Lucking Out by James Wolcott Read Free Book Online

Canadian standards and whose takeoffs had none of the fanged bite of David Frye’s (his tongue-darting, eye-popping William F. Buckley suggested an iguana on mescaline)—based mostly on Little’s high Q ratings, which were considered a gauge of likability. Likability! This from a paper dedicated to chafing and championing the difficult underdog. He brought in designers and illustrators and introduced a blue band to the
Voice
’s front-page logo, a minor twirl-up that was considered a trashy violation of the paper’s monochromatic aesthetic. It didn’t take long for the verdict to be rendered on Felker’s tenure at the
Village Voice:
guilty—guilty of journalistic manslaughter and reckless malpractice. In the histories and memoirs of the
Voice
that soon followed, Felker was cast as both usurper and undertaker. The front cover of Ellen Frankfort’s unauthorized account
The Voice: Life at the “Village Voice,”
published in 1976, featured a mock front page of the
Voice
pasted over a tombstone. “Here Lies Independent Journalism” was the graveyard message. Kevin Michael McAuliffe’s less emotionally shredded, wider-lensed view of the ongoing psychodrama,
The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the “Village Voice,”
published in 1978, offered a more detailed damage assessment that also consigned the
Voice
to the junk pile of broken dreams. To McAuliffe, and in this he was far from alone, Clay Felker’s conquistadorial reign had ushered in a dry-hump orgy of debauchery, profligacy, and groupie adulation of power and celebrity:
    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