If there is anything that the staff of The Stranger loves more than homosexual intercourse, narcotics that have been concocted from household cleaning products, and railing against common decency, that thing is laying claim to novelty. There is no sentence that these smug arrested adolescents enjoy scribbling more than "It's, like, totally rare, man; you probably haven't even, like, heard of it or whatever."
In that vein, the King of the Aging Hepcats, DAVE SEGAL, takes advantage of a stultifyingly slow news week to "turn" Stranger readers "on to" one Alex Ruder at a radio station known by the call letters KEXP, which I have been informed is not-for-profit. This disc jockey mans the phonograph there between the indecent hours of one and six o'clock in the morning, meaning it is unlikely that he's even once been heard by human ears (and Mr. Segal's turgid praise is not going to help matters, given The Stranger's dwindling reader base). This obscurity—as all obscurity—is music to Mr. Segal's ears, and so he casts Mr. Ruder, who, again, is an overnight disc jockey, as a hero battling against the forces of mediocrity.
Questions spring to mind: If Mr. Ruder is as talented as Mr. Segal suggests, why does he not jockey the discs at an hour in which normal, hardworking Seattleites can hear him? And if Mr. Ruder were to get the morning shift, would Mr. Segal still praise him? One suspects not, given his mania for the arcane. But we have lingered too long on this undeserving topic already; certainly, there must be something worth our consideration somewhere in this issue.
Or perhaps not. In news fiery Latina CIENNA MADRID spews forth on not one, but two topics. First she profiles scofflaws who are unwilling to follow the simple standards and procedures required for them to collect their voluminous government handouts, then she praises a bill that would allow government-funded abortions. Apparently, nothing happened in Seattle last week, Miss Madrid, so you decided to foist your socialistic agenda on the streets of the city? This is followed by DOMINIC HOLDEN whinging about the death of Occupy Seattle—in a piece that is three months too late, by my estimation—and a pie chart by GOLDY, who is now apparently entering the postverbal stage of his shameful career.
There's not much else to see here: aimless dithering on art and ("special" this week) music by JEN GRAVES; BRENDAN KILEY's toothless machismo presented in his pseudoconfrontational "stunt" language; DAVID SCHMADER proving that The Stranger could somehow find a human being even less qualified to be film editor than Lindy West; DAN SAVAGE's usual homosexual agenda, served up with a steaming side dish of self-righteousness that flies in the face of all logic and common sense; and an incoherent smear of "food writing" by the flatulent lard-heap who goes by the obviously phony moniker of PAUL CONSTANT that amounts to a page worth of tittering over foreign languages because they sound funny. At times like this, the sweet caress of death cannot come quickly enough.
