Hey, Writers!

1. Back when I was the A&E editor at a certain morning daily, I was going to fill a little hole in the state edition, holding the space for a late review coming for final, with some sort of fashion-oriented wire story. One of the copy editors got hold of it and noticed that a secondary or tertiary source had contributed a not-very-serious line about snoods becoming the next fashion trend. The copy editor nearly soiled the upholstery. “Is this true?” he asked, all a-quiver. “We need to localize this! Is the snood making a comeback in Tucson?” One of the other feature-department editors started to chime in, without even reading the story. I just ignored them.

   Worse, I think, is what happened at the Star two or maybe three days ago. Some intrepid reporter got fitted with special earplugs to block almost all sound, and spent a day going around town to report on what it’s like to be a deaf person. Some editor forgot to point out that actual deaf people have developed skills to function in the world, whereas the intrepid reporter came back and wrote about how hard it was to communicate with bus drivers by waving her hands in the air.

2. My comment is not as dramatic but my first writing gig was writing restaurant reviews for the Downtown News, which was and probably still the weekly newspaper that served downtown Los Angeles.

   I was never allowed to write anything negative because the editor said that a restaurant was either an existing advertiser or a potential advertiser.

   My articles appeared every other week and I wrote about lunch. I worked in civil service at the time and going out to lunch on someone else’s dime was the highlight of our boring routine while at work anyway.

   If I went to a Chinese restaurant and said the broccoli was limp, I had to say something positive in the same sentence like for instance but the egg roll was crispy.

   It was hard because not every restaurant was a WOW. What also made it hard was that I was a minor celebrity in my office building of 5,000 people and I became very well known and people believed what I wrote and wanted to experience the same thing.

   Once I went to a new place and the food was bad as was the service. There was absolutely nothing good to say about the place except that it was conveniently located on the tram stop. I called the editor and told him what happened and he said he would review it. He gave it a glowing review.

   I did the reviewing for about 2.5 years and then my department moved to the San Fernando Valley and there was no way I could get downtown for lunch any more so that was the end of writing for many years.

   While it was often fun, it was also deceitful. I’m glad the Weekly doesn’t have that policy.

3. Um, in my first comment, I meant that the Star’s faux-deaf adventures happened two or three DECADES ago, not days. That was back around the time the Star’s hard-hitting investigative reporter John Dare (the pseudonym the paper used for various employees whose identities needed protection) wrote all about his visit to the Grand Thumpress massage parlor.

4. I wonder, though, how this story would have panned out if it had been the reporter’s idea, not the editors. It’s an entirely different thing when it’s your idea as opposed to someone else telling you what to do. (Which is why we’re all freelancers, right? To protect our journalistic integrity?) An article about breastfeeding in public would, in my opinion, actually be interesting. But I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anyone to do it.

5. I wonder if it was Gene Armstrong’s idea to slam Big Pete Pearson in his recent review, or if that too was an executive decision. From reading your otherwise vanilla music reviews, one wouldn’t know your publication was capable of a bad review — in fact, you wouldn’t know it was capable of independent thought at all: most of the reviews I’ve read were rehashed from the artist’s press release. Nice to see that although your writers know little about the blues genre, they are more than capable of slamming an Austin and Phoenix (oops…is that a dirty word in your paper?) legend. So just what would you consider top-notch blues? I will give you some time to pore over your most recent emails, from paid publicists, so you can comment.

6. Kim: With all due respect, if you don’t think the Weekly is capable of bad reviews, you’re either ignorant or an idiot. But, hey, thanks for reading!

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