IMO, the Felker Voice wasn’t bad but it was slick which, you know, was an appropriate esthetic.
But maybe Felker wasn’t so much of a problem — selling to Murdoch was a huge problem — but times they were a’changing. (I know. Sorry.) The Voice of course was the Voice of legend during culturally expansive times and those times started to slow then hit reverse around the same time as the Felker. Not saying there was nothing good at the Voice after the Felker purchased it but there was ever less.
All that said, I miss Cockburn’s Press Clips regularly. Almost despite him being a prick, famously abrasive, the column was enlightening to say the least. He was right then, more so nowadays. (If anyone knows anyone writing the same stuff now, please advise. Yes, I know about Rosen and Froomkin but they of course don’t come close to Cockburn.)
But reading the Voice in the 70s or so and not knowing Nichols or of Nichols? I don’t know…
Ugh, that guy. Bought the Sun-Times, tried to wreck it, barely failed, it still hasn't recovered. Made Mike Royko do something he swore he would not do--leave and cross the street to work for the Tribune.
The cultural shift overlapped with Felker’s ownership. By the time Rupert got the Voice it was necessarily already in decline to the point that he only somewhat hastened the decline. By the time he sold it was a shell of what it had been at its best, but so was society. The post-Murdoch years prove it. (Not a defense of Murdoch.)
Interesting stuff. Of course like a lot of us here, I was first introduced to your work via the Voice, Roy. I can believe the oral histories sound disjointed, because how can you have that many iconoclasts and egos in one place and find many cohesive through lines?
I never knew much about the Voice’s history, and it was already over 20 years old when I read my first issue in the late 70s. I can’t remember when the weekly issue would come out, but I want to say Wednesdays, maybe? Anyway, when I lived in the East Village from 1979 through the 80s I looked forward to pulling a new issue out of the newsrack, usually in the wee hours right after delivery, when I was staggering home from some club. Good times. I continued to read it online, but I didn’t enjoy it in the same way. The metallic clunk of the newsrack slamming shut, and the tactile feel of the paper itself were integral parts of the experience for me.
"I can believe the oral histories sound disjointed, because how can you have that many iconoclasts and egos in one place and find many cohesive through lines?" I think that's one of the reasons I sometimes enjoy a good oral history: You can read one person's take on some event, then, in the next graf, another person will completely contradict what you just read. Or you can plainly see one person's agenda in their telling of a story.
God I miss the Voice: to a guy working his way out of the closet in 1990s Appalachia, it was the gayest thing online at first: some others here, i think, have mentioned it Personal Ads as a window into another world...
I miss the in-town papers of the pre Internet era: Atlanta's Creative Loafing (and its clones in Charlotte and a couple Florida cities) actually did serious journalism and political coverage: they were the voice od the young urbanites.
It's owners had a mountain cabin here in lake Blue Ridge: they were political conservatives who knew there was a market for the writing of social liberals...
They also put a Bayliner with a 400 hp engine in the lake: you could traverse this smallish lake in 10 minutes, leaving a wake that might just swamp a bass boat or party barge..
I hope something like journalism survives the internet.
I really miss print journalism. Yes, they could pile up collecting dust and required a little bit of extra work to dispose of, but I would read a paper more thoroughly, and be more inclined to reread articles in periodicals, in print form than online. Maybe that's just me. But I do miss it.
The Chicago Reader, too. Weekly don't-miss-this journalism. They broke the Jon Burge saga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge) when no other paper would touch it.
I remember being a 13-year-old kid spending hours on a Saturday at the main branch library while my mom was out shopping for the week. I'd been doing that since I was about 8. (Imagine dropping an 8-year-old kid off at the library for the afternoon these days. Police would be called - perhaps a SWAT team. ) Somewhere around age 12 I started reading about film. Before too long, every week I would read every movie review in the periodical section. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, Jay Cocks -Time magazine, Stanley Kaufman in the New York Times
Molly Haskell
in New York magazine and her husband Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice . Before long I was the youngest proponent of the auteur theory of film in South Central Ohio. Eventually I noticed the Village Voice classified ads- Boy was that ever an education ! I'm still trying to digest everything I read there back then.
Long about the mid-70s I read an article in the Voice by a fellow named Nick Tosches . It was about Willie Nelson and outlaw country music.
" There are true tales about many of the old-line country singers, tales of gunplay and whisky and dunes and dunes of Benzedrine and high-heeled caravans of open-mouthed girl-things, garish Iliads of honky-tonk excesses that are rarely encountered except in Don Siegel movies."
Nothing by Hunter Thompson ever hit for me the way that article did. It knocked me clear out. I decided that all I ever wanted to do was to be able to write something Even 1/10 as good as that .
I became a horticulturalist.
I need to read this book! Thanks for the great review. Firstly, it's a great review with enough of your personal experience injected to make it very involving. Secondly, Not a word about that goddamn Trump. Much appreciated.
Isn't it great that there's so much more than the slow motion violence to the Wild Bunch. That eligaic tone is so perfect. As I age I feel like I've seen a completely different film from what I thought it was.
I wondered what the still from “The Wild Bunch” was doing up there. “Which one is supposed to be Henthoff or Chrisgau?” I thought. Seemed a stretch, but thanks for clearing that up. Every publication should have a writer of Roger Angel’s talent to memorialize its glory days, as those days are buried in the relentless sludge of blogs and podcasts and tweets we endure now (present company excluded.)
I remember subscribing to the Voice in Colorado the 70's and it would arrive like a talisman from a far away dreamed of culture. Between it, Creem, NME, and the New Yorker I felt like I had a handle on most of the real world I dreamed of joining... Or maybe it was just about figuring out which records were worth checking out and which to take a pass on and the culture writ large really seeped in later... And then there was that brief flowering of the New York Press, which I never fully understood, but made a later impression on me when it appeared- we can have two quality free weeklies worth reading! NYC is perfect!
Wonderful review, and I learned something today, that the Village Voice still exists (who knew?) I went to their website and saw some stuff worth reading, so thanks!
And I think I get the better part of the deal, not having lived in New York during the Voice's glory days, I can't possibly be disappointed by what they're putting out now.
"the late theater critic Michael Feingold recalls that Goldstein was miserably homophobic until, one day, Feingold noticed his “black cloud” had lifted and he correctly deduced he’d come out."
Yoicks. The things people need to do to protect themselves...
I lived in NY from '72-80. Cockburn was a revelation--he could be funny, in that Brit way that I loved. I remember (from 40 years ago) this: He was writing about fusty, self-aggrandizing Letter to the Editor trope of "am I the only one..." His example: "'Am I the only one who regards child rape as an objectionable mode of conduct? In your last issue, Alexander Cockburn...(etc.)'" Also, it was from him I learned that the very words and phrases a newspaper used revealed its biases.
Christgau was terrific. Just yesterday I was admiring his line about Tonio K's album featuring "session musicians who CARE."
Conason and Barrett made me unhappily aware that the world was much more complicated, and corrupt, than I knew. Even the restaurant reviews were sharp--e.g., Jeff Weinstein's comment that "gimmick" is the Yiddish word for "idea."
I'll always be grateful to the Voice for its music coverage. Around the time punk and new wave began to assert themselves, rock radio went into its Lee Abrams death spiral, and it became work -- hard work -- to keep up with new and interesting stuff. I bought a lot of $3.99 LPs on Christgau's recommendation. But in keeping with the Voice's weirdness, nothing shocked me as much as Christgau's extremely frank and unself-conscious writing about his own marital sex life. Whaddaya know, it's online, and this sentence is seared into my brain: "Whether it was the drama or the relief or premenopausal hormone surges, neither of has ever, at any age, under any circumstances, had as much sex as we did in the month that followed--our nightwear from that period, tattered by frottage, protruding body parts, and general hard use, is in the archives." P.S. I had to look up "frottage."
Damn, this triggers some memories for me...of growing up in Brooklyn in the late '60s/early '70s, and my not-yet-right-wing older brother bringing home copies of the Voice, the East Village Other, and occasionally Screw, all of which corrupted my still-growing psyche. Them were the days, long since gone, and greatly missed. Now all has turned to shit, and threatens to get worse by the minute. My fucking senior years were supposed to be a lot less depressing.
I was an avid reader during your stint at VV (all while you still kept Alicublog going full-time — a hero of our time!). It always seemed to me the Voice never really “got” you and your weekly undressing of wingnut propagandists. It was as if they thought you were there to write Bombeck-style light humor.
The targets of your snarksmanship may have appeared to be merely angrified clowns and bumbling fuckups, but, well, look where we are. In your hilarious way, you were sounding the alarm.
So triggering, remembering days of old.
Anyway.
IMO, the Felker Voice wasn’t bad but it was slick which, you know, was an appropriate esthetic.
But maybe Felker wasn’t so much of a problem — selling to Murdoch was a huge problem — but times they were a’changing. (I know. Sorry.) The Voice of course was the Voice of legend during culturally expansive times and those times started to slow then hit reverse around the same time as the Felker. Not saying there was nothing good at the Voice after the Felker purchased it but there was ever less.
All that said, I miss Cockburn’s Press Clips regularly. Almost despite him being a prick, famously abrasive, the column was enlightening to say the least. He was right then, more so nowadays. (If anyone knows anyone writing the same stuff now, please advise. Yes, I know about Rosen and Froomkin but they of course don’t come close to Cockburn.)
But reading the Voice in the 70s or so and not knowing Nichols or of Nichols? I don’t know…
"selling to Murdoch was a huge problem"
Ugh, that guy. Bought the Sun-Times, tried to wreck it, barely failed, it still hasn't recovered. Made Mike Royko do something he swore he would not do--leave and cross the street to work for the Tribune.
Duly noted, and added to the "strangle in the crib" list I've made up in case I ever get my hands on a time machine.
Thanks for the reminder – "The Strangle In The Crib" was one of Ali's greatest fights!
The cultural shift overlapped with Felker’s ownership. By the time Rupert got the Voice it was necessarily already in decline to the point that he only somewhat hastened the decline. By the time he sold it was a shell of what it had been at its best, but so was society. The post-Murdoch years prove it. (Not a defense of Murdoch.)
Interesting stuff. Of course like a lot of us here, I was first introduced to your work via the Voice, Roy. I can believe the oral histories sound disjointed, because how can you have that many iconoclasts and egos in one place and find many cohesive through lines?
I never knew much about the Voice’s history, and it was already over 20 years old when I read my first issue in the late 70s. I can’t remember when the weekly issue would come out, but I want to say Wednesdays, maybe? Anyway, when I lived in the East Village from 1979 through the 80s I looked forward to pulling a new issue out of the newsrack, usually in the wee hours right after delivery, when I was staggering home from some club. Good times. I continued to read it online, but I didn’t enjoy it in the same way. The metallic clunk of the newsrack slamming shut, and the tactile feel of the paper itself were integral parts of the experience for me.
It was Wednesdays. Tuesday night you could get it at Astor Place.
So Thursdays up here in benighted Vermont. Nostalgia is a nasty disease, really, and I’m suffering from it at the moment. Damn.
"I can believe the oral histories sound disjointed, because how can you have that many iconoclasts and egos in one place and find many cohesive through lines?" I think that's one of the reasons I sometimes enjoy a good oral history: You can read one person's take on some event, then, in the next graf, another person will completely contradict what you just read. Or you can plainly see one person's agenda in their telling of a story.
My husband used to serve up with the morning coffee copies of Roy's Voice article, Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman. What a way to start the day!
God I miss the Voice: to a guy working his way out of the closet in 1990s Appalachia, it was the gayest thing online at first: some others here, i think, have mentioned it Personal Ads as a window into another world...
I miss the in-town papers of the pre Internet era: Atlanta's Creative Loafing (and its clones in Charlotte and a couple Florida cities) actually did serious journalism and political coverage: they were the voice od the young urbanites.
It's owners had a mountain cabin here in lake Blue Ridge: they were political conservatives who knew there was a market for the writing of social liberals...
They also put a Bayliner with a 400 hp engine in the lake: you could traverse this smallish lake in 10 minutes, leaving a wake that might just swamp a bass boat or party barge..
I hope something like journalism survives the internet.
I really miss print journalism. Yes, they could pile up collecting dust and required a little bit of extra work to dispose of, but I would read a paper more thoroughly, and be more inclined to reread articles in periodicals, in print form than online. Maybe that's just me. But I do miss it.
CREATIVE LOAFING, yes! The Georgia State SIGNAL had an arts section that tried aspired to that vibe
The Chicago Reader, too. Weekly don't-miss-this journalism. They broke the Jon Burge saga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge) when no other paper would touch it.
I remember being a 13-year-old kid spending hours on a Saturday at the main branch library while my mom was out shopping for the week. I'd been doing that since I was about 8. (Imagine dropping an 8-year-old kid off at the library for the afternoon these days. Police would be called - perhaps a SWAT team. ) Somewhere around age 12 I started reading about film. Before too long, every week I would read every movie review in the periodical section. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, Jay Cocks -Time magazine, Stanley Kaufman in the New York Times
Molly Haskell
in New York magazine and her husband Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice . Before long I was the youngest proponent of the auteur theory of film in South Central Ohio. Eventually I noticed the Village Voice classified ads- Boy was that ever an education ! I'm still trying to digest everything I read there back then.
Long about the mid-70s I read an article in the Voice by a fellow named Nick Tosches . It was about Willie Nelson and outlaw country music.
" There are true tales about many of the old-line country singers, tales of gunplay and whisky and dunes and dunes of Benzedrine and high-heeled caravans of open-mouthed girl-things, garish Iliads of honky-tonk excesses that are rarely encountered except in Don Siegel movies."
Nothing by Hunter Thompson ever hit for me the way that article did. It knocked me clear out. I decided that all I ever wanted to do was to be able to write something Even 1/10 as good as that .
I became a horticulturalist.
I need to read this book! Thanks for the great review. Firstly, it's a great review with enough of your personal experience injected to make it very involving. Secondly, Not a word about that goddamn Trump. Much appreciated.
Isn't it great that there's so much more than the slow motion violence to the Wild Bunch. That eligaic tone is so perfect. As I age I feel like I've seen a completely different film from what I thought it was.
I wondered what the still from “The Wild Bunch” was doing up there. “Which one is supposed to be Henthoff or Chrisgau?” I thought. Seemed a stretch, but thanks for clearing that up. Every publication should have a writer of Roger Angel’s talent to memorialize its glory days, as those days are buried in the relentless sludge of blogs and podcasts and tweets we endure now (present company excluded.)
"it had nothing to do with her heterodox views" am I missing something? Or just a typo?
Whoops, thanks, fixed
Am I in?
I am, I am!
I remember subscribing to the Voice in Colorado the 70's and it would arrive like a talisman from a far away dreamed of culture. Between it, Creem, NME, and the New Yorker I felt like I had a handle on most of the real world I dreamed of joining... Or maybe it was just about figuring out which records were worth checking out and which to take a pass on and the culture writ large really seeped in later... And then there was that brief flowering of the New York Press, which I never fully understood, but made a later impression on me when it appeared- we can have two quality free weeklies worth reading! NYC is perfect!
Any mention of Abe Weissman?
Don't watch the show, had to look it up, very funny
Wonderful review, and I learned something today, that the Village Voice still exists (who knew?) I went to their website and saw some stuff worth reading, so thanks!
And I think I get the better part of the deal, not having lived in New York during the Voice's glory days, I can't possibly be disappointed by what they're putting out now.
"the late theater critic Michael Feingold recalls that Goldstein was miserably homophobic until, one day, Feingold noticed his “black cloud” had lifted and he correctly deduced he’d come out."
Yoicks. The things people need to do to protect themselves...
I lived in NY from '72-80. Cockburn was a revelation--he could be funny, in that Brit way that I loved. I remember (from 40 years ago) this: He was writing about fusty, self-aggrandizing Letter to the Editor trope of "am I the only one..." His example: "'Am I the only one who regards child rape as an objectionable mode of conduct? In your last issue, Alexander Cockburn...(etc.)'" Also, it was from him I learned that the very words and phrases a newspaper used revealed its biases.
Christgau was terrific. Just yesterday I was admiring his line about Tonio K's album featuring "session musicians who CARE."
Conason and Barrett made me unhappily aware that the world was much more complicated, and corrupt, than I knew. Even the restaurant reviews were sharp--e.g., Jeff Weinstein's comment that "gimmick" is the Yiddish word for "idea."
And then, of course, one discovered Roy Edroso.
I'll always be grateful to the Voice for its music coverage. Around the time punk and new wave began to assert themselves, rock radio went into its Lee Abrams death spiral, and it became work -- hard work -- to keep up with new and interesting stuff. I bought a lot of $3.99 LPs on Christgau's recommendation. But in keeping with the Voice's weirdness, nothing shocked me as much as Christgau's extremely frank and unself-conscious writing about his own marital sex life. Whaddaya know, it's online, and this sentence is seared into my brain: "Whether it was the drama or the relief or premenopausal hormone surges, neither of has ever, at any age, under any circumstances, had as much sex as we did in the month that followed--our nightwear from that period, tattered by frottage, protruding body parts, and general hard use, is in the archives." P.S. I had to look up "frottage."
https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/misc/sex-95.php
Damn, this triggers some memories for me...of growing up in Brooklyn in the late '60s/early '70s, and my not-yet-right-wing older brother bringing home copies of the Voice, the East Village Other, and occasionally Screw, all of which corrupted my still-growing psyche. Them were the days, long since gone, and greatly missed. Now all has turned to shit, and threatens to get worse by the minute. My fucking senior years were supposed to be a lot less depressing.
I was an avid reader during your stint at VV (all while you still kept Alicublog going full-time — a hero of our time!). It always seemed to me the Voice never really “got” you and your weekly undressing of wingnut propagandists. It was as if they thought you were there to write Bombeck-style light humor.
The targets of your snarksmanship may have appeared to be merely angrified clowns and bumbling fuckups, but, well, look where we are. In your hilarious way, you were sounding the alarm.
I am content.
Content (backwards R) Roy!