the Back of the Book (Arts), or subfeuds within each category. Andrew and I as devotees of narrative cinema were the least hip or cutting-edge of Voice writers, but we were still wayward polemicists-he in advancing the still controversial auteur theory and I in taking a feminist slant.īut more than its politics, the Voice during this period (late ’60s, early ’70s) was characterized by two things: the personal, confessional tone of the writing, and the rather nasty habit of writers attacking each other. The Voice was radical, bohemian, leftist but not ideologically pure. Village its very village voicey movie#When Andrew expanded the movie coverage I moved over and began what in effect was a kind of learning-on-the-job graduate school. I wrote a piece on the Living Theatre as a kind of audition and got a job as the fourth-string reviewer covering Broadway-the main Voice critics were hanging out in the churches and basements and out-of-the-way venues where off-Broadway flourished and which the paper had practically invented. I WAS WORKING AT THE FRENCH FILM OFFICE, writing a bulletin and newsletter for American journalists about French films, when I first met Andrew Sarris, then the “mainstream” film critic (Jonas Mekas was avant-garde) at the Village Voice. We were given the almost unheard of freedom to go wherever the subject took us discovery and self-discovery went hand in hand. I’m sure he’s no happier about the accuracy of his forecast than I am. But there it is. Thirty years ago, Alexander Kluge told me that in the twenty-first century, the computer would eliminate any space and time for reflection. It’s a different city now, and a different world. I may be wrong about this, but I think everyone at the Voice then had at least some Gramscian notion of cooperatively trying to improve the state of things, whatever else they had on their minds. When I worked there, the Voice had many gorgeously idiosyncratic writers across the board, on film, theater, TV, books, fashion and nightlife, and editors who were true editors, not corporate ventriloquists. In fact, they exposed the metastatic corruption of Donald Trump when he was but a smear of ordure in the real-estate landscape. The late, great Wayne Barrett and other Voice political writers exposed the rich corruption of our town, state, and country, for a readership that actually understood what corruption is, and actually objected to it. Hoberman, Vivian Gornick, Melissa Anderson, Robert Christgau, Michael Miller, and Greg Tate-have shared their recollections about what it meant to work at that irreplaceable place.ĪT THIS SUPREMELY SQUALID and depressing bend in our country’s political life, it’s strange to recall what the Village Voice once was to a once great, liberal American city, a city that now competes with London as the world’s biggest money laundry. Here, some of the Voice’s most singular-Gary Indiana, Molly Haskell, J. As its title promised, it produced a raucous and joyful chorus that remains a standard by which writerly courage is still measured. The Voice was a cultural necessity for decades, a breeding ground for generations of passionate and relentless journalists, critics, and writers, where they could hone their chops, flex their intellects, dig deep and deeper still into acts both heroic and criminal, whether civic or aesthetic. Few of us trusted the self-proclaimed savior, but we did somehow, perhaps a bit dumbly, have faith that the phoenix would inevitably rise from the ashes as it had before-this time, with great enough force and vitality that the city would have its beloved and reviled weekly back on the streets. At that time, a new owner promised a new era, vowing to make the Voice great again, and we who worked there believed him. I myself was a latecomer to the publication, first hired as a pinch-hitter art critic in 2014, and then bumped up to art columnist in 2016. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE VILLAGE VOICE-in the spirit of the paper itself, let’s not mince words about the nature of its ending-may not have been a surprise, but it was still a shock to the system. From left: Nat Hentoff, Jules Feiffer, Alex Cockburn, Karen Durbin, and Joel Oppenheimer picket after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 1977.
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