Tag: commerce

The O.C. Weekly’s Best of the O.C. Weekly’s Staff’s Drinking Buddies Issue

I shouldn’t expect too much from the free weekly paper in a rich flat right-wing suburb fifty miles south of Los Angeles, but I’m very disappointed in the Orange County Weekly’s “Best of O.C.” issue. It’s an unreadable mess of office in-jokes, arch post-ironic snark, inaccuracies, logrolling, and delusions of grandeur. It is, in short, the Waiting for Guffman issue.

It begins with a bizarrely academic leader which is precious as hell but probably the best-written thing in the issue. It belongs in a painfully literary college humor magazine.

Almost all of the rest of the issue is devoted to an in-group of 25ish partyers. This leads to “My Favorite Things” spreads for a fundraiser party organizer who like Lhasa Apsos and those old 90s records, some random community college student with one of the new-fangled “blogs” who is therefore a social critic, an activist stereotype straight from the pages of The Onion, and a Chapman prof who is claimed to be a novelist but appears to be Adam Sandler playing one in a bad movie. Oh, and an apparently very nice guy who is a computer dude and DJ and stuff but is oddly described as a Renaissance man. Maybe he buys drinks for them a lot. He does seem pretty cool.

About a third of the items are in Long Beach, which is not in Orange County. However the 25ish partyers all live and hang out there and this issue is for and about them, not about their readers.

Clearly the ad salesmen did way too good a job. The issue is big and fat, and even with the high ad-to-editorial ratio they run, that was a lot of inches to fill. But they do have two or three good writers. Arellano and Moxley are of national quality, and Nick Schou is capable and talented. But instead of letting some people with skill work on this thing they just dumped in a load of garbage they could giggle to each other over. They compound the problem by adding on a few “I beg to differ!” items to the end of each “best of” item. This gives you the charming sensation of being next to their group as they pass in-jokes back and forth. I fail to understand why anyone would care which El Pollo Loco these people prefer, much less be present at a cute little fake argument about the choices available.

I suppose it doesn’t matter that my local weekly paper blows so hard. People read it for the listings and the ads, the same way they read the L.A. Weekly. The good writing goes as unnoticed as the bad by almost everyone, and this particular crowd of drunk scenesters is fooling themselves about their importance as much as I did 20 years ago at a free weekly paper, myself. But it could be good, and I wish it was. There are a lot of great things to write about here, enough to fill a Best Of issue with, some Worst Of, and with a lot more cultural and political substance and way more actual fun.

I sincerely wish these people saw their opportunity and took it.

As they say in their own post-everything bad-is-good ode to cosmetic surgery, truly it is another nail in the rational coffin.

P.S. No one thinks you’re badass for hanging out in Santa Ana at night except your mom. They’re all going to laugh at you! They’re all going to laugh at you!

Scout’s Honor

L.A. Boy Scouts new merit badge: ‘Respect Copyrights’

patchLOS ANGELES (AP) — A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Scouts will be instructed in the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen.

Scouts also must choose one activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy. They also can create public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music.

The world of drug ads again

Another visit to the doctor means more scanned-in drug ads! Hurray! First off we have the “Healthy Lifestyles” brochure from the Lilly company. It’s actually not for one of their drugs but for a “stop eating so damn much” plan that is no doubt intended to go with a diet pill or something. They were attempting to show the bountiful beauteous cornucopia of joy that is a HEALTHTY LIFESTYLE! but the cultural resonance of the picture they chose is unfortunate. I cropped it to the “good part.”

eden who

Next we have

The Lilly people are also advertising their antidepressant Cymbalta. Men have ADD and women have depression, so their model for this ad is the typical middle-aged middle-class woman considering her symptoms. I cropped off the top which asks which of these are symptoms of depression? and the bottom that tells you to talk to your doctor about all of your symptoms, no doubt because the list they have adds up to a prescription for Cymbalta. I like it with just the middle bit:

symptoms of buying our stuff

More great stuff from the new age magazine

  1. The Enlightenment Card is here! It’s a Visa credit card that gives you points as you buy towards… enlightening things. I want to tell the Dalai Lama about it so I can get one of those long cheerful Tibetan laughs out of him.
  2. Holistic dentistry as a general concept is probably a great idea, because dentists so often are the ones who see medical problems first. However, I’d avoid the madman with the extensive psychoceramic chart (270k jpg) showing how your teeth control your lungs, liver, and everything else.
  3. Do you need an exorcist? Why no, I don’t. I especially don’t need one who uses Comic Sans. Considering their client base, though, they’re wise to demand the $300 up front. Customer service must be a bitch there.
  4. There is an ad for a psychic clairvoyant medium named Zack Havoc. I don’t want anyone who identifies with “Havoc” messing with the spirit world. That’s a name for a late 1990s extreme sports/fake punk DJ guy, not a medium. His Corporate Reading services include “Product Placement.” Does that mean he will put your product in his readings? Also “Employee Moral” and “Theft of Services.” His political services include “demographic populace” and “legislative zeitgeist.” Okay I’m done now.
  5. Energy Healing for Pets. Yes, the url is psychicvet.com. There is a kind of Pet Tarot for sale there, too. Are we really this rich? I guess we are.

The rest of the ads are mostly for unlicensed psychotherapy via loopholes like “life coaching” and “psychic counseling. There are also ads for fraudulent medicine of various kinds, including a claim for total herbal cure of diabetes; that’s lethal. There are also quite a few pyramid schemes, including ones that produce more of the fake psychotherapists by using counseling to recruit more counselors. The smell of brimstone is evident.

I found one really cool thing in the entire magazine. There is an Organic macrobiotic Japanese food lunch truck roaming Los Angeles. Okay, that’s just awesome, having a lunch truck pull up outside your job and getting edamame, soba noodle salad, some gyoza, and a hot cup of genmai-cha. Salut! Or whatever you say in Japanese.

I suggest a fire.

It’s great to see that Tower is continuing to overprice even during their final dying going-out-of-business sale. The CDs and DVDs are all 10% off the insane list price no one pays. Whee.

Three-month-old magazines are 30% off, though, if you’re into those.

SINK THE BIZDEV!

ahhhlisaaah reports that:

Vince Neil, lead singer of Motley Crue, is headlining a three-night MOTLEY CRUISE in January that will sail to the Bahamas from Florida – he’ll be featured with his solo band on the ship.

Cruises, like second-rank Vegas hotels, are the natural destination of has-been entertainers. I’m not sure whether this one would be better or worse than the Styx Cruise, but it doesn’t have the wonderful cultural resonance of that one anyway.