Midway between the glitz of Times Square and the grind of Wall Street, Greenwich Village used to be New York’s ulterior zone, a refuge for artists and agitators, dropouts and sexual dissidents. With the New York Times established as the city’s greyly official almanac, in 1955 this bohemian enclave acquired its own parochial weekly, the Village Voice. The rowdy, raucous Voice deserved its name, and now, following its closure in 2018 (it has since been revived as a quarterly), it has an appropriately oral history. The collage of interviews in The Freaks Came Out to Write extends from the paper’s idealistic beginnings to its tawdry decline, when it scavenged for funds by running sleazy ads for massage parlors.
The Voice’s origins were proudly amateurish. One early contributor was a homeless man recruited from a local street; equipment consisted of two battered typewriters, an ink-splattering mimeograph machine and a waste paper basket for rejected submissions. Morale spiked when a staff member discovered that dried pods used in fancy flower arrangements contained opium, which was boiled up in the office when the time came for a coffee break. Editorial standards hardly matched the pedantic correctness of the New Yorker. Norman Mailer, a columnist for a while, loudly berated a Voice copytaker who mistook “nuance” for “nuisance” and ordered the cowering menial to “take your thumb out of your asshole!”
GONZO JOURNALISTS
Behavior like this was the rule at the ungenteel Voice. An investigative reporter joined forces with teenage gangs on looting expeditions, and during a riot at Tompkins Square in the East Village another journalist relished the wet but effective weaponry used by squatters, who bagged their own urine, added donations from stray cats and dropped the plastic sacks from rooftops on to the police below.
“Cops will run away from cat urine,” we’re assured. “It’s a lot better than a gun.”
At the New York Times, someone else reflects, people stabbed you in the back, whereas the more upfront writers at the Voice aimed for the chest. Notoriously competitive, contributors denounced one another in abusive slogans scrawled on the walls of the office toilet. Occasionally there were punch-ups in the newsroom.
“You may kick my ass,” the music critic Stanley Crouch warned a colleague, “but I’m going to hurt you.”
If pinioned to prevent him from using his fists, Crouch savaged his opponents with his teeth instead. A battle of the sexes was fought more peaceably in an exchange of epithets. Mailer snarled that the Voice’s feminist contributors wrote “like very tough faggots;” one of the women snapped back by denouncing Mailer and the jazz critic Nat Hentoff as “old-school male fuckheads” or “absolute oppositional pieces of shit.”
FLASHY, QUIRKY
The Village’s voices were journalists of a new kind, flashy and often crazily quirky. Jill Johnston wrote rhapsodies about female desire in an unpunctuated flux that mimicked Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness in Joyce’s Ulysses. Greg Tate devised a critical method for analyzing Black culture that he called “Yo, Hermeneutics.” The sports reporter Robert Ward found himself speechless when the baseball team he favored lost the World Series, and began his column with an elongated moan followed by a smattering of curses: “O h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h. Shiiiitttttttttt. Jesus Fucking Shit. Oh Christ. Agh. Arg.”
Cutting through this vocal and verbal babble, the most quietly eloquent testimony is a moment of suppressed terror recalled by Michael Musto, whose job was to keep the Voice topped up with high-pitched showbiz gossip. During the Aids epidemic, Musto recalls that he showered in the dark, afraid of discovering a potentially fatal lesion as he soaped his body.
“The Voice saved the Village,” boasts one of its last editors. Yes, during the 1950s its advocacy helped defeat a scheme to level the area’s crooked, congested maze in order to send a four-lane expressway careening across Manhattan. But although the Village was physically preserved, social and economic changes invisibly overtook it and at last these neutered the radical Voice. Property developers drove out the impecunious artists; yuppies occupied the lofts and studios they vacated. Rudy Giuliani’s regime at City Hall enforced a pious ordinance that banned gay bars and sex shops situated near churches. The Meatpacking district, where the streets until recently were puddled with blood from butchered carcasses, now houses showrooms for Rolex, Apple, Moschino and — taking the prize as most dizzily pretentious — a brand of apparel entitled Theory.
The founders of the Village Voice thought of it, Ed Fancher says, as “a religious thing”, leading a progressive crusade. These days the local religion is consumerism, not liberal reform: the Village has been recast as a shopping mall where the only voices to be heard are a hubbub of inducements to buy. The Freaks Came Out to Write is a rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper better days.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had