The Voice at 50.

We'll see soon enough whether the Village Voice has just written its own eulogy or, as the bravest optimists would have it, is preparing to turn a new leaf with its 50th Anniversary Special. Either way, J Hoberman reminds me why I subscribed to the weekly as long as I lived in the States and, before it began appearing online, would trek to the nearest Amerika Haus once I moved to Germany to read it (and other papers and magazines, too, of course), week after week.

"[Jonas] Mekas was an inspired propagandist; [Andrew] Sarris was a gifted pedagogue." Myself, I was too young to have been aware of Mekas's enthusiasms before he left the Voice in 1974 but, soon after, as a teenager, I became an addict (in Texas, natch) during the reign of Sarris and watched with fascination as he took sniper fire from younger writers one or two columns over until he, too, was gone.

"The first review I was assigned," writes Hoberman, "in late 1977, was David Lynch's Eraserhead, then playing to audiences of four and five at the Cinema Village. And where else" could he "have reviewed Todd Haynes when he was working in Super 8 or Wong Kar-wai before his movies played above Canal Street?"

Where else indeed. "There's been an erosion of space and an imposition of format, but I'd like to believe that this readership is still there and that the commitment remains." So would we all. But if Hoberman were starting out today, he'd probably be writing for his own blog and hoping that the pennies from the Google ads cover the cost of bandwidth.

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2005 9:08 AM