So… what’s up with this Midtown Monthly shit?

That’s the name of this little paper I get in the mail here in the 95816 once every month or so. As far as I can tell, it’s the work of approximately 3 people with one person writing most of the content. Most of the pages are filled with display ads from quaint lil’ yuppie businesses ‘round town (and it appears that most of them are actually located outside of the Midtown area.) The actual reading content is mostly advertorial crap with a two page fluff piece on time management thrown in the paper’s center, written by the same person who writes almost all of the other stuff, natch, and which goes in 140 different directions, yet in the end, says nothing.

What really made me want to spit my soda when I picked this rag up: a cover story licking the shit clean out of Paul Petrovich’s ass. Petrovich, he of the dreaded Sacramento Art Nazi Movement, he who has the gall to white over an original and attractive mural on one side of the street, and on the other, post a hideous equine hunk of scrapheap shit right smack in front of the Safeway, and then pay the equivalent of about 25 Safeway employees’ wages to plop up a water tower that is completely hollow and has no fuckin’ practical purpose whatsoever. Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to take a short hop to pick up milk or Fritos or whatever, but this guy really needs to stay out of the art world. As far as his senses of aesthetics and urban culture are concerned, he has his head totally up his ass.

But hey, perhaps I should either pity the folks at Midtown Monthly, or even strangely marvel at their incredible level of being out of touch with the real pulse of the Midtown that they claim to be a part of. Perhaps they saw a certain unfillable niche: after all, the Bee tends to cover the hard news and the News & Review goes after the “wacky” stuff, so hey, the upper middle income carpetbaggers who bought Victorian fixer uppers for WAY too much money need SOMEthing to read, don’t they? And you have to hand it to them: they just spit this shit out to everybody in certain zip codes who has a mailbox. There’s no mailing label, and therefore, no mailing list, and THEREfore, nobody can cancel their delivery because hey, we don’t have an address to remove! Admittedly, that’s some pretty clever tactics.

Yeah, fuck it. Maybe I took these folks too seriously. Maybe we need people like Petrovich around to remind us once in a while that the old saying is true: when money talks, bullshit does walk. The best way to deal with this shit is: next month, when their rag involuntarily pollutes my mailbox, to: 1.) Take it straight to the recycling barrel, and 2.) There is no number 2. As for anyone in Midtown reading this: Who’d care to join me?