Sam Chanderson
August 24th, 2005, 03:41 PM
Dear Stranger writers and "Slog" readers:
I've had a blast posting on this forum the last few weeks. It wasn't fun at first. All I did was vent some spleen and attack any idiot who disagreed with me. It was good for my rage but soon it left me feeling hoarse. I felt like I was on talk radio.
But then I decided on an experiment. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a Stranger writer, just for a brief time.
So I embraced my inner Stranger and learned to Heart Dan Savage.
What does this mean?
It meant this: I let myself sink into the delirious warm bath of sarcasm, a bilious substance that is the dark lifeblood of The Stranger. They drink this stuff by the barrel. They do laps in this stuff. It's such an important shtick for some of them (e.g. "I Heart Television," the Family Circus of Stranger Funnies) that they've written nothing but sarcasm on a weekly basis for over a decade.
Generally, their targets choose not to respond. The Stranger/Weekly war, for example, has been all one-sided salvos from the beginning. The Stranger makes a big deal about something, squawks to their friends, the dailies, and of course in their own paper, and the Weekly responds by shutting up. (This last "feud" was particularly embarrassing, as it was all based on Savage getting up in arms about a stupid joke that Keck had tried to pull, without telling Dan.)
Silence is really the only way you can respond to sarcasm. It's your way of pretending that the critic or the criticism doesn't piss you off.
And it's how they've treated my postings. Yes, the "I Heart Dan!" category, which has been viewed more times by more people than any other subject on this Slog, has been basically ignored. Its popularity must be troubling to them, but aside from a wimpy little plea from Dan to stop "Hearting" him, we've heard nothing from these razor-sharp wits. Zilch. Nada.
Isn't it funny to have The Stranger shut up about anything?
Maybe they're growing up.
They're certainly getting older. (Median age of Stranger writers, anybody? I'm guessing 37.) And that means they're getting more like the...Weekly.
Horrible but true.
The Stranger ridicules every change that the Weekly has ever made. But the sad thing about The Stranger is that it doesn't change. It's the same bratty bunch of proud underachievers that it's been since it was founded in 1991.
That's 14 years of brattiness. They must be tired of it themselves. Sarcasm is never a force that has power to move any debate forward. Instead, your wheels just spin in the mud eternally until everyone gets bored and gets out to walk.
Which is what their readers are starting to do.
So the aging Stranger staff are trying to act all grown up and it's embarrassing. We get Dan as the Grand Old Statesman on all sorts of soporific subjects (can't wait for the new book, Dan! "The Commitment!" That one should get you on Oprah!), and showing up on VH-1 and cable yak shows. They're putting wretchedly middle-aged radio ads on Air America. This whole "slog," in fact, is an attempt to gain them some sort of legitimacy as Serious Cultural Commentators, even though the news they post with such fanfare is either wincingly adolescent "opinion" or stuff that much better publications (e.g. Salon) has had up for days.
It's like going for a ride with a 16-year-old who's trying to show you what a good driver she is, while insisting on listening to KEXP, telling you her opinion on the war in Iraq, and keeping a cigarette going simultaneously.
Just makes you tired, you know?
After several weeks of covering myself liberally in sarcasm, I find I really can't do it anymore. It's started to affect my generally positive attitude about life. If I was paid to think and write like this it'd be different. But thank God I'm not. I might become one of those strange oddities like Mudede or Frizelle or Wagner, an unchallenged ego who is under the illusion that their writing has some sort of lasting worth.
So thank you, Stranger, for giving me a chance to be a bratty little creep for a few weeks, and understand what it feels like to be in your crowd. I feel like I've really come to terms with you, you endlessly annoying bunch of idiots. May age and time be kinder to you than you've been to other people.
I Heart Dan. But more importantly, I've learned to Heart the Stranger.
I've had a blast posting on this forum the last few weeks. It wasn't fun at first. All I did was vent some spleen and attack any idiot who disagreed with me. It was good for my rage but soon it left me feeling hoarse. I felt like I was on talk radio.
But then I decided on an experiment. I wanted to see what it would be like to be a Stranger writer, just for a brief time.
So I embraced my inner Stranger and learned to Heart Dan Savage.
What does this mean?
It meant this: I let myself sink into the delirious warm bath of sarcasm, a bilious substance that is the dark lifeblood of The Stranger. They drink this stuff by the barrel. They do laps in this stuff. It's such an important shtick for some of them (e.g. "I Heart Television," the Family Circus of Stranger Funnies) that they've written nothing but sarcasm on a weekly basis for over a decade.
Generally, their targets choose not to respond. The Stranger/Weekly war, for example, has been all one-sided salvos from the beginning. The Stranger makes a big deal about something, squawks to their friends, the dailies, and of course in their own paper, and the Weekly responds by shutting up. (This last "feud" was particularly embarrassing, as it was all based on Savage getting up in arms about a stupid joke that Keck had tried to pull, without telling Dan.)
Silence is really the only way you can respond to sarcasm. It's your way of pretending that the critic or the criticism doesn't piss you off.
And it's how they've treated my postings. Yes, the "I Heart Dan!" category, which has been viewed more times by more people than any other subject on this Slog, has been basically ignored. Its popularity must be troubling to them, but aside from a wimpy little plea from Dan to stop "Hearting" him, we've heard nothing from these razor-sharp wits. Zilch. Nada.
Isn't it funny to have The Stranger shut up about anything?
Maybe they're growing up.
They're certainly getting older. (Median age of Stranger writers, anybody? I'm guessing 37.) And that means they're getting more like the...Weekly.
Horrible but true.
The Stranger ridicules every change that the Weekly has ever made. But the sad thing about The Stranger is that it doesn't change. It's the same bratty bunch of proud underachievers that it's been since it was founded in 1991.
That's 14 years of brattiness. They must be tired of it themselves. Sarcasm is never a force that has power to move any debate forward. Instead, your wheels just spin in the mud eternally until everyone gets bored and gets out to walk.
Which is what their readers are starting to do.
So the aging Stranger staff are trying to act all grown up and it's embarrassing. We get Dan as the Grand Old Statesman on all sorts of soporific subjects (can't wait for the new book, Dan! "The Commitment!" That one should get you on Oprah!), and showing up on VH-1 and cable yak shows. They're putting wretchedly middle-aged radio ads on Air America. This whole "slog," in fact, is an attempt to gain them some sort of legitimacy as Serious Cultural Commentators, even though the news they post with such fanfare is either wincingly adolescent "opinion" or stuff that much better publications (e.g. Salon) has had up for days.
It's like going for a ride with a 16-year-old who's trying to show you what a good driver she is, while insisting on listening to KEXP, telling you her opinion on the war in Iraq, and keeping a cigarette going simultaneously.
Just makes you tired, you know?
After several weeks of covering myself liberally in sarcasm, I find I really can't do it anymore. It's started to affect my generally positive attitude about life. If I was paid to think and write like this it'd be different. But thank God I'm not. I might become one of those strange oddities like Mudede or Frizelle or Wagner, an unchallenged ego who is under the illusion that their writing has some sort of lasting worth.
So thank you, Stranger, for giving me a chance to be a bratty little creep for a few weeks, and understand what it feels like to be in your crowd. I feel like I've really come to terms with you, you endlessly annoying bunch of idiots. May age and time be kinder to you than you've been to other people.
I Heart Dan. But more importantly, I've learned to Heart the Stranger.