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Boston Globe
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Karen Durbin, journalist who led Village Voice in '90s, dies at 80
Her byline, however, disappeared for stretches as she battled chronic writer's block. During one period, spanning nearly an entire decade, she turned to editing as the senior arts chief at the Village Voice from 1979 to 1989 — spanning an era when rising rents and shifting tastes began to chip away at the vestiges of Manhattan's counterculture scene. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She had first made her mark at the Voice with a dose of ennui. A personal discourse, 'Casualties of the Sex War,' appeared in April 1972 declaring that her righteous fire from the 1960s — the antiwar movement, women's marches, and other causes — was now just embers. In a blast of cynicism, Ms. Durbin foreshadowed the self-indulgence and political malaise of the years ahead. Advertisement 'We're all feeling adrift politically,' she wrote. 'Politics of any kind, straight or raving radical, seems empty right now. The counterculture is a media dream, the revolution a counterculture fantasy.' Advertisement Hedonism and detachment, she said, were now her guides: 'I'm hard pressed to come up with a single friend who loves anyone, who is loved, who remembers what the word means. Sex, yes. Lots of sex, more than ever.' Her manifesto, just months before Gloria Steinem helped launch Ms. magazine as a flagship for feminism, was seen by some readers as cowardly surrender and by others as a bold declaration of female individualism. The buzz caught the attention of the editorial board at Mademoiselle, which offered Ms. Durbin a beat covering the women's movement as a maverick. She also took over the 'The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Sex' column, adding a cheeky and rebellious touch that dovetailed with emerging attention to female sexual empowerment, with books such as 'Sexual Politics' by Kate Millett (1970) and Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' (1970). Ms. Durbin returned to the Village Voice in 1974 as a staff writer and assistant editor during a golden age at the publication, which was plump with advertising (Bruce Springsteen found his drummer, Max Weinberg, in the Voice classifieds) and had a stable of journalistic talent including Norman Mailer, Nat Hentoff, and cartoonist and illustrator Jules Feiffer. Yet Ms. Durbin railed against what she called a 'boy's club' atmosphere that she said left female staffers battling for attention. She once recalled Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield complaining that women's issues had pushed civil rights 'off the table.' 'And I said, 'Who designed that table?' I mean, I was pissed,' she was quoted as saying in a 2013 book on Hentoff's career, 'The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,' by David L. Lewis. Advertisement At the Voice, Ms. Durbin found a niche exploring cultural touchstones. She went on tour in 1975 with the Rolling Stones, writing a piece rich with mockery of the fawning and idolatry of the rock and roll entourage but also noting how she was starstruck just being there. A recurring joke at the Village Voice in the 1990s was her wistful closing section of the piece. She wondered how many years the Stones would have left as rock and rollers. (The band was still touring then and still is now.) In 1976, she finished a cover story that became a defining meditation. She had ended a relationship with journalist Hendrik Hertzberg and was looking back on her emergence from couplehood. ''We' had been the source of my gravity, the axis on which my universe turned,' she wrote in 'On Being a Woman Alone.' The essay was quickly one of the most-discussed pieces in Village Voice history and established Ms. Durbin as a symbol of feminism on her own terms. In one section, Ms. Durbin recalled a conversation with a female friend about reclaiming their identities, separate from the men they dated. 'In a sense we did give up men,' she wrote. 'No longer trusting them, we stopped depending on them and started depending on ourselves. We chose to become alone, literally, sometimes, and continually inside our heads.' Ms. Durbin took over as arts and entertainment editor of the lifestyle magazine Mirabella in 1990. Five years later, she was named the Village Voice editor in chief, replacing Jonathan Z. Larsen, at a time when the weekly was looking to regain some of its earlier serendipity and what Ms. Durbin called 'unassignable' stories. Advertisement 'Articles that no editor can think up in advance because they only spring from the heart of a writer's imagination and passion,' she said. As she took over, Ms. Durbin said the Voice had 'retreated into a dark and angry corner' since the Reagan era. She saw her role as keeping the leftist banner flying but without becoming shrill and predictable. 'There has to, on some level, be a joy in it and not just rage,' she told The New York Times. She oversaw a redesign of the Voice and the initial reporting on a significant scoop, the killing and dismemberment of a well-known figure on the New York club and drug scenes, Andre 'Angel' Melendez. A club promoter, Michael Alig, and another man were convicted in the March 1996 slaying. Ms. Durbin's tenure was relatively brief, however. She resigned in September 1996 amid reported disputes with the publisher, David Schneiderman, over cost-cutting steps and the direction of the Voice. In April 1996, the paper switched to free distribution in Manhattan, a move that boosted its circulation but was criticized by some media writers as a blow to the Voice's image as a newsstand mainstay since 1955. The Voice went fully online in 2017 and halted publication the following year. It was relaunched in 2021. Karen Durbin was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 28, 1944, into a farming family and spent her teen years in Indianapolis. She was a summer intern at the Indianapolis Times while studying at Bryn Mawr College, where she received a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. She took a job as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker and began attending meetings at the feminist collective Redstockings. In 1970, she joined the media office of New York City's environmental agency under Mayor John V. Lindsay. Advertisement 'I remember standing at a newsstand and picking up one paper after another, because I just wanted to see what they were like,' she was quoted as saying in Lewis's book. 'And then there was this thing called the Village Voice, and it wasn't like anything I'd seen.' After leaving the Village Voice in 1996, Ms. Durbin contributed film reviews for The New York Times and other outlets such as O, founded by Oprah Winfrey. In one piece for O, she listed her 50 greatest 'chick flicks' of all time. Some of her selections were not the typical fare. On her list was the 1986 sci-fi sequel thriller 'Aliens,' starring Sigourney Weaver battling super-predator life forms. 'One of the great movie heroines of all time,' Ms. Durbin wrote. Ms. Durbin had no immediate survivors, Carr said. She often described the Village Voice in its prime as akin to a lively bar in its namesake Greenwich Village. 'And everybody's sitting at the bar, and having whatever they're having, and talking about everything under the sun,' she said. 'And sometimes an argument and, you know, sometimes a chorus. And I thought the Voice was like that.'
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jacki Weaver: ‘What am I secretly good at? I pick up other people's dogs' poos'
You're hosting the series Australia: An Unofficial History, which includes government tourism films from the 1970s. How would you sell Australia to the world now? When people ask me, having lived in Los Angeles for 14 years, how is Australia superior to America, I say, 'No guns, free medical, affordable education.' What's the oldest thing you own, and why do you still have it? I've got a cane chair that was given to me for my second birthday. I have it in my sitting room, it's got a little cushion on it and it's really sweet and very tiny. I'm very small – I'm less than five feet tall, and I'm 48 kilos – so I can still sit in this little chair, and I do! I mean, probably I shouldn't have sat in it when I was pregnant, I could have broken it. But it survived. I'm 77 and a half, so it's 75 years old. That's pretty impressive. What's your favourite place to visit in the world? New York City – I just love it. I've been at least 40 times, and I've stayed in at least 30 different hotels. I first visited there in 1972 and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, and for a time I used to go to New York every year. I love how you can walk everywhere. I love how if you really work out your timetable carefully, you can see 10 shows a week: three matinees – on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday – as well as evening shows. And there are great bars. I'm a bit of a barfly – I like to sit in fabulous bars and listen to other people. I love all the gay bars down on eighth and ninth avenue. And then there's the museums, the libraries, the parks – I think it's the greatest city in the world. What's the best lesson you learned from someone you've worked with? I'm not a tantrum thrower, but I remember very early on all the senior actresses and actors saying to me: try not to ever lose your temper, either in a rehearsal room for a play or on set for a TV show or a film, because it only makes you feel worse and it upsets everyone else. You have a storied romantic history – you once said you'd effectively had nine husbands if you counted serious relationships. What's your top bit of relationship advice? Kindness. I remember Germaine Greer saying – and she's always been a great hero of mine, because of The Female Eunuch – that the most overrated virtue is kindness. But I think it's the most important virtue, because it influences all the others. My ex-lovers and ex-husbands might disagree, but I've always tried to be kind in a relationship. If you had to fight a famous person, who would it be, how would you fight them and who would win? I'm a lover, not a fighter. I wouldn't fight anyone. First of all, I'm so tiny I don't think I could beat anyone in a fight unless I took a machete or an AK-47. I used to have a bit of a tongue when I was younger [so] I'd like to think I could demolish someone with words. But the people that are dislikable enough to want to fight, they're usually stupid. So no matter what witticisms you've managed to come up with, they'd probably go right over their heads. Do you have anyone in mind? I don't want to get political, but probably politicians. There's a few politicians that I don't like. What are you secretly really good at? I don't know, picking up dog poo? I wear gloves, and I'm very neat at it. I live in an apartment block in West Hollywood that has a dog park and the rules are that you pick up your own dog's poo, but a lot of people don't – it's very annoying – and so I do pick up other people's dogs' poos. Which is rather like changing another person's child's nappy, isn't it? I think I've got a very tidy mind – I'm a little obsessive compulsive – and I'm married to someone who I love dearly, but he is intrinsically untidy, so I think I'm good at being quietly subversive, going around tidying up. What's been your most cringe-worthy run-in with a celebrity? I don't know that it's cringe-worthy, but it's slightly embarrassing. There's a very exclusive club [in LA] called San Vicente Bungalows; I'm a member, and I took a friend of mine there for lunch. And this place has rules: you're not allowed to take photos of people, and if you don't know someone, you're not allowed to go up to them and speak to them. We were having lunch, and this young man with a baseball cap on backwards and sunglasses, who had been with a group of noisy boys, came up and said, 'I just want to say that I really love your work. I'm a huge fan.' And I said, 'Oh, thanks very much' – thinking: I thought you weren't supposed to come and talk to people you didn't know. And when he went away, my friend said, 'You don't know who that was, do you?' And I said, 'I've got no idea.' It was Leonardo DiCaprio. I've always been a fan, ever since Gilbert Grape, so I was really annoyed with myself for not recognising him – I would have said, 'Oh my God, Leo, thank you!' Which word do you hate most? I hate when fashion people say, 'Oh, your eyes just pop.' Actually I was reading something about the inauguration in the paper today and somebody was saying there were colours that really 'popped'. What do you mean popped? How stupid. I don't like 'reach out' either. People say, 'I'll reach out to your people.' Fuck off! Give me a call or a text. Do you have a party trick? I'm not very good at parties, believe it or not. I'm a card-carrying introvert, and my husband is too. I love extroverts – I find them fantastic to be with, because you don't have to do any work. But when we have to go to parties, my husband and I always find a corner and sit down and talk to each other. Which annoys my manager, who's like, 'Get out there and circulate.' Sometimes I force myself to say, 'I think you're fantastic,' but usually I'm too shy. That's my trick. Australia: An Unofficial History premieres Wednesday 5 March on SBS and SBS On Demand
