JUST LIKE NEW TIMES

A couple weeks ago, I conducted a little unscientific experiment: Would a company that I’ve outspokenly badmouthed in print overlook my past squawking and offer me a job? I figured the odds were long since the company’s New Times (oops, sorry. Village Voice Media. Be still my heart).

The position in question was editor of Seattle Weekly, a gig that, given different ownership, I would have been seriously chomping at. Yet despite the my public feelings toward the ownership –- my diatribe is recounted here -- I applied, partially as a test and partially because there’s a side of me that thinks the position and the location would make the bullshit that went along with it more palatable. I ran an alternative paper in L.A. for nearly four years (the Los Angeles Reader) and I miss the rush of putting out a weekly on the fly.

The first question was whether I should come clean in my cover letter. Should I remind the New Times Suits (I picture bolo ties, boots made from the skins of exotic dead animals, and Red Man chaw) that I danced on the grave of New Times L.A. in an L.A. Alternative Press story in 2002. Should I tell them that, no, really, I totally understood why company honcho Michael Lacey called me and fellow management at the doomed L.A. Reader cocksuckers right before the guillotine came down hard on our collective necks back in 1996?

I asked a pair of trusted advisers who’d worked with me at the Reader, and they agreed I should stay mum and only play the remorse card well into the process. So I sent a nice package of clips with a confident cover letter and sent it off to New Times (er, Village Voice) headquarters in Denver.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the gig. Nor an interview. Just a generic form letter from a New Times underassistant lackey that “nothing was available” for me at the moment. (Just say “until the end of time” and be done with it). It could very well be that I lacked the credentials to run the Seattle Weekly. I can kind of accept that. But it’s more fun to be paranoid and assume that that Mr. Lacey’s got skin the thickness of one-ply tissue (something I saw very first hand a decade ago) and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d ever be considered for a gig there, credentials be damned. I prefer to imagine Lacey, up there on his little mountaintop, counting his money, laughing diabolically at those he thinks he's squashed. I hold the man personally responsible for yanking the heart of the nation’s alternative press with a rusty pair of pliers. If I've annoyed him just a little bit, I'm happy.