A Ringer Spotted in The Stranger

We dropped our Stranger vs. Weekly faceoff feature (lawsuits), but we do occasionaly still flop those rags open for a scan. Last night we were grinding through the top-heavy feature section of this week's Stranger, when almost without noticing we began flying through one of them. Take us away, Stranger, take us away. Until suddenly we came to a screeching halt on a single word: gimcrack. Gimcrack..? Raban! Our eyes scanned upwards and sure enough, the one man in Seattle good enough to drop a "gimcrack" from time to time was our host for this trip. Jonathan Raban, we love you.

In particular, they congregated in the polyglot suburb of Harburg, south of the river from Hamburg, a place that in its social and economic make-up looks a lot like the shabbier bits of Leeds, Birmingham, and the London inner suburbs of Stockwell, Tulse Hill, Streatham Hill, where the London bombers found their lodgings—that unpicturesque terrain of flats, terraced family housing, betting shops, malodorous hairdressers, ethnic groceries and restaurants, stalled traffic, broken pavements, boarded-up shop fronts, the amiable muddle of gimcrack domestic and commercial architecture dating from the 1880s to the near present. Nowhere could be more "Western" in its style of down-at-heel free enterprise.

The Stranger loses this week's one-night-only return engagement, not because Raban's article isn't the best thing to appear in either weekly in memory, because it is, but because it's so hard to find on the damn website. The nerve of the old boy to submit something for an issue already packed with Stranger staff features!

Update:The Stranger realized their mistake on the website over the weekend and gave Raban top billing.