Congratulations on your recent “What Stinks!” article [August 23]. Once again, the Reader has proved itself to be the premier spunky and witty, irreverent voice of Chicago! Thank God Dr. Reader continues to have its fingers firmly on the pulse of the hippest people and aspects of this great city, and that its writers are not afraid to stand up against Chicago’s banal and insipid matters. Hooray for my heros, “BC, JF, EG, AL, CP, NP, and LS,” taking on even the most popular of places and things to expose the truth, all the while sprinkled with hilarious satirical ability.
I don’t presume to be as wordly and wise as all you, but I think you left one out:
The Reader.
Spunky! Irreverent! Swear words! Want ads! And best of all: free! Let’s put it this way, if it wasn’t free, it would have gone the way of the Chicago Sting and Chicago Blitz long ago. Too bad this poor excuse for an art paper isn’t worth wiping your ass with, because until they print it on flushable paper, it continues to be the biggest waste of valuable landfill space in Illinois. The Reader is like the side of parsley next to the meal of Chicago. Yeah, it’s there on the plate, trying to look interesting, but once you touch it, you just want to throw it away.
Oh to be a fly on the wall in those Reader staff meetings! There must be such an entertaining power struggle: On the one hand, frustrated young writers who got rejected by Spy and National Lampoon because of their poor writing ability. On the other, the old guard businessmen who pay the bills and keep things running thanks to an extensive phone porn boutique.
Basically, the Reader is one step above a mediocre college newspaper, and serves to spoon-feed one version of the urban experience to people who are too lame to figure it out for themselves.
To sum up, the amount of interesting reading contained in the Reader on any given week could fit on a pamphlet half the size of “Common Sense.” Retailers should pay me to take the thing out of their store. (AW)
Adrian Wenner
Chicago