Complaint Dept.

If you define ombudsman as a "reader's advocate," I'd say that my job is the exact same thing.

by Duane Swierczynski

We don't really have an ombudsman here at City Paper. Closest thing is me. I know, that sounds weird. How can an editor in chief ombudize his own paper?

However, if you define ombudsman as a "reader's advocate," I'd say that my job is the exact same thing. Every suggestion, correction or diva-like hissy fit I hurl at the staff is meant to do one thing: make this a better paper for you, Dear Reader.

And if Dear Reader isn't pleased, then I should answer for it.

Three things didn't please some of you this week. Let's take them one at a time.

After my editor's letter last week, which included some profanity, regular commentator Patrick D. Hazard posted this at www.citypaper.net:

To paraphrase your divided spirit, God I love your seriousness, God I hate the scummy rhetoric you too often stoop to to express it. Can't you see that neologisms like "assholeteria" and "dickheads per square inch" are as feebleminded as the gross behavior you're legitimately criticizing? Up with serious talk, down with scummy talk.

I've admitted before that profanity is a favorite writerly crutch of mine. Perhaps I reach for it too easily. And perhaps it is off-putting to some people.

But dagnabit, Patrick, I often write with my gut, and sometimes, my gut tells me that I need a word with enough muscle and venom to make my point. And I've been sitting here, racking my brains trying to think up a word that expresses quite the same emotion as "assholeteria" ... and I'm coming up blank. Still, I'll work on it.

Discerning reader "Jean Luc" writes:

The "Things that matter to people who matter" [Culture Shock] section of the City Paper is nothing but a forum for local pseudo-celebs to masturbate over painfully obvious cultural items and passé fads. I'm glad that contributors are willing to share such hidden nuggets of knowledge, such as the little-known fact that wine goes well with cheese, or that it's surprisingly easy to get pissed off at Sudoku. ... What's next? A musician condescendingly gushing about the niceties of Sierra Nevada beer? Someone telling me about this awesome new band called Radiohead?"

You might be missing the point, Jean Luc. This is meant to be a cocktail party on a page, where the emphasis is not so much the info nuggets traded back and forth, but the company itself. Call them pseudo-celebs if you want, but they're the people who make this city interesting, and I like that we spend more time chatting them up, outside the usual mix of picks and profiles.

By the way: You matter, too, Jean Luc. I invite you to send us a Culture Shock item. (I'd like to hear more about this "Radiohead" you mention.)

As you can tell by the letters to the left of this column, more than a few people were upset about our decision to run a gory cover portrait of Man Man just days after the slaughter at Virginia Tech.

When the Virginia Tech story broke, I did look at that photo with a raised eyebrow. But ultimately, we decided that changing the cover would be flinching without just cause. If you think it's wrong to run such an image in the wake of real-life violence, then by extension you'd have to pull, say, every horror and action movie whenever there's a CNN crawl about another 29 dead in Iraq.

Was our cover image ideal? Umm, no. But the connection between it and what happened in Virginia seemed tenuous at best. So we kept it.

And now, one noncomplaint. I'd like to publicly applaud Elliot Shelkrot, the outgoing president of the Free Library of Philadelphia, for 20 years of excellent service. As a serious book junkie during much of his administration, I'm grateful for how hard Elliot worked to give the people of this city little literary havens — despite two decades of funding threats and political shenanigans. I owe much of my career to the Free Library, which constantly kept me gorged on brain food when I was a young, wannabe writer. On behalf of everyone whose lives are just a little bit brighter for having borrowed a book: Thank you, Elliot.

(duane@citypaper.net)