Schneiderman didn’t worry about what actually appeared in the Voice because, he said, he had trust in his editor, Don Forst. Indeed, the bantam, septuagenarian former head of New York Newsday has been Voice editor longer than anyone has ever held the job. Asked why he got the position, Forst, nothing if not blunt, said, “I’m a very good manager. I can handle a tough room. But really, I don’t know. I needed a job.”
It was clear from the start that Don Forst’s paper was to be a wholly different animal. One of the first acts in the Forst era was the firing of Jules Feiffer, universally regarded as the paper’s most visible and beloved symbol. “It wasn’t just that they canned Jules,” says one Voicer who, like almost everyone else, preferred to remain nameless. “It was well known that they thought he was making too much money, if you can call seventy-five thousand dollars too much for Jules Feiffer. They’d been after Karen Durbin, the last editor, to get rid of him. But she refused. She knew what Jules meant. What really blew people’s minds was Forst’s attitude after he pulled the plug. He said Feiffer was fired and that was that. There wasn’t going to be any of the usual shit about it, none of that letters-from-the-outraged-staff stuff that has always gone on at the Voice. The staff tried to buy an ad to complain, but the ad department said they wouldn’t run it. That’s when we knew we’d entered a period of malign neglect at the Village Voice.”
Once, for better or worse, the Voice was a “writer’s paper,” but the I word was soon banished from most Voice copy. “I am simply not interested in people’s individual psychodramas,” Don Forst said. Story length was restricted, with few features running longer than twenty-five hundred words. “Our younger demographic doesn’t like to read long stories,” said the seventy-three-year-old Forst. One day, Forst dropped a copy of The Old Man and the Sea on the desk of the late Julie Lobbia. “Your sentences are too long,” he said. Most destructive, according to most, has been the redesign of the arts pages, allegedly at the behest of the ad department. In the old days, a lead Voice critic could address the week’s fare in a free-ranging essay of about fourteen hundred words. Now it was decreed that they produce three separate “elements” on the page, each dealing with a separate film, play, or piece of music. The “big” piece runs eight hundred words.
“It is depressing,” says one critic. “I thought if I stayed serious, I’d create a body of work that might win me a Pulitzer. At least I had the hope. Now what can I show, these little postage stamps?”
Meanwhile, management, always legendarily cheap (Schneiderman once declared that no Voice reporter was allowed to use 411; the policy was dropped after people started calling 1–718–555–1212, which was more expensive), kept downsizing. Gary Giddins, only the best jazz critic in the country, was pushed out after three decades. Sylvia Plachy, who along with James Hamilton had given the Voice a very distinctive photographic look, was laid off, apparently to save her $20,000 stipend. Her son, the actor Adrien Brody, an office regular back in his toddling days, often making copies of his face by pressing his nose to the glass of the Xerox machine, came to help her move.
“He had this baseball hat jammed down over his head, demanding to know who fired his mother,” one observer recounts.
Hearing some of this, Michael Lacey frowns. He’d been ranting about how even though he’d come from a union household, and his brother, who helped build the World Trade Center, was the president of a midwestern boilermakers local (“which was no pussy union”), he had no use for organized labor. This didn’t mean he expected any trouble from the Voice union. What he hoped would happen, Lacey said with confounding plutocrat noblesse oblige, was that the Voice employees would realize a union wasn’t necessary, “because we take good care of our people.”
Word of bad morale at the Voice, however, brought Lacey up short. Although no slouch with the downsize scythe himself (mass-firing tales are legend in the New Times canon), Lacey shook his head at stories of layoffs. “You don’t get rid of good people just to save money. They’re too hard to find. You don’t discourage them. You want a lively newsroom, some action. Sturm. Drang. That place seemed dead.”
He couldn’t seem to get over David Schneiderman, his new partner, referring to himself as “a numbers guy.” He liked Schneiderman and had learned not to underestimate him. But “a numbers guy? … Sounds like death. I can’t even balance my checkbook…. It’s so sick the way most of the business runs. The top editors don’t edit. Never touch a piece of copy. What do they do all day, think beautiful thoughts? The way we do it, the editors have to write too. They should never forget how hard it is, the fucking agony of it. I make myself write and report. It kills me, but I do it.”
Then, loud enough for the other diners to turn around, Lacey declared, “God help me, I’m in a business of weenies!”
The next day, I was talking on the phone to Robert Christgau, the Voice’s archetypically thorny “Dean of Rock Critics.” He asked me what I thought of Michael Lacey. I said he’d probably turn out to be a nightmare, but so far I kind of liked him.
“What do you like about him?” Bob demanded.
“I don’t know … he’s got this bonkers sincerity about him. Who knows what he’ll do, but I got the feeling he genuinely wants to make the paper better.”
Christgau snorted. “I doubt if his conception of how to make the paper better conforms to mine.”
Then he hung up. Conversations with Bob Christgau have a habit of being truncated without warning. Often voluminous on the page, verbally he retains a compelling gift of concision. After Nelson Rockefeller reputedly died after sex with the young Megan Marshack, Bob said, “If I knew it would kill him, I would have blown him myself.” When John Lennon was shot, he bemoaned, “Why is it always Robert Kennedy and John Lennon, not Richard Nixon and Paul McCartney?” Personally, I’ve always treasured Christgau’s assessment of my work. During the era of the Reggie Jackson Yankees, I wrote a not particularly friendly piece about the team. Christgau, a Yanks fan, came over to my desk.
“Read your piece,” he said. “Really sucked.” Then he stomped away. I never even got a chance to thank him for his input.
Christgau’s comment about Mike Lacey seemed likewise to the point, a perfect Voice Person reply. To wit: sure, Lacey and his crew could take over, as Leonard Stern, Clay Felker, and Murdoch had done before. They could fire everyone, turn the paper into a desert flatter than a Scottsdale Mall. They might temporarily own the paper’s little red boxes, its famous name. But they would never control its soul, never truly silence the legitimate keepers of the VV logos.
Coming from Christgau, now sixty-three, more than half his life spent at the paper, it was a defiance you had to respect. This was especially so, since of all the supposed Village Voice “dinosaurs,” those masthead survivors who never seem to go away, nobody comes in for as much sniping as Bob. Typical is the commentary of Russ Smith, the snarkish “Mugger” of the New York Press, the most recent bottom-feeder paper whose entire existence is bound up in the fact that it is not the Voice. Smith said the merger would certainly mean “sayonara to Robert Christgau, who could then be reached at either an upstate retirement community or the publicity department of a record company.”
No doubt much of the ire directed at Christgau stems from his long-running “Consumer Guide” feature, in which he hands out letter grades to discs each month, a practice that caused Lou Reed to once refer to Xgau as “an asshole” on a live record. The subtext: School of Rock might have been a hit, but “rock as school” will never be, and what’s a sixty-three-year-old guy who has never burned a CD got to say about pop music in this day and age anyway?
The answer is quite a lot, if you care to listen. Present from the moment rock became “serious,” Christgau, like other all-inclusive Voice critics J. Hoberman and Michael Feingold, knows everything from the beginning to now and continues to put it to the page, albeit a tad densely. Indeed, writers like Christgau—and this probably goes for Nat Hentoff, too, still batting away on his Selectri
c 3 and too busy to have me come by because “with the Constitution so endangered, it needs my total attention all the time”—could have existed only at the Village Voice.
This was the realm of the non-J-school, self-invented, pop-cultural autodidact, a place where the high tone met the vulgar and an Everyman could hawk his expertise. It is no coincidence that many of the older Voice writers come from working-class, outer-borough backgrounds (Christgau’s father was a Queens fireman, Richard Goldstein’s was a Bronx postal worker), people who threw in their lot with the egalitarian vision of the paper where they could write what they wanted. What’s the term limit on that, even in a journo-world desperate to “get younger”? No doubt Christgau will go to his grave positive that the Voice, the true Voice, exists only as “a left-wing, intellectual, writer’s paper,” and believe me, he is not likely to go quietly.
“It might sound strange, but people my age are much more suited to working at the Voice the way the paper is these days,” says Jarrett Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old front-of-the-book reporter. “We came into this business knowing it was a potentially dying industry. I would have loved to have worked at the Voice when it was great. You just have to look at the fiftieth, see all those covers, and it gives you a chill. But you have to be realistic, deal with what is.”
It made you wonder if it might have been better to have taken the paper out and shot it, like a used-up racehorse, before, say, the humiliation of going free.
“Don’t think I would have liked that,” said Richard Goldstein, who worked at the paper for thirty-eight years in an unparalleled career that comprised more or less inventing rock-and-roll criticism and establishing an above-ground media outlet for the gay community. This is not to mention uncounted hours of engaging in all intrapaper turf squabbles (in my day, the alleged macho “white boy” news writers at the front of the book were always at war with the whiny art-culture people in the back). Now sixty-one, Goldstein, raised in a Bronx housing project, is one more perfect Voice Person who started reading the paper early, sussing out that a trip on the Woodlawn-Jerome line to MacDougal Street could make even him a bissel cool. Present for every regime change in the history of the paper, Goldstein will not be around for the New Times era. He was fired in the summer of 2004, after an increasingly fractious relationship with Forst.
Goldstein contends that Forst has waged a long-running gay-baiting campaign against him. “He said things to me I hadn’t heard since the playground in the Bronx. He just kept doing it. It was sick.” In 1999, in accordance with Voice policy on verbal abuse, Goldstein wrote a letter of complaint. It was after that, he says, that Forst retaliated by “taking away my job…. I hired and edited Mark Schoofs, who won a Pulitzer Prize; I wrote ‘Press Clips.’ It wasn’t like I was slipping. Then one day Forst comes in and tells me I won’t be writing for the paper and I should just think of myself as a ‘cobbler.’ I don’t want to be maudlin, but the Voice was such a big part of my life for so long, to have it disappear was incredible.” Eventually, Goldstein wrote a letter to David Schneiderman, telling his side of the story.
“I trusted him. In my mind he still represented the Voice I knew. Then I got a call from the publisher, Judy Miszner, and she’s telling me, ‘So you’ve decided to resign.’ I said, ‘What?’ Their attitude was, if I couldn’t get along with Forst, I had to go. I couldn’t believe it. This, at the Village Voice! Then they started giving me a hard time about my severance. I’m there thirty-eight years, and they’re trying to stiff me.”
“Richard broke the chain of command,” says one Voice writer. “That was the unforgivable thing.”
Finally, Goldstein filed a federal suit charging the Voice with, among other things, sexual harassment and age discrimination. “Even after all that, I didn’t want to hurt the paper,” he says.
Should you care to, you can go to TheSmokingGun.com, the Web site started by Bill Bastone, former Voice writer, to read the court documents in the case of Richard Goldstein, plaintiff, v. Village Voice Media, defendant. In it, Goldstein accuses Forst of calling him “an ass-licker,” “a slut boy,” “a pussy boy,” and saying he walked “like a ballerina.” After years of hearing about dreary Voice p.c., the case makes surreal but grim reading.
Asked if the Village Voice was “the biggest basket case” of his acquisitions, Mike Lacey bugged his eyes like, “duh.” “Without a doubt,” Lacey said, but this only raised the stakes, because the Voice, and New York, was “such a big deal.”
“This is it: unique, special, fucking exciting,” Lacey said, walking through a driving rain on Ninth Avenue in the Thirties. He was spritzing, free-associating about what he might do with the Village Voice.
“I like the arts coverage. But we’ve got to work on the front of the book. We can’t have stories cribbed from the Net. We have to get out of the office. Robbins seems good. He’s a reporter. But I can’t believe they don’t have a front-of-the-book columnist, someone to give a sense of the fabric of what the streets are like. Come back, Jimmy Breslin!”
He was steaming now, talking louder, stomping across the avenue. “We could cover the courts. Have a reporter down there. We don’t have to be Time Out.” Did he feel he had a particular responsibility to the Voice staff, especially those writers long identified with the paper? “Of course, you want people who love the place, but this is a business that is based on performance. It isn’t a legacy.”
No doubt this was going to be hard, Lacey said. He was having some difficulty buying into David Schneiderman’s circulation numbers. “Have to see about that,” Lacey said, regretting that he wouldn’t be able to move to New York to keep an eye on things. “No, I got this sixteen-year-old. He drove the car through the garage wall back in Phoenix. He requires surveillance.”
Then Lacey said he had to rush. He was flying out in the morning to L.A., where he’d scheduled a meeting at the LA Weekly. It promised to be tense, after New Times’s typically vicious, ultimately losing attempt to start a rival paper to the Weekly. There’d be hard feelings, fences to mend, necks to snap back into joint. It was all a giant juggling act, Lacey said. With seventeen papers, you couldn’t play favorites.
Meanwhile, the Voice threw a little party at Bowery Bar to celebrate the fiftieth-anniversary issue. The turnout was good, especially considering the announcement of the merger and how few whose work had been chronicled in the issue were invited or able to show up. (Newfield, Joel Oppenheimer, Joe Flaherty, Mary Nichols, Geoff Stokes, and Paul Cowan, among others, had a good excuse: they were dead. Many others just hated the paper.) A cake decorated with the famous Voice logo was served, and David Schneiderman, after laughingly introducing himself as “that mystery man,” made a speech. Someone quoted Alexander Cockburn’s famous line from a previous Voice takeover, how the change made him “dizzy with the prospect of a whole galaxy of new asses to kiss.”
Then, with the dinner crowd arriving, the party was over. The Voice people walked out onto the Bowery. If you looked to the right you could see CBGB, where the drag queen Jayne (nee Wayne) County once knocked out Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators with a mike stand. James Wolcott wrote a really cool story about it for the Voice sometime in 1975. Soon, they might close CBGB because Hilly Kristal won’t pay higher rent. But that was the way it went. It was a new world out there, with new times to go with it.
11
Ground Zero/Grassy Knoll: 11 Bulletpoints About 9/11 Truth
The attack on the World Trade Center, with its attendant political and moral fallout, is without doubt the biggest story I ever covered. It doesn’t stop. It is a rare day that goes by I don’t think of the events of that nightmarish time. Along with almost every journalist in the City, I’ve written several pieces on the WTC and no doubt will continue to do so. For me, 9/11 time falls into several catagories. The first period is the event itself, the very day when “everything” supposed to have changed. I was there that day, at Ground Zero, arriving a couple hours after the towers fell. I was there when 7 World Tr
ade Center collapsed. I’ll know I’ve got the Alezheimer’s when a day goes by and I don’t think about what happened then. Another part of my version of 9/11 time involves the immediate political fallout, especially the exploitation of the event by the powers that be. The Republican Party’s cynical decision to hold their 2004 nominating convention at Madison Square Garden was an affront to any real New Yorker. The notion that these creeps (fearmongering former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was one of the worst) could use the city as backdrop to push their increasingly disastrous post-9/11 agenda deserved nothing but a stiff middle finger, not the fawning, phony hospitality extended by Mayor Bloomberg. The strongarm policing job done by Commissioner Ray Kelly during the convention, indiscriminately herding non-violent protesters into paddy wagons so people like Dick Cheney would hear nary a discouraging word, ranks as a low point in New York’s long tradition of loud-mouthed democracy. New Yorkers showed what they thought of Bush’s visit by giving him a big-time 16 percent of the vote in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Past that is what I’d call the inevitable long-range psychology of 9/11, covered in the piece printed below. Conspiracy theory has a bad name these days, and this seems highly judgemental and unfair. It is only human to invent some sort of reason for the inexplicable. This said, if the pieces I’ve written about 9/11 reveal anything, it is that my feelings remain consistent: I experience as a New Yorker first, a citizen of the City. From New York magazine, 2006.
1. 11/22 and 9/11
They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this photo-shopped age of unreliable narrators, omniscient and otherwise, much remains the same. As with 9/11, the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas on 11/22/63, the Crime of the Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands, yet no one can exactly be sure what happened. Like 9/11, an official explanation of the Kennedy assassination was produced. The Warren Commission confirmed early reports that Lee Harvey Oswald, a ne’er-do-well member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository. The Commission said Oswald, who two days later would be shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone.
American Gangster Page 17