#The village its very voicey movie#
#The village its very voicey professional#

We would spend countless hours browsing through the DVD collections at Kim’s Video searching for the most obscure B-movies. From the comic book and record stores to the head shops it was a wonderland that I was infatuated with. Saint Marks Place had a special place in my heart.

East or West, it didn’t matter it was where we believed we belonged. It didn’t matter what was happening in your life you just knew that the Voice was the one stable thing that anyone could depend on regularly.īack when I was just a kid in high school my friends and I would play hooky in order make our pilgrimages to the Village. Outside of politics or art it was just so damn comforting to know that every week the Voice would be there patiently waiting in that cherry red box to be picked up. Very few media outlets had influenced countless kids like me from adolescents to adulthood like the Voice had. No other paper was on the cutting edge of local progressive media like the Voice was. It was in the Voice that I learned about the systemic nature of Stop and Frisk or the vast amount of municipal corruption behind Blomberg’s City Time scandal. To feed my new developing political outlook, my weekly Voice ritual supplied me with weekly flow of progressive national and local news. It was amongst the occupiers in those hours long general assemblies that I began to develop my political consciousness. Later in my life, when I was in community college, I would skip class to be a part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just holding the Voice under my arm made me feel sophisticated.

#The village its very voicey movie#

It got to a point that I wouldn’t even watch a movie if it got a poor review in the film section. It was an important bastion of popular education. In those pages readers were exposed to the world of art, music, film and politics. I was hungry for all of it, devouring those pages like a steaming bowl of rice. Even though we knew that we could never could afford to move to the Village I guess he just liked the fantasy of it.įor us the Voice offered its readers an opportunity to discover the cutting edge of the counter culture. My friend Cristopher would even go so far as to circle potential apartments in the Voice’s classifieds section. As soon as I graduated, I thought to myself, my friends and I would immediately move to the village and room together. In my mind I was already a young bohemian that was born in the wrong generation. Art was a Manhattan thing and the Mecca of everything cool and subversive was in the Village. As a young teenager growing up in working class Queens there were very few places that I deemed cool. The Voice was filled with all this cool art and culture that I never knew existed. Everything inside those pages enthralled me. Later, when I was all alone on the train ride home from school I would make my way through the rest of the paper. Those were my first memories of the Village Voice. Because of his column at the age of sixteen I became my high school’s equivalent to Masters and Johnson. It beat the hell out of anything I learned from health class. In the back of those pages, tucked between the phone sex hotline ads I would get most of my sex education from Dan Savages “Savage Love” column. In high school everybody pretends to be having sex but the thought of having sex is terrifying. Every so often we would work up the nerve to call one of the numbers in the ads only to freeze up with fear when the raspy, seductive voice of a woman would answer.

#The village its very voicey professional#

Our hormones raging, my friends and I would huddle in the corner of our home room class, salivating over the scantily clad women offering such services as “therapeutic” massages and professional female companionship. Every Wednesday my fingertips would be black with ink as I turned to the back pages of the latest issue of the Voice to conduct my weekly high school ritual of gawking at the escort ads. Like many readers I first became aware of the Voice when I was a teenager, although what initially attracted me to the Voice wasn’t always the most appropriate for my age. Rarely did it fail to inspire something in its loyal readers. It survived solely as a final remnant of a Village that no longer lived. For 20 years the Voice has been struggling to survive in the face of buy outs, layoffs and of course losing profits. In truth the Voice for some time was nothing but an echo of its former self. This year is the first year since 1955 without any fresh print editions of the Village Voice. For the last few months I was in denial but now the grief has quickly settled in. For months all of those iconic little red boxes have been either siting empty or filled with piles of trash.