Actually, there are several free papers which cover different areas of the city - there are three that cover our area (we seem to be in a sort of overlap zone - we're not big enough or interesting enough to warrant our own, but the nearby ones spread to here. You can also get The Onion for free in some places). The one I'm talking about is the one that covers the whole city, and comes out weekly.
One possibly important difference about the free paper is it's not delivered to houses (at least, it's not delivered to our house), you have to pick it up somewhere. There's a pile of them in the club house, there are dispensers on street corners, I picked one up today from next to the ticket booth at the cinema.
Anyway, the first thing you notice about the paper is its bulk. It's 156 pages long (last week's was the same length, so that might be a rule). For something free, that's pretty hefty. If we had a fire, and if it was cold, and if we had one of those machines that they used to sell in the innovations catalogue for turning newspapers into logs, we'd never need to send out for coal deliveries.
The second thing you notice when you open the paper is the ads. It's got a lot of ads - it's a free paper, after all. The first ad on page 2 is for cosmetic surgery - you can have Botox for $10 per unit (I've no idea what a unit of Botox is, but you have to buy at least 30), you can have Restylane (no idea what that is) for $399 per cc, and a lunch time face lift for $1100 (per session). The 3rd advert is also for plastic surgery ("The New Lipo - have it done on Thursday, back to work on Monday" none of this lunchtime nonsense here), page 6 is for Laser surgery ("monthly payments as low as $31") page 8 has a full page plastic surgery advert ("Breast augmentation $2999"). Page 11 is another full page one ("Botox $100 per area, (2 area min)" - what's an area? that's a bit vague, it's like saying "Bananas, 12p per unit weight. But I digress.) P 13 is cosmetic dentistry. Later on in the paper are slightly more disturbing (and only slightly smaller) ads for "Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation", one can be rejuvenated in two ways, it appears, the first way is "for the enhancement of sexual gratification", and the second "for the aesthetic [sic: UK spelling there] enhancement of the vulvar structures". I'm sorry, but my genitalia are insufficiently beautiful, can you fix that for me doctor?
The next most common type of advert (at least in the front of the paper) is other medical stuff. These adverts tend to be smaller, usually quarter page: "Unhappy? Manic? Moody? Call for an evaluation". "Headache and migraine sufferers - could this muscle be the cause of your pain?". An impressive number of these are for 'medicinal cannabis' - "First 420 patients will receive a gram of Cannabis"
At the back of the paper, there's a new kind of advert - for "gentleman's' clubs". (There are a lot of other adverts for other stuff too, of course). "Almost naked go go girls", "Showgirls - totally nude", "Full alcohol bar, topless dancers, watch all major sporting events!", and several pages of "adult massage".
After that's finished surprising you, the next thing is the writing. First, it's quite, errmm..., I can't think of a good word, maybe risque is it. There's a regular column called "Ask a Mexican", where you can write in (under a pseudonym) and ask a Mexican (obviously) the kind of question you wouldn't want to ask a Mexican that you knew. Last week, the question was about whether second generation Mexican's didn't like recent Mexican arrivals - the answer was that they don't, and they have names for them, but the names differ between areas ('wab' was one of them). This week, the questions are "How did the patron saint of Mexico get a name derived from Arabic", and "Can the Dec 12th roundups be construed as just your everyday harassment and discrimination against Mexicans by a corrupt government and corporate slave masters hellbent on intimidation?" (The answer to the second was no, not really but that it wasn't nice to do it on a religious feast day "even the Nazis had the decency not to stage the Kristallnacht during the Sabbath.")
The problem page makes the problem page from Playboy read something like Beatrix Potter. (Actually, if you've not read it, it's remarkably dull in places. It's called the Playboy Advisor, and here's a link to one of their frequently asked questions "What are the duties of the best man at a wedding?") One question this week is from a gay man whose new (ish) boyfriend won't allow the writer to penetrate him. Part of the answer is "... maybe your dick is so big so absolutely ginormous, so ass-splittingly huge that you've scared his gay butt shut". But it concludes "the only way to find out ... is to promise not to dump [him] if he tells you the truth." There had, it seems, been a recent story about a lady whose boyfriend turned out to have something of a foot fetish. Someone wrote in and said that this wasn't so bad, and their boyfriend was the same, and now they are getting married. The response is that this is a nice happy ending, and that more letters like this might make a nice Valentine's issue, so "I'm putting a call out for letters from vanilla types who took a chance on a kinky motherfucker ...and they took home to meet mum and dad."
However, the most surprising thing about the paper is the quality of the writing. It's very, very well written. Not in the way that The Sun is well written (which it is - it's hard to write crap like that), I mean in it's sophistication. There's a large feature every week, and this week is about Muslims in California. Here's a quote, from the beginning of one article "Iran is a society based on a dichotomy, a place where people live separate and sometimes clashing public and private lives, and where duality of identity has become a major social issue for youth".
There's also an article discussing assaults by black people on white people, and whether these can be considered 'hate crimes' because power is the root of the issue, and whether the media generally were not taking notice of a story, because it was difficult to present (in, I very approximately estimate, 3000 words).
There's a cartoon of George Bush holding a skull in Hamlet and Yorick mode, with the caption "George W Bush looking at the 599,999th Iraqi skull created by his lover of peace, freedom and democracy and deciding that the world will finally be safer now that Saddam Hussein is dead". Now apart from the political extremism of that cartoon, which one would imagine in The Guardian, but not the Burton and District Promoter (that was the first free paper we had - there was a rabbit called 'Promoter Percy' that you had to try to find). Where were we, yes, apart from that, there can't be many papers in the world that run a cartoon which need to know about Hamlet to really get.
There are restaurant listings, with elaborate descriptions "a monument of conspicuous consumption, bottles of champagne and expensive sake ornamenting the tables, the most exquisite tuna tartare ..."; " a chef with a wobbly idiosyncratic style that couldn't be further from the finish-fetish crowd pleasers"; "only in the 21st century could you find a restaurant quite so mid century modern, with sleek love seat sofas and machine polished wood and a quantity of prefabricated design that probably would have amused Ray and Charles Eames back in the days when their aesthetic was found more in your kindergarten classroom than in a fashionable cafe". (I've no idea what that last one means - which might prove my point, or might refute it). Anyway, the restaurant reviews go on for two full pages, in small print).
I was going to write about the film reviews as well, but I can't be bothered, so I'm just going to cut the first paragraph:
As a child, I couldn’t stand Beatrix Potter, and not just because her cute jacketed critters bored me senseless. I loved tough children’s tales, but Potter’s stories were manipulative and twisted, filled with punitive authority figures — Mrs. Rabbit is a prissy scold, Farmer McGregor an evil-tempered lout — visiting tightlipped moral justice on insipid mice, bunnies, and the truly insufferable Jemima Puddleduck. Small wonder that poor Peter Rabbit cowers under the bedclothes while Mrs. R. looms menacingly over him like some demented Nurse Ratched on all those quaint plates and mugs that fuel the multimillion-dollar Potter industry.The free paper almost summarizes America for me. It's crap and cheap and nasty and superficial. And at the same time it's sophisticated and intelligent and cultured.
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