Virtualized Voice

So El Parroto is heading to the subway in Bay Ridge yesterday morning when he spies a pile of new Village Voices in their Red Box, sporting a picture of Bobby (he of the Nobel Prize in Literature) on the front cover, and worrying that something has happened to our leading folk poet, even though he the Parrot had not yet read the previous issue and was still hauling it around in his backpack, picks it up, hustles down so as not to miss the R train ( a transportation disaster) and has a quick look, when lo!, what is the meaning of this: Final Edition??

Well, I hadn't heard the news, though it was reported by the NY Times several weeks ago that the Voice would cease printing, but not when. No doubt there will still be plenty of copies when I get home, I will pick up a few more... not! By midday every box in the wide city had been cleaned out by "souvenir collectors", or to put it in the Parrot vernacular, fucking lowlife thieves who no doubt came along in vans or trucks right behind the distributors, scooping up entire boxes and throwing them in the back, to be sold on Craigslist for $100@ - the ultimately irony, as that is precisely who gobbled up the classified ad business that used to be the Voice's bread and butter.

Included in the issue is a 50-page photo spread of current and former Voice writers, photographers, and staff members, and as if almost half a century of reading it weren't enough to move me, what jumped out was how many writers in even this grossly incomplete album were familiar names, people who had continually given me reason to cheer, scream or shake my head in sympathy over so many years. Even more than the muckrakers were the music and film reviewers, people I would rarely agree with wholeheartedly but whose sense of engagement always motivated one to think, react, care about the latest indie film or unknown punk rock band.

That is was incomplete was driven home to me when I noticed they did not have a photo of my fellow philosopher Peter Kivy, who I distinctly recall having told me he was the Voice's classical music critic before he became the world's leading philosopher of classical music. Just to make sure, I checked his Wikipedia entry, which sadly did not have much of a bio and did not confirm his tenure at the Voice. So someone who knows for sure one way or the other, please correct that or correct me.

Meanwhile, after all the great photo spreads in the ultimate hard copy, it's that cover that sums the whole thing up. You see, Voice photographer, Fred McDarrah snapped the photo outside the VV offices one day some 52 years ago, clearly a candid shot, when Dylan was not yet Dylan and might still hang out on a bench in public without being mobbed, and he just gives McDarrah a casual salute, "Yo", as he raises his camera. But now the gesture comes to symbolize both a salute to the journalists of the Voice, which is largely what this issue is, and a way of saying "Goodbye" to the newspaper, from someone who became all but a stand-in for the very concept of Greenwich Village. Now, that is an absolutely brilliant use of an archive photograph, as it works in half a dozen ways: as an alluring cover photo, a representation of the neighborhood that gave the Voice a raison d'etre, a nod to the photographers, writers and editors who made it matter, a wistful farewell to the classic version of the paper, a recognition of the symbiosis between Dylan, music and journalism, and a final nod to the man himself who rose to greatness on the same wave of Sixties culture that the Voice did.

This final print edition also reminds me how different the newsstands of New York City were when I was a kid. Then, you would not only find daily editions of The New York Times, the Daily News, and the very liberal New York Post for sale, but also the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American and the World Telegram & Sun - each of their names signifying the collapse or merger of two or more formerly independent New York newspapers. Half of them have been gone for a while, and those that remain are ever more dependent on web-based revenue and ancillary enterprises to survive. The Voice was the only tabloid I had much use for any more, and now it's gone from the sidewalks. I still get the Times delivered on weekends, much to my considerably younger wife's consternation. If they give up the ghost - or rather, become virtual ghosts of their former physical selves - it will be the not very happy end of an era.

So I'm sad to see the print VV go... I like to hold things in my hand, like books and newspapers and worms and... well, okay, not worms, except when I've got the munchies. But yes, matter matters, and virtual voices are never as rich as real ones. Squawck!