A stupid person complains that the Village Voice couldn't possibly be a factor in pushing the lie I was talking about, the claim of the innocuous effects of media violence, bigotry, racism, sexism, etc. which is ubiquitous in movies, TV shows, etc. because a couple of years back it died the death of dead tree journalism and is in the process of dying off, altogether. You wonder if that's the rule for a media corporation (no doubt a corporate "person") why you can't declare all dead human criminals to be blameless in the roles they played in the crimes committed during their lifetimes.
The reason I mentioned The Village Voice this morning was, primarily, due to the long, long term presence of the late and awful. self-centered bore Nat Hentoff one of those media assholes who pushed every possible line of "free speech - free press" absolutism that he could. That was his brand. Hentoff, when he was very, very old and had repeated his habitual themes and memories over and over again for decades, got boring and expensive and got canned by The Village Voice and he took up the logical perch that his ideology prepared him for, at the Koch funded, fascist-libertarian Cato Institute.* I've despised Hentoff for decades, even before I singled him out in my first blog post. But he's hardly the only such figure in that pseudo-liberal-pseudo-lefty rag's history.
I know enough about the legendary Village Voice to know it's origins were far from admirable. Its founders, the dirty book writer Norman Mailer, the future adviser of Ed Koch, Dan Wolf and the psychologist - hack, Edwin Fancher, were hardly likely to lead to a viable future that was adequate, even by the standards of the later 1960s. It is a very New York City, male, very white male, very affluent or aspiring to be affluent, college credentialed style of liberalism. Perhaps that's why so much of its "free speech - free press" orthodoxy, it's one and only (and self interested) durable substitute for moral absolutes, is now so useful to the corporate fascist right and racist neo-Nazis.
This ancient, 1959 meet the press style interview of Ed Fancher will make you cringe, it shows that the very 50s style NYC "liberalism" was never going to lead to much that was good. I think it was mostly affluent people who never intended to go very far in changing in ways that they didn't feel entirely comfortable with. Before many years were out ol' Norman Mailer was battling against feminists, Ed Wolf was an adviser to the flagrantly racist Ed Koch and, well, you can hear where Fancher was coming from in that interview. I don't think he was, at that time, really very interested in much more than his neighborhood in that most parochial of American cities.
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This piece from The Nation, a sort of long obituary for the Village Voice contained this interesting characterization of it.
The Voice was an original, but it wasn’t unprecedented. More than two centuries ago, French newspapers began printing a feuilleton—a supplement, or “leaf,” attached to political or business pages—that talked about the arts, literature, culture, fashion, and, of course, gossip, in a personal style. Later, especially in Vienna, the feuilleton became a form of journalism in which coverage of the arts and fashion was informed by politics, and vice versa.
It’s a little hard to imagine today, when the most linked-to piece on NYTimes.com might be a recap of Game of Thrones, but that kind of journalism was once frowned upon in America—or at least relegated to the supermarket tabs. Before World War II, there were the “little magazines,” aimed at a small, discerning class of serious readers. But there was nothing like the Voice, a pop tabloid that often gave the impression that it was being written at ground zero of the postwar cultural shift.
For anyone who might want a perspective on that style of journalism the V.V. practiced from one of the too little known heroes of journalism, here's a piece I wrote about Karl Krauss, someone who should be remembered in place of just about all of the celebrities of satire since then.
* The old Koch funded asshole, with his son, got scared right before he finally croaked and tried to sound the alarm about Trump's endangerment of the media and journalists. I like to think of it as him seeing his own flock of chickens coming home to roost.
Update: It's too stupid for me to care about what that ass posted at Duncan Black's boring blog. It's apparent that only the most voluntarily retarded of Black's ever dwindling rump of his former community is stupid enough to believe he characterizes what I wrote. And you can't fix that kind of will-based stupidity. No, I didn't even bother to look at the link, this time. I predict that the ever fewer number of adults who post comments there will gradually go elsewhere or die off. Black will drop it when it stops producing revenue for him, it's the only reason for it to still be actively updated.
"Update: It's too stupid for me to care about what that ass posted at Duncan Black's boring blog. It's apparent that only the most voluntarily retarded of Black's ever dwindling rump of his former community is stupid enough to believe he characterizes what I wrote. And you can't fix that kind of will-based stupidity. No, I didn't even bother to look at the link, this time. I predict that the ever fewer number of adults who post comments there will gradually go elsewhere or die off. Black will drop it when it stops producing revenue for him, it's the only reason for it to still be actively updated."
ReplyDeleteThere's something pathological about the fact he cares so much. It's Trumpian, this obsession. I still say it has something to do with NYC; must be in the water, or is is just the culture?
As for the VV: read it (or at it) a couple of times, must have been back in college. Not interested. Too parochial, not all that interesting. I was more surprised it lasted as long as it did, than anything.
The most surprising thing about his obsession with me is that it takes up time he could spend on the thing he likes talking about most, him. Maybe he didn't realize that and now that he's read this he'll drop me. One can only hope.
DeleteThe V.V. was mostly a community newspaper about a small, rich, self-obsessed community and not even everyone who lived there, mostly certainly affluent white people. I've read minority community papers hardly anyone heard of that were less parochial. That interview with Edwin Fancher is really shocking, a real eye opener as to the limits of that rag and the local culture it sprang from.
I will admit that I called Norman Mailer a dirty book writer to annoy the troll, though I think it's what he was most known for at the time. I have always found him unreadable, I wasn't impressed with The Naked And The Dead finding it was a parade of set types and stereotypes instead of characters. That's something that's so often true in writers with a large reputation during their lifetime but who aren't much read after they die. I'd rather read history than story books about things like that.
Come to think of it, I did look at Ancient Evenings once and I think I really meant it when I said he was a dirty book writer, glad to say it, in fact.
Mailer: I think I read "Of a Fire On The Moon," about the Apollo missions. Don't remember much about it except I read it to read Mailer.
ReplyDeleteNever tried that again.