![]() 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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