Another Monday, Another Gambit

Monday, everyone agrees, sucks. At least it does until we can lay our hands on a brand-spanking new Gambit. The January 30, 2007 issue has arrived as scheduled, and I'm itching to lay my eyes on every soporific word.

Until then, I'll simply note that the cover story ("COMMON SENSES: Cajuns Lose Hearing and Sigh To Usher Syndrome More Than Other Americans. Research at LSU May Change That") promises to mine the same earnestly tedious ore that the Gambit lode has produced with such remarkable consistency over the years. Ennui is to Gambit what coal is to West Virginia.

The teasers point to material just as good. Page 19 tells us "what the polls say about Gov. Blanco." Here's guessing it's nothing nice, but I'll withhold judgment until I read Gambit's big scoop on the governor's numbers. Ronnie Virgets spins a down home yarn about babysitting his grandchildren on the next page. If it's not as bewildering as his other columns, I'll be greatly distressed. Page 9 has a story on how the Jan. 11 anti-crime march is "just the beginning." (Of what? More anti-crime marches?) And finally, Gambit gives us the lineup for JazzFest on page 32.

I wonder if Dr. John will be playing. Fingers crossed, y'all!

Get your shit together, Gambit!

You think I'm Gambit's worst pain-in-the-ass? Think again after reading this correction, which is appended to Blake Ponchartrain's column in the January 23, 2007 issue:

Correction: In my column of Jan. 9, I wrote that The Beverly was named The Beverly Hills Club. In fact, it was named The Beverly Country Club after The Beverly Hills Club of Cincinnati.

Some douchebag actually took the time to inform them of this, though I think we all can agree that if we can't trust Gambit to get an obvious fact like that right, how can we trust them with anything else?

The Anti-James Brown

You’ve got to hand it to Gambit Weekly film critic Rick Barton: he manages to make other film critics look like hard workers. In a job where all that’s asked is to see movies and write intelligently about them, Barton fails to do both. He’s the least hardest working man in show business.

The average critic often sees two or three movies a day, which considering how shitty most movies are qualifies them for combat pay. Barton, on the other hand, seems to see one a week, unless the New Orleans Film Festival waddles into town. Then he sees three.

As a New Orleans media insider, I'm privy to the work habits of and the requirements for all of Gambit's writers. Barton's are unique. The first secret I'll reveal is Barton actually watches the movie he's reviewing in a theater. The second is the least hardest working man in show business has a week to come up with his musings on the film.

With seven big days cleared to write his review - here comes the third and final secret - Rick goes high-tech, pulling out his Bart-o-matic reviewing machine, a miracle of engineering that manages to generate the same review for each movie. Once the coils turn red, the device spits out a lede. This is invariably a profound observation on the human condition. So for his review of Notes on a Scandal, Rick kicks things off by noting that we live in a “mobile society.” For Dreamgirls, Rick reflects that “celebrity is the bane of American culture.” For Blood Diamond, Rick crawls out on a limb with his point that “all over the world, innocent people are caught in the middle of violent power struggles.” And so on.

Then the machine works on the plot summary, a dull-as-dishwater retelling occasionally enlivened by the machine’s riotous stabs at vigorous writing. (I've heard the Bart-o-matic takes days to put this together, but that's okay since it ultimately comprises 90 percent of the review and saves Rick the trouble of telling us in any detail why a movie is good. Most movies are really, really good in Rick’s book, by the way.) There’ll be plenty of space on this blog for cataloging these flights of fancy, but today I’ll share with you this passage from the Blood Diamond review: “And Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a local villager who dares to dream that his 12-year-old son, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), will grow up to be a doctor.”

I believe I can fly

I believe I can touch the sky

I think about it every night and day

Spread my wings and fly away

I believe I can soar

I see me running through that open door

I believe I can fly I believe I can fly I believe I can fly

Okay, I added the R Kelly lyrics, but I’m gonna’ dare to dream they were, uh, flying through the Bart-o-matic when it spit out that sentence.

Only at the bottom of the review do we get Rick’s bottom line thoughts, but the Bart-o-matic insures these are as trite as his off-the-rack comments on, like, life, man. Sometimes these judgments come to us in a language that looks like English, but somehow isn’t. To wit, from the Blood Diamond review: “the plot is unconvincing all the while the action sequences and unresolved stab at romantic convention rob the film's seriousness of much of its weight.” Easy for Rick to say!

Look, I know free weeklies don’t pay well, so you could argue Gambit is only getting what it pays for. But when I worked at a free weekly in New York, we couldn’t stop people from begging us to publish their movie, stage and whatever-else reviews even if we had guns. Most of them were horrible scribblers, but not all. In a city with a supposed surfeit of great writers (cough-overrated-cough), you’d think Gambit could find someone to rotate reviews with Barton the way it did before Katrina.

Then we’d at least get two different reviews a year.

Sexy time!

People look at free weeklies for - maybe - three or four reasons, none of which are "let's read some great writing and cutting-edge reportage." One reason they do is titillation; the ads are generally racier than what you'd find in a daily.

Gambit, though it pales in comparison to the flat-out pornography found in weeklies in New York and Los Angeles, is no exception, and I feel compelled to compliment the ad department for several comely babes that made their way into the January 23, 2007 edition.

o Page 14: That's one sweet, blonde Yoga babe enticing me into Salvation Body on Magazine Street. Sitting Indian-style - sorry, I'm old school - she leans slightly to her right, toned arms above her head, a portrait of Eastern serenity and Western hotness.

Still, I'm not gonna' do Yoga, nor "hind," "marika," "fila," "be present," "prana," and "blue fish."

o Page 15: It looks like they've got the right priorities at "Priorities," an "activewear" retailer in the Riverbend. One of those is putting a hot babe in their ad; this week's maiden is a tank-topped brunette who, like her rival on page 14, has her hands above her head, though she's really not leaning much. A hint of buck teeth gives her a girl-next-door quality most find fetching.

o Back page: A smoldering ad from American Apparel goes full-page hot with a topless Babe-alonian in thermal long johns and oversized clown sunglasses lying prone on a Kirschman's sofa.

All in all, those babes make up for the rather tawdry ads for chat lines, massage parlors, and escort services in the back. Those need work!

Our dinner with Andrei

If there's any appeal to the scribblings of Gambit columnist Andrei Codrescu, it must be the DIY-ish subtext that says sucking at writing need not be a barrier to actually becoming a writer. Just as The Velvet Underground encouraged the careers of thousands of mopey, whining musicians, Codrescu has given hope to anyone who thinks life's quotidian details might be interesting to other people.

They're not, of course, but that doesn't stop 'drei. In his January 23, 2007 "Penny Post" column, he hits the triple bank shot of lousy writing: the personal story, followed by the Google search, ending with the critical observation. If you follow along, you too can do this at home!

Drei's subject is the new statewide smoking ban. It seems 'drei went to Coop's the other day and didn't cough all over himself like a four-year-old girl, which was the old routine before the ban. This is more than enough personal information for a reader, but 'drei piles on detail the way a Roman centurion administers the last five swings of a 50-lash whipping - needlessly.

He selects "fetuccini Alfredo with paneed chicken" for his meal. Hey, 'drei - why not add an order of red beans and rice? No problem! Drei does, and lets us know. The chow comes "pretty fast, in 10-15 minutes." And if readers wonder where 'drei ate his meal, he unburdens them by mentioning he "took it home."

And you thought your life was boring. Let's pause for a second. If you were at a party and someone launched a conversation with this information, would you be inclined to let it continue? I wouldn't! But somehow 'drei actually gets paid cash money for this culinary banality.

After finishing what folks in the newspaper business call a "soft lede," Codrescu gets around to the meat-and-potatoes of his column - the smoking ban. It seems Codrescu had previously "laughed" and "scoffed" at the very idea of one. But, to quote a musician 'drei is fond of, the times they are a changin'; what was one dismissed as the Platonic ideal of nanny-state paternalism now is the conventional wisdom.

How that happened might have been an interesting, if not particularly original, column. But this is 'drei writing. Why, you know, try hard when you've got Google? So Codrescu types "smoking ban" into his tool bar and lets it rip. In stunning succession reminiscent of the "domino theory" of Southeast Asian politics in the 1970s - my analogy, of course, not Codrescu's - one city after the other has instituted a smoking ban, according to 'drei! Really? Yes!

It's all a big surprise to him. But a lot of things will surprise 'drei if he holds to his shopworn ideas about major cities. New Yorkers are high-strung. The Irish of Dublin are "big talkers and big whiskey drinkers," laboring under "the ironic and wistful gaze of Mr. Joyce." (Ugh.) Gay Paris is "Gauloise-steeped." It didn't occur to 'drei that a) only one out of four people smoke, and that number is declining, b) people who don't smoke don't like cigarette smoke, and c) passing a smoking ban is among the easiest tasks for a city council or state legislature to perform since it costs almost no money and receives no opposition save for knee-jerk lobbying from tobacco and restaurant interests. Surprise!

With the bulk of his "work" completed, 'drei throws a few New Orleans cliches our way. You know the drill - "Mississippi mud," Mark Twain, floozies. It's a wonder he couldn't wedge in "that timeless, smoke-enveloped streetcar, the one named Desire, which wends its way up St. Charles Avenue under the ironic and wistful gaze of Mr. Williams." Or something about jazz.

He ends with the critical observation because, deep down, 'drei's a serious guy. "Personally, I'm relieved," he writes. "Culturally, I can't say I'm thrilled." That he's not thrilled might make for an interesting column, but why bother to write that when you have the quotidian, and Google, in your arsenal?

This is how it goes for Codrescu, one column after the other.

Welcome!

In this age of ubiquitous Internet-based media criticism, it seems a shame that free weeklies get a pass from the cavity search daily newspapers often receive. It's not like weeklies are doing a better job of covering whatever it is they think they cover and thus are immune from criticism; they're certainly not so alternative that there's no need for an alternative to them. The truth is I've stumbled upon a web-era first - a subject too trivial for the Internet.

Giving the local free weekly a hard time isn't too trivial for this guy! I've spent years reading New Orleans "alternative" paper - Gambit Weekly - laughing my way through one goofy story after another. My wife has ceased sharing my amusement, so I turn to the world wide web in the hope that there are three or four people who, for reasons better left unexamined, get a kick out of making fun of it.

What gets your Gambit mojo working? The learning-on-the-fly reportage of its cub reporter, L'il Jeremy Alford? The relentless minutiae of Blake Ponchartrain, the "New Orleans Know-It-All"? The Least Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Rick Barton? Clancy DuBos's weekly tizzy over Ray Nagin?

I love 'em all! But for me, nothing quite tops the astonishing triteness of Andrei Codrescu, who might be the worst thing out of Romania since Count Dracula. Post to follow, the first of many on 'drei...