TRIVIA QUESTION
I'm curious about the inconsistency of the 2012 Boston Phoenix ballot for Best Trivia Night. Of the six nominees, five were trivia nights at individual bars (including mine, at the White Horse Tavern), and one, Geeks Who Drink, is not an individual bar, but rather a national franchise. To this end, Geeks was able to use their national marketing muscle to solicit votes from their fans in Boston and in other markets, and ostensibly for this reason, won the award.
Now, Geeks Who Drink puts on a creative show, and they deserve the good press that they get. But to place their entire organization on the ballot against the work that I do through Stump Trivia in only one bar is simply not fair. I can only solicit the patrons of one bar for votes. Geeks solicited the patrons of dozens of bars in and outside of Boston for votes. Was the Phoenix doggedly determined to honor Geeks Who Drink?
Will LaTulippe
Brighton
PAYING: THE PRICE
I have a vote for the biggest pain in the ass in music (see "The Biggest Problem with Music," News and Features, April 20). I think that the money spent on promotion and marketing dictates what music becomes popular in the monoculture. In the '90s, the trend trickled down to dictate what indie labels produce and consider "best practices" necessary to maintain or drive profit. This paid promotion and manufactured publicity, aimed at maximizing profit from a handful of bands, feeds into the content requirements of media catalyzing and restricting the music we grow up listening to and then aspire to make. In the loop from pay-to-play hype to real life and back again is an insidious form of recirculating feedback that prohibits innovation and prefers consistent mediocrity over drastic variations in quality. I'm not saying I am any better, I just see it as a flaw of the existing system.
Andrew Marshall Alper
Chicago, IL
via Web
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- We hear that
I just finished reading your article, "Voices Carry" (October 21). Thank you so much for writing about this very important topic.
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I wanted to tell you how much I admired your cover article in the October 21 Boston Phoenix ("Voices Carry").
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I just read your article about the Occupy New Hampshire primary event ("A Wedding and Four Funerals," January 13).
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I simply love bass — there is nothing wrong with that.
- Letters to the Boston editors, February 17, 2012
Regarding your recent "House of Incorrections" story (Talking Politics, February 3), I think it would be more believable if some criminal-justice experts were quoted.
- Sorry state, changing times
You can't expect a university that helped to fund a speaker who downplays the Holocaust and mocks Jewish students before and during his speech to denounce something they have zero relation to.
- Letters to the Boston editors, March 23, 2012
The hypocrisy from the left is breathtaking.
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The Boston Teachers Union (BTU) is not obscene (see "Q: Who Hates School Reform?" Editorial, March 23).
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It's almost laughable that people get so upset about electronic privacy when the government can search your car, containers, and property outside your home without a search warrant.
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Thanks for your "I was a teenage Gramlich" article (April 6). Ned Gramlich was my father.
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I took issue with the final statement of Peter Keough's review of The Avengers ("Awkward First Steps," Arts & Entertainment, May 4) — with his dismissal of Agent Phil Coulson's death as not "compelling" enough to rally a group of heroes into action.
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