Joel Stein Plays Catch-Up

When Michael Kinsley came on board as LAT Editorial chief, one of his first moves was to hire Joel Stein to add a young, fresh voice to the paper. But how fresh is Stein? This week he visits Lucha VaVoom, the Mexican themed burlesque show which, he writes, his friends have been telling him about “for months” and describing as a “Mecca for hipsters.”

Great, but Lucha VaVoom has been going on for years and is in fact established enough to have been the subject of several Los Angeles Times pieces, dating as far back as 2002. Stein uses the event to launch into a fairly rote–albeit accurate–examination of the appeal of camp in Los Angeles. Which again, is hardly a newsflash.

Is this the best Stein can do? Is this the best the LAT can do?

(Also, LAObserved catches this editorial oddity– an ‘Outside The Tent’ piece by John Ziegler that was too inaccurate– or TOO HOT?– for print but which Bob Sipchen decided to post online.)

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