Village voice its very village voicey archive#

I never worked at the office, but I recall a thrill nearly every time I entered it-headed to the desk of my editor, Jeff Weinstein or Vince Aletti-three blocks from my apartment, on St. I could take for granted a hip audience that required a minimum of exposition, and was game for jumping into the deep end of the subject at hand. Among other things, I could consult with a canny photographer-first James Hamilton, then Robin Holland-to double the thrust, or the irony, of each column. The next seven years-until, to my lasting wonderment, I was tapped by The New Yorker-were the most fun I’ve ever had as a critic. I rejoined the Voice two years later, after 7 Days shut down. It was terrific (Adam Moss was the editor Joan Acocella covered dance we were a darn clever bunch) but doomed by the recession that shortly followed. (Thank God for the contract of the Voice’s union, by the way, which would finance me through an otherwise bankrupting health crisis.) In 1988, Schneiderman effectively went into competition with himself with a new, stapled tabloid weekly, 7 Days, where I was employed once again. The Voice’s publisher at the time, David Schneiderman, reacted to the city’s rising prosperity in the eighties by trying to nudge the paper toward an upscale market, but was stymied by the staff’s entrenched counterculturalism. It seemed like every time I ran into Gary he said he was about to quit, but he didn’t quit-playing dog in the manger, in my exasperated view. I wished to return to the Voice, but the fabulously acerbic Gary Indiana (who ended one column with this direct address to his readers: “Fuck you”) held the art-critic post by then. Then I blundered, jumping to the revived Vanity Fair before I was ready for it, or it for me. My second cruise, from 1980 to 1981, was wonderfully timed for a resurgence of energy in an art world that, like me, had drooped through the seventies. But the brief elevation launched what I hadn’t yet imagined would become a career. In a contest between meeting deadlines and doing drugs, guess what won. Someone at the Voice-eleven years past its founding, by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer-liked how I wrote. As a chaotic college-dropout poet and freelancer, subsisting on Avenue B, I had no credentials apart from hanging out with a lot of artists and having done some short (chiefly one-sentence) reviews for Art News. My first time at the Voice, in 1966, was a fluke typical of the overnight mobilities of life and work in New York then.

Village voice its very village voicey archive#

He said that a few employees would stick around to work on a digital archive the rest were laid off immediately. On Friday, a year after the paper became online-only, the current owner, Peter Barbey, told the staff that it would no longer publish new material. No one knew that history was loading a bullet with our name on it. The paper’s swaggering confidence and pizazz, instantly responsive to zigs and zags of the downtown Zeitgeist, startled me. A very few people, not appearing to be up to much, sat far apart at desks in a dimly lighted panorama of desuetude.īetween trips to a photocopier with the massive, sad tomes, I scanned the contents of numerous issues: products of passionate reporters, clued-in critics, brilliant writers, deft designers, and crackerjack photographers and cartoonists-too many, in each case, even to start mentioning here. The person who finally admitted me seemed surprised to see a visitor. Gaining entry to the locked premises was hard. Like most of the paper’s archives, many of those pieces have survived only in bound volumes of dingy newsprint, never digitized and, in my case, long lost on a defunct laptop. The last time I visited the Village Voice’s old, big newsroom, near Cooper Square, was three years ago, when I went seeking copies of columns that I had written between 19, during the third of my stints as the downtown weekly’s art critic.