The Voice at 50, part 2.

"In the internet age it's difficult to convey how vital and exciting the Voice was to those of us scattered across the country during the Vietnam era who felt that there was something happening somewhere and the Voice was bringing us the rough word," writes James Wolcott in a brief but excellent appreciation. I want to revisit the 50th Anniversary issue because a generous batch of archival material's gone up at the site that truly is worth noting. For example...

Jonas Mekas in 1959:

The two most modern and most intelligent American films, John Cassavetes's Shadows and Robert Frank's and Alfred Leslie's Beat Generation, are still not released, and my praising them here wouldn't amount to much, since you cannot see them. But these two movies are so far ahead of all Hollywood and independent films that once you've seen them you can no longer look at the official cinema: you know that American cinema can be more sensitive and intelligent.

Stephanie Gervis Harrington in 1964: "The only fear Lenny Bruce has is 'of running out of carfare to the Supreme Court.'"

John Wilcock in 1965: "In the past few months Andy, assisted by poet Gerard Malanga, cameraman Buddy Wirtschafter, script-writer Ronald Tavel, and the ubiquitous photographer Billy Linich ('foreman' of the East 47th Street 'factory'), has been making at least one full-length movie per week." Related: Roberta Smith in 1982 on Basquiat.

Robert Christgau in 1978: "Perhaps the way to understand it is this: Rather than a working-class youth movement - potentially revolutionary, proto-fascist, or symptomatic of the decadence of our times - punk is a basically working youth bohemia that rejects both the haute bohemia of the rock elite and the hallowed bohemian myth of classlessness."

Walter Kendrick in 1981: "Yale's new Gang of Four has no label."

J. Hoberman in 1987: "Capping a trend that's been percolating for most of the decade, a new obsession with the strangeness - even the Otherness - of the American heartland characterizes a remarkable number of recent movies.... The true godfathers of Shopping Mall Chic are Errol Morris and Jonathan Demme, both of who came out of left field in the mid-Carter years to meet heartland mishegas heads-on — in part by dramatizing 'true stories' of bizarre success and pathetic failure."

C Carr in 1992: "[T]he energy that moved from Paris to New York, from West Village to East Village, from Old Bohemia (1830-1930) to New Bohemia (the 60s) to Faux Bohemia (the 80s) has atomized now into trails that can't be followed: the 'zine/cassette network, the living-room performance spaces, the modem-accessed cybersalons, the flight into neighborhoods that will never be Soho."

Hilton Als in 1992: " At table number 25, Sylvester 'Spike' Lee, filmmaker, sat alone, making notes in his agenda at the time of the first public (but very private) screening of his long-awaited epic, X, a film that, having been nearly 10 months in the making, and with a $33 million budget, has generated more advance publicity, criticism and debate than any 'bio-pic of a slain leader' (as Variety termed it) since Conspiracy became a movie nexus."

Michael Feingold in 1993: "Angels in America is the best kind of political play. Rather than take an orderly stance on a specific set of issues, it treats politics as a connected and conflicting set of impulses, a moral soup in which we find ourselves swimming."

Julian Dibbell in 1993: "They say he raped them that night.... Call me Dr. Bombay. Some months ago — let's say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had — I found myself tripping now and then down the well-traveled information lane that leads to LambdaMOO, a very large and very busy rustic mansion built entirely of words."

Ann Powers in 1994: "Suicide, especially one as violent as Cobain's, is the loudest possible invocation of silence; it's a perfectly clear way of turning your life into a mystery."

Michael Musto in 1999: "The film goddess looked fit to eat a dwarf. 'First of all, where the hell is the light?' she bellowed in the semidarkness... Then he says, "She doesn't need an introduction," so I'll introduce myself. I am Anita Ekberg!'"

Eric Weisbard in 1999: "Once upon a time there was Generation X. I do mean once. In the World Almanacs I grew up with - kind of a pre-web thing - a generation is 20 years, maybe 25. We got three."

Dennis Lim in 1999: "Malkovich, Jonze and Kaufman are gathered in a midtown hotel suite, and observing the three together, you're amazed that their collaboration proved so cohesive - they don't even seem to be from the same planet."

James Hannaham in 2002: "[S]ince both Martha Stewart-brand whiteness and ghetto-fabulous negritude are in remission, the culture is now giving mad props to black nerds."

And excerpts from 50 years of book reviews.

Posted by dwhudson at October 31, 2005 6:55 AM