The Village Voice and Me
It's a fact so obvious as to be totally unacknowledged, namely, that education doesn't just happen in school but in fact is happening all the time. What school has that most informal contexts lack are qualities of purpose, rigor, and structure. You can, of course, read all of Shakespeare on your own, but you are more likely to do so and to get more out of it if you take a course. But, then again, who has time to read Shakespeare, what with all those episodes of the "Housewives of Wherever" to catch up on, or, in my case, all those ball games to zone out to?
All of this came to mind when I read last week that the Village Voice had closed up shop. I think it had gone downhill lately, but when I was a regular reader it was fantastic. For me, the Voice couldn't be beat as a source of informal education. It shaped much of the person I am today.
I think I started reading it around 1979 or '80, and read it on a weekly basis throughout the entire decade. It was a tabloid form newspaper, complete with newsprint that came off on your hands. First of all, I soaked in the whole big city, left leaning, cosmopolitan vibe of it. Loved it. A huge thing for me was learning about gay culture and related matters of civil and human rights that would only move to the front burner in the years to come. Lest that sound too serious, a first read was always the gossip and nightlife column by Michael Musto, the modern archetype of the Sassy, Ironic Gay Friend. Dude was funny.
The political side was strong, too. Alexander Cockburn had a regular column. I think Hitchens wrote for them, too. And James Ridgeway. They did some muckraking and investigative stuff, but more than anything I learned how to think analytically about politics. Nat Hentoff had a weekly column on civil rights issues that I never skipped. He was a fierce defender of the free speech rights of the anti-abortion movement.
But most formative for me was the arts coverage. So strong as to be almost unbelievable. Gary Giddins had his jazz column, Weather Bird, running each week. Giddins is probably the best jazz writer of the last fifty years, and the 80s was actually a great time for jazz. The inimitable Robert Christgau edited the whole music section and ran his Consumer Guide where he wrote short one-paragraph reviews to which he affixed letter grades. He was also in charge of the year end Pazz and Jop music poll. My listening was almost too influenced by Christgau. The legendary Lester Bangs was a contributor. My favorite piece from him was called "A Listener's Guide to Horrible Noise." Kyle Gann had a column called Bang on a Can that covered the genre known as New Music or Experimental Music -- music in the lineage of John Cage et al.; music that avoids anything that is too ingrained in us as listeners, anything that is too obviously pleasure-inducing. The closest thing to the Voice music section today might be something like the website Pitchfork. I read the art columns by Gary Indiana and others. I probably even read the dance reviews.
I think that the whole thing presented the idea that aesthetics is ethics, that openness and adventurousness are important in art and in life. Yes, sir, I learned a lot from the Voice. And at a buck a week or so it was a lot cheaper than my graduate degrees.
All of this came to mind when I read last week that the Village Voice had closed up shop. I think it had gone downhill lately, but when I was a regular reader it was fantastic. For me, the Voice couldn't be beat as a source of informal education. It shaped much of the person I am today.
I think I started reading it around 1979 or '80, and read it on a weekly basis throughout the entire decade. It was a tabloid form newspaper, complete with newsprint that came off on your hands. First of all, I soaked in the whole big city, left leaning, cosmopolitan vibe of it. Loved it. A huge thing for me was learning about gay culture and related matters of civil and human rights that would only move to the front burner in the years to come. Lest that sound too serious, a first read was always the gossip and nightlife column by Michael Musto, the modern archetype of the Sassy, Ironic Gay Friend. Dude was funny.
The political side was strong, too. Alexander Cockburn had a regular column. I think Hitchens wrote for them, too. And James Ridgeway. They did some muckraking and investigative stuff, but more than anything I learned how to think analytically about politics. Nat Hentoff had a weekly column on civil rights issues that I never skipped. He was a fierce defender of the free speech rights of the anti-abortion movement.
But most formative for me was the arts coverage. So strong as to be almost unbelievable. Gary Giddins had his jazz column, Weather Bird, running each week. Giddins is probably the best jazz writer of the last fifty years, and the 80s was actually a great time for jazz. The inimitable Robert Christgau edited the whole music section and ran his Consumer Guide where he wrote short one-paragraph reviews to which he affixed letter grades. He was also in charge of the year end Pazz and Jop music poll. My listening was almost too influenced by Christgau. The legendary Lester Bangs was a contributor. My favorite piece from him was called "A Listener's Guide to Horrible Noise." Kyle Gann had a column called Bang on a Can that covered the genre known as New Music or Experimental Music -- music in the lineage of John Cage et al.; music that avoids anything that is too ingrained in us as listeners, anything that is too obviously pleasure-inducing. The closest thing to the Voice music section today might be something like the website Pitchfork. I read the art columns by Gary Indiana and others. I probably even read the dance reviews.
I think that the whole thing presented the idea that aesthetics is ethics, that openness and adventurousness are important in art and in life. Yes, sir, I learned a lot from the Voice. And at a buck a week or so it was a lot cheaper than my graduate degrees.
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