If you pick up a paper copy of Washington City Paper this morning, you may experience a sensory flashback to 2006, when our issues averaged 160 pages and always weighed this much. However, it’s just that our fall arts guide is stuck inside! Don’t panic! The newspaper business still sucks! This year’s guide has listings and content up the wazoo, including critics’ picks and a feature that purports to tell local bloggers such as Morgan Hungerford and Matthew Yglesias just what they should do with their entertainment dollars this autumn. Also in this piece: bear joke. It looks great in print. Pick one up!

As Mike Watt would say, I feel like spielin’ this morning. If you don’t have the time, DO NOT CLICK MORE.

Read More “Morning Roundup: Going Long Edition” »

The Way We Get By is almost certainly a marvelous movie, at least judging from Mike Riggs‘ review, which ran in our Silverdocs issue (6/12). The producers of the movie liked Riggs’ review so much they excerpted it on their movie poster, an excerpt of which you can see above. Interesting thing about that review, though: Riggs never said “Absolutely stunning” in it (regardless, I am absolutely stunned I didn’t kill such wildly gushing copy when I had the chance).

To find that part of this quote, you have to turn to Riggs’ morning roundup from Thursday, June 11. He wrote then:

As for me, I got pretty choked up watching The Way We Get By, and can’t think of a single friend, family member, or down-on-his-luck stranger to whom I would not recommend this film. Absolutely stunning. And Trimpin opened my eyes to the joys of reviewing movies while high sound installations.

I had to ask. He says “I had smoked a little bit before I watched” The Way We Get By, but swears he was stone-cold sober when he wrote that ringing endorsement.

Yesterday a story with “Fucking” in its headline rocketed to the top of the Google News front page. This earned Google four complaints.

Two months ago City Paper ran the words “Suck Your Dick” on the front cover. The image went up online the day before and elicited nary a peep, but when the issue hit stands, woo boy. We got so many complaints we had to to divide up a list of angry callers to phone back. Also, it got us on Fox, which redacted the headline to “‘You Put Me Out in Denver ‘Cause I Wouldn’t (blank) (blank) (blank)’.” (Since when is “Your” a standards and practices issue?)

Google News has a reach Washington City Paper couldn’t even dream of approximating. It is, however, consumed one person at a time, not displayed on a newsstand kids could conceivably walk by and ask their parents about. This possibility, though no specific instance of this happening, motivated many of our angriest letter-writers. Someone got so angry that s/he swore publicly her/himself!

Eddie Turner’s image says, so simply, what we are all feeling.

(N.B.: Turner’s girlfriend passed this on to me; it is not posted on his Web site but you should read that anyway.)

This past weekend, I visited a Wal-Mart in Tappahannock, Va. Or maybe I went to a Walmart. Signage inside and outside the store spelled the chain’s name all closed up, with the “m” lowercased. But many of the products I looked at also stated they were distributed by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. This is the kind of thing that drives copy editors coconuts!

So I called Wal-Mart/Walmart this morning. All the media relations people were in a meeting, which if you work for a small newspaper is more or less where they will always be when you call.

Read More “UPDATED: Wal-Mart or Walmart? Wal-Mart Gets in Touch” »

Legba Carrefour left for Dupont Circle at 5 a.m. this morning with a borrowed truck full of white bikes. The Columbia Heights resident, 27, didn’t know Alice Swanson, the struck-and-killed cyclist whose memorial was removed from the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and 20th and R Streets NW last month.

But Carrefour, who says he’s been two-wheeling through the District since he was 6, says he got “really angry” about the ghost bike’s removal, and spent weeks Dumpster-diving, as well as wailing on Freecycle and Craigslist, looking for old bikes. The idea, which he’s got a blog for: He’d put up 22, one for each year of Swanson’s life, all spray-painted white. As of 10:30 a.m., 16 were still there; Carrefour figures people have nicked them while he’s been off gathering flowers to stick on them.

Carrefour has a scar on his right arm from a collision with a cab, and a chipped tooth from a run-in with an SUV. He has no plans to trade his Surly Steamroller. “One, I couldn’t get around anywhere. It’s fun, it’s relaxing, and it’s easy. Also I can’t afford a car.”

He looks at the circle, screwing up his face at the newly placed sign warning drivers to yield to bikes. “If they take it down,” he says, gesturing to the bike he’s placed where Swanson’s original memorial was, “I have a bunch more that are already white.”

More photos of the bikes after the jump
Read More “Ghost Bikes Return to Dupont Circle: Alice Swanson Rides Again” »

ANOTHER HORSE’S ASS NAMED JOE WILSON, this time a Republican, breaks decorum and accidentally says what he thinks. This is a cause of great concern! In American politics, there is a ridiculously precious conceit called decorum, which means you can Twitter a retort or pound your opponents on a chat show later, but you must never, ever, show the passion for your job one would take for granted in a high school football coach.

Someone just called me, from Germany (!) to say that there are 22 ghost bikes in Dupont Circle today to honor Alice Swanson. Great!

AFTER THE JUMP: Trees, eagles, bells, weird traffic circles, Giants fans, Beatles, Big Star
Read More “Morning Roundup: “You Lie!” Edition” »

This article about the Washington Post by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair: commenting on such things is Wemple’s beat. All I could hope to add to the discussion is my belief that the photo of Katharine Weymouth on page 2 of this article is a Prince song waiting to happen.

Hey, what’s this in the Washington Post? Another story “uncovered by Redskins, verified by The Post, or whatever”? Why no! This story is about the Redskins suing fans who’ve fallen on hard times, and it is seriously harshing my day.

Read More “Morning Roundup: Burgundy, Gold, and Slimy” »

Darrow’s post yesterday is far from the first photo of a banana on City Desk. In fact, in this blog’s relatively short run, we’ve posted far more banana photos than seems plausible. Here is an archive.

Maybe it was H.L. Mencken who said it, or maybe it was me, but if you have a choice between mentioning that a former president’s daughter is now happily married, well-adjusted, and suited to her new role as education reporter for NBC and leading an item about a former president’s daughter who’s now an education reporter with NBC by mentioning her booze-addled past, WRITE THE LEAD THAT MENTIONS THE BOOZE-ADDLED PAST EVERY TIME.

But that’s not what’s fun about this NewsBusters item that laments the fact that Justin Moyer mentioned that Jenna Bush used to terrorize D.C.’s tavern-owning community in a “Names & Faces” piece in the Post (Moyer also mentioned that Bush taught at a charter school, wrote two books, and got married—is there more heft to her story than this?)—it’s that citizen journalists such as “sickoflibs” have linked to photos of Moyer in his Edie Sedgwick garb, and that Tim Graham, who wrote the post, quoted some oblique lyrics as proof of Moyer’s malfeasance. And then he said this:

Let’s have fun imagining Justin Moyer and his editors at the Washington Post Style section never engaged in drinking at bars or clubs before they hit legal drinking age, not to mention what other teenaged hi-jinks they engaged in.

Justin Moyer does not drink. With the exception of a mint julep he tried in Louisville, Ky., in 2000, that has ever been the case. I know, because I called him to ask. Tim Graham, you are a lazy blogger!

“The story was based on wire reports about a BBC broadcast this week of Dylan’s weekly satellite radio program, ‘Theme Time Radio Show.’ The Post story did not report that the show originally aired Dec. 3; The Post failed to confirm the timing of the broadcast.” (today)

Oh Internet, when will you learn? (1) (2) (3) (4)…

Finally someone not afraid to ask.

The most amazing thing about Ted Kennedy’s death: There are no commemorative newspapers for sale. The Boston Globe is running a special 12-page section today, but so far no Michael Jackson- or Obama-style tributes. This is a slap in the face to the American way of mourning, second stage of which involves opening your wallet and buying something that you’ll have no place for later. Seriously, what are you gonna do with a commemorative newspaper? A framed front page, sure, I can see that, but a whole newspaper—where’s that gonna go? I’ll tell you: into a shopping bag, then eventually into the bottom of a box that your kids will someday empty after you die. They will glance at the newspaper, wonder what it is, then put it in the tube that shoots garbage out to space.

If you really want to remember Ted with your credit card number, you can donate money to this vaguely defined foundation. Though these might be going cheaper.

After the jump: convenience, tragic irony, more
Read More “Mourning Roundup” »

You have to go back to 2006 to find City Paper’s last mention of Jan Hammer, in Tricia Olszewski’s review of Cocaine Cowboys. That follows a 10-year drought for Hammerheads since Mark Jenkins‘ review of A Modern Affair, in which Jenkins says “the fate that [director Vern] Oakley and writer Paul Zimmerman have devised for them is as corny as the film’s Jan Hammer score.”

This coming week, though, City Paper corrects this historic wrong.
Read More “City Paper Now Owned by Jan Hammer” »