"People who relish offensiveness to make a point are all for free speech -- so long as the speech doesn't offend them. This is a liberal hypocrisy," Robert L. Jamieson Jr. writes in his Seattle Post-Intelligencer column today. Jamieson is upset because a local nightclub canceled a show by reggae singer Buju Banton, whose lyrics contain references to killing homosexuals. (He was rescheduled at a different venue.) The outcry was "fueled in part by The Stranger, which loudly sounded the alarm on its blog after other city bloggers began a witch hunt," even though "the alternative weekly touts itself as a champion of free speech and a pusher of artistic envelopes," Jamieson argues. In a post on The Stranger's blog Tuesday, writer Eli Sanders responded to the paper's critics: "The Stranger is not the U.S. Supreme Court or the Seattle Police Department. We don’t interpret the Constitution and we don’t enforce its provisions. ... The First Amendment continues to exist despite Neumo’s cancelling of the Buju Banton show. Neumo’s still has the right to put on offensive shows if it wants to. We still have the right to put up blog posts about Buju Banton if we want to. And Buju Banton himself, if he really still believes in the urgency of an artistic message that includes glorifying anti-gay violence, can stand on the street in front of Neumo’s (or in any other public space) and shout that message as loud as he wants."
John Wilcock was already an experienced British journalist when he began writing "The Village Square" column for The Village Voice in 1955. These days, the 78-year-old writes a weekly column in The Montecito Journal, self-publishes a monthly zine called The Ojai Orange, and produces a public access television show. The twisted tale of his life, as revealed to the Ventura County Reporter, also includes stints as a travel writer for The New York Times and Frommer's, a columnist for LA Weekly, and an apprentice to a witch. Wilcock was friends with Andy Warhol and Abbie Hoffman, but says he "never really got along very well" with Norman Mailer, because Mailer was "a bit self-important."
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