Lucking Out - James Wolcott [16]
Clay Felker had taken over a paper in 1974 that was unique, populated by a community of writers who constantly agreed to disagree and who were edited, if that is the word, by a man who simply loved good writing for its own sake. By the end of 1976, Felker, whatever his own politics might be, had discovered that New Left rhetoric was a commodity that could be bought and peddled just like any other, and that was what he had done. For the first time in its history, it was possible to predict, in advance, what position the Village Voice might take on anything. The paper that had never had an editorial line now had one, a smug, institutionalized hippie leftism. The paper that had always been open to every point of view was now cravenly jingoistic. Clay Felker had taken the most ambitious, the most experimental, the most exciting American newspaper of its generation, and he had built a monument to vulgarity with it.
All that may be true, but I have to admit it worked out swell for me. Up blew the whale spout and on a spume of foam I flew. Those may sound like the words of an ingrate, but denying is lying, and I can’t deny that the Felker takeover turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me at the Voice, and not just me. That rude injection of vulgarity invigorated a vein of new blood that revitalized the paper and cocked it forward, despite the masthead carnage and the premature burials of the Voice’s relevance. Due to Felker’s meddling and despite Felker’s meddling, the paper was poised for a lightning streak that would make the Voice the definitive seventies paper, a bucking bronco reborn. Punk, disco, the emergence of gay culture, the morphing of political feminism into personal memoir (as exemplified by Karen Durbin’s ardent, reflective, influential essay “On Being a Woman Alone”), the triumphant swell of the Hollywood blockbuster, the celebrity portraiture that would displace street photojournalism—the Voice was primed for these phenomena by the new observation deck Felker installed in nearly everyone’s thinking. New editors boarded the vessel, and the old system of unassigned reviews filling the in-box each week like church flyers was junked in favor of a bullpen rotation. One day I was slicing open envelopes like a Victorian clerk when the new music editor, Robert Christgau, boistered in, holding loose manuscript pages in his hands and flapping them with authority. In future years it would be hard to picture Bob empty-handed, so familiar was he for reading copy on the flat-footed fly, doing his own version of bumper cars years later when a new device known as the Sony Walkman came on the market, enabling him to avoid seeing and hearing where he was going. (Empowered by the music pumping into his head, he assumed he had the right-of-way.) Bobbing was what Bob did, the top half of his body—clad in record-company T-shirts that had shrunk considerably in the wash while retaining their impudent panache—rocking back and forth as he thought, expostulated, paced like a prosecutor in front of the jury, laid down the editorial law, or let loose with a laugh that seemed to explode