Dear editor,
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For starters, Armstrong’s review of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream [Section 3, November 19] was spot-on. Hadn’t seen them before, hit that Logan Square show, and, uh, honestly that’s possibly the single best description of the Ohio outfit one could imagine. (Side note to L.S. Auditorium–your drink prices are bullshit.)
So if anything, the Reader best consider Liz Armstrong an asset. I don’t see anyone else out there in indiepressland who both has the balls to call Vice mag founder Gavin McInnes out on his casually racist neocon antics and can manage to do so without sounding like a whiny Democrat; who can slam the plastic surgery self-hate reality foisted upon us but still celebrate good style when she sees it; or covering direct-action environmentalism, Friends Forever, and Costes in a major weekly. Actually, what baffles me is why the Reader made not one peep about Armstrong’s illegal arrest and detention at the Republican National Convention protests this summer in New York, instead leaving the job of reporting her tale solely to Chicago-based indie mag Lumpen, whose press run and distribution is considerably less than yours. If Jonathan Rosenbaum got kicked at an anti-Bush protest and locked up in a toxic bus depot I wager you all would be devoting some inches. Somebody dropped the ball there.
