Latest news with #VillageVoice
Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Karen Durbin obituary: editor of New York's Village Voice
In New York literary circles Karen Durbin was famous for her baroque monologues — great, breathless treatises that could leave her audience (or staff) stunned. When she was appointed editor of the counterculture magazine Village Voice in 1994, her predecessor told her: 'It's crucial to the job to listen'. An influential feminist commentator, it was fortunate she usually had something to say. 'Words like 'paradigmatic' and references to de Tocqueville are apt to appear in her monologues without the slightest warning,' wrote William Glaberson in a 1994 New York Times profile. 'And evidence of the active mind of a lifelong reader often pops out between puffs of the slim cigarettes she knows she smokes too often.' Invariably described as a whirlwind, a force and a
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.'
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
I use the word comix to describe my art form not as a misspelling of comics, which would stress the medium's roots in the 19th-century newspaper funnies, and only in passing reference to the 'underground comix' of the 1960s, whose name pointed to their X-rated 'adult' content. I think of the word as co-mix, and lose the hyphen to focus on the fusion of two separate mediums of expression—words and pictures—into one. It's a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space. One very short strip by Jules Feiffer helped me understand the full implications of what that meant. In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore. Feiffer got his first job as a 17-year-old assistant to the great Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, a weekly newspaper supplement about a masked crimefighter in a sophisticated film noir–like world. Over the next 10 years, Feiffer sharpened his talents and submitted work to book publishers and newspaper syndicates that seemed to like what he did but had no idea how to sell it. Then, in 1956, he walked into the offices of the fledgling Village Voice, which had just started up the year before, and was invited to do the first alternative-weekly comic strip. Two generations of artists (Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, David Lynch, and so many more) would follow a similar path through the alt-weeklies. Feiffer did his Voice strips for more than 40 years (with no pay for the first eight!). The paper gave him space to hone his style and themes, as well as time to find an audience eager for something that was not like anything else. His skills as a draftsman were rather modest in his early years, but from the get-go, he showed a formidable talent for dialogue. He was an astute political satirist and a perceptive analyst of the human condition. Well versed in the Freudian thought that permeated 1950s America, Feiffer and Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts) were arguably the first cartoonists to give their characters inner lives. Schulz portrayed his Peanuts gang as small adults; Feiffer's adults are all neurotic overgrown children. Charlie Brown is a hapless loser, and Bernard Mergendeiler, one of Feiffer's recurring characters, is a hopeless schlemiel—a grown-up, Jewish Charlie Brown. Both artists were sensitive barometers of their times. [Read: My friend Jules Feiffer] Feiffer's strip was unique—until other cartoonists 'borrowed' his approach. He generally steered clear of dialogue balloons and panel borders. His scratchy lines were influenced by Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and indicated that he was hip to Picasso, Paul Klee, and George Grosz, as well as to his childhood-favorite old masters—including Elzie Segar (Popeye), Crockett Johnson (Barnaby), and his beloved mentor, Eisner. He knew the kinetic language of comix intimately, but most of the work that made him famous was remarkably static—the same face or figure repeated with minor variations over all six to eight panels. 'I thought that for the work to be effective, the movement had to be very subtle or nonexistent. I had to sneak up on the reader … so I had to have a frozen camera,' he explained in an interview. 'And most important to me was the storytelling, that the flow had to be very smooth.' The static figures act like a metronome, marking time between the stanzas of his sharp-witted soliloquies and dialogues; the gestures and expressions function as stage directions. This strategy worked for him for about 10 years—and then began to bore him silly. Feiffer would regularly let his angst-ridden modern dancer (a character based on an old girlfriend) hijack a whole strip, and she'd leap gracefully through all the panels, offering a Dance to Variety. Eventually, the artist broke out of his self-imposed prison, letting his lines and figures become jazzier, often drawing directly in ink without any preliminary penciling. In 1958, Playboy offered him space to spread his wings, to work in color and occasionally do multipage features such as Hostileman, about a deeply neurotic superhero drawn in the flashy comic-book layouts that Feiffer had devoured as a kid. As time went on, Feiffer became more and more graphically daring, and in 1979, he even drew a graphic novel avant la lettre, Tantrum—'a novel-in-cartoons,' per the jacket copy, about a middle-aged man literally turning back the clock to avoid adult responsibilities and become a toddler again. Notably, the passing of time became a recurring subject in Feiffer's long and fruitful career. He wasn't just a master of turning time into space; he was the grand master of comix timing. One classic example of this is his minimalist tour de force, Oh God! It is, in one sense, sexually explicit for the time it was published, but also completely abstract—just a series of black boxes, perhaps in a variation on blackout comedy sketches is a master class in the formal potentials of co-mixing words and pictures, and it made an indelible impression on me. Borders, which Feiffer so rarely used, were essential here. The spaces between each panel clearly demarcate one moment in time from the next. The lettering is in Feiffer's distinctive hand, made with the same strokes he uses for his drawings—his writing and drawing are extensions of each other. In the first four boxes on page one, Bernard and Joyce are each reduced to a straight line, a minimalist abstraction of the speech-balloon tails that usually point to characters' mouths. Their two blocks of dialogue in the first panel thrust down at steep angles that will converge somewhere below the panel border. The text gets smaller and quieter in the next three panels, followed by three extraordinary solid panels of inky blackness. Silence settles in after the intense activity above. On the left side of the last panel on the first page, Bernard asks after Joyce in 'normal'-size lettering. But the entire right half of that last panel on page one remains black—one more half-beat of stillness. [Read: A high-water mark in American mass culture] Dialogue resumes on the first tier of page two, interrupted by only one panel of blackness. I asked Feiffer about those panels once: 'Why three boxes first and only one on the second page?' He paused, did a sort of Fred Astaire–style soft-shoe step, and said, 'Well, as Jack Benny once said, 'In comedy, timing is everything.'' In the panel following that single black box, Joyce and Bernard's affectionate dialogue continues. In the next row, Bernard declares his love for Joyce, and a curtain of black silence shrouds her side of the panel. This is followed by a direct repeat of the last box on page one—'Joyce?'—and another silence. And in the last panel of the comic, Bernard's half is silent as Joyce delivers her punch line. Oh God. How beautifully choreographed! When the master of timing departed our temporal world for a large and silent india-ink panel nine days shy of his 96th birthday, the cartoonist left behind an enormous body of work that still dances on the page. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
I use the word comix to describe my art form not as a misspelling of comics, which would stress the medium's roots in the 19th-century newspaper funnies, and only in passing reference to the ' underground comix ' of the 1960s, whose name pointed to their X-rated 'adult' content. I think of the word as co-mix, and lose the hyphen to focus on the fusion of two separate mediums of expression—words and pictures—into one. It's a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space. One very short strip by Jules Feiffer helped me understand the full implications of what that meant. In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore. Feiffer got his first job as a 17-year-old assistant to the great Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, a weekly newspaper supplement about a masked crimefighter in a sophisticated film noir–like world. Over the next 10 years, Feiffer sharpened his talents and submitted work to book publishers and newspaper syndicates that seemed to like what he did but had no idea how to sell it. Then, in 1956, he walked into the offices of the fledgling Village Voice, which had just started up the year before, and was invited to do the first alternative-weekly comic strip. Two generations of artists (Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, David Lynch, and so many more) would follow a similar path through the alt-weeklies. Feiffer did his Voice strips for more than 40 years (with no pay for the first eight!). The paper gave him space to hone his style and themes, as well as time to find an audience eager for something that was not like anything else. His skills as a draftsman were rather modest in his early years, but from the get-go, he showed a formidable talent for dialogue. He was an astute political satirist and a perceptive analyst of the human condition. Well versed in the Freudian thought that permeated 1950s America, Feiffer and Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts) were arguably the first cartoonists to give their characters inner lives. Schulz portrayed his Peanuts gang as small adults; Feiffer's adults are all neurotic overgrown children. Charlie Brown is a hapless loser, and Bernard Mergendeiler, one of Feiffer's recurring characters, is a hopeless schlemiel—a grown-up, Jewish Charlie Brown. Both artists were sensitive barometers of their times. Feiffer's strip was unique—until other cartoonists 'borrowed' his approach. He generally steered clear of dialogue balloons and panel borders. His scratchy lines were influenced by Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and indicated that he was hip to Picasso, Paul Klee, and George Grosz, as well as to his childhood-favorite old masters—including Elzie Segar (Popeye), Crockett Johnson (Barnaby), and his beloved mentor, Eisner. He knew the kinetic language of comix intimately, but most of the work that made him famous was remarkably static—the same face or figure repeated with minor variations over all six to eight panels. 'I thought that for the work to be effective, the movement had to be very subtle or nonexistent. I had to sneak up on the reader … so I had to have a frozen camera,' he explained in an interview. 'And most important to me was the storytelling, that the flow had to be very smooth.' The static figures act like a metronome, marking time between the stanzas of his sharp-witted soliloquies and dialogues; the gestures and expressions function as stage directions. This strategy worked for him for about 10 years—and then began to bore him silly. Feiffer would regularly let his angst-ridden modern dancer (a character based on an old girlfriend) hijack a whole strip, and she'd leap gracefully through all the panels, offering a Dance to Variety. Eventually, the artist broke out of his self-imposed prison, letting his lines and figures become jazzier, often drawing directly in ink without any preliminary penciling. In 1958, Playboy offered him space to spread his wings, to work in color and occasionally do multipage features such as Hostileman, about a deeply neurotic superhero drawn in the flashy comic-book layouts that Feiffer had devoured as a kid. As time went on, Feiffer became more and more graphically daring, and in 1979, he even drew a graphic novel avant la lettre, Tantrum —'a novel-in-cartoons,' per the jacket copy, about a middle-aged man literally turning back the clock to avoid adult responsibilities and become a toddler again. Notably, the passing of time became a recurring subject in Feiffer's long and fruitful career. He wasn't just a master of turning time into space; he was the grand master of comix timing. One classic example of this is his minimalist tour de force, Oh God! It is, in one sense, sexually explicit for the time it was published, but also completely abstract—just a series of black boxes, perhaps in a variation on blackout comedy sketches is a master class in the formal potentials of co-mixing words and pictures, and it made an indelible impression on me. Borders, which Feiffer so rarely used, were essential here. The spaces between each panel clearly demarcate one moment in time from the next. The lettering is in Feiffer's distinctive hand, made with the same strokes he uses for his drawings—his writing and drawing are extensions of each other. In the first four boxes on page one, Bernard and Joyce are each reduced to a straight line, a minimalist abstraction of the speech-balloon tails that usually point to characters' mouths. Their two blocks of dialogue in the first panel thrust down at steep angles that will converge somewhere below the panel border. The text gets smaller and quieter in the next three panels, followed by three extraordinary solid panels of inky blackness. Silence settles in after the intense activity above. On the left side of the last panel on the first page, Bernard asks after Joyce in 'normal'-size lettering. But the entire right half of that last panel on page one remains black—one more half-beat of stillness. Dialogue resumes on the first tier of page two, interrupted by only one panel of blackness. I asked Feiffer about those panels once: 'Why three boxes first and only one on the second page?' He paused, did a sort of Fred Astaire–style soft-shoe step, and said, 'Well, as Jack Benny once said, 'In comedy, timing is everything.'' In the panel following that single black box, Joyce and Bernard's affectionate dialogue continues. In the next row, Bernard declares his love for Joyce, and a curtain of black silence shrouds her side of the panel. This is followed by a direct repeat of the last box on page one—'Joyce?'—and another silence. And in the last panel of the comic, Bernard's half is silent as Joyce delivers her punch line. Oh God. How beautifully choreographed! When the master of timing departed our temporal world for a large and silent india-ink panel nine days shy of his 96th birthday, the cartoonist left behind an enormous body of work that still dances on the page.
MTV Lebanon
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- MTV Lebanon
Clem Burke, multifaceted drummer of iconic rock group Blondie, has died
Clem Burke, whose versatile drumming propelled the iconic rock group Blondie during its decades performing everything from new-wave punk to disco-infused tunes, has died. He was 70. The band said in a statement on its website Monday that he died from cancer but no additional details were provided. 'Clem was not just a drummer; he was the heartbeat of Blondie,' the band said in a statement. 'His talent, energy, and passion for music were unmatched, and his contributions to our sound and success are immeasurable.' The self-proclaimed 'rock & roll survivalist' started playing the drums when he was 14 in his school orchestra but was kicked out for playing too loud, according to Blondie's website. In the 1970's, he answered a band's ad in the Village Voice seeking a 'freak energy' rock drummer, kicking off his decades-long career with lead singer Debbie Harry and the rest of his Blondie bandmates. The band recorded its first album in 1976 and by the following year was touring with such icons as Iggy Pop and David Bowie. It became known as the most commercially successful band to emerge from a fertile New York rock scene that also produced Talking Heads and the Ramones. In 2006 Burke and the other original members of Blondie were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame after selling more than 42 million records, according to Blondie's website. During the late 1970s and early '80s, the band had eight Top 40 hits, including four No. 1s: 'Heart of Glass,' 'Call Me,' 'The Tide Is High' and 'Rapture,' which is regarded as the first No. 1 hit to feature rap. There's also a five-track 1975 album demo that includes 'Platinum Blonde,' a sort of band mission statement. But Burke's mark was especially solidified with his rapid, powerful drumming at the start of 'Dreaming' in 1979. In 2022, after unearthing a New Wave treasure trove of reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and records, the band created the box set 'Blondie: Against the Odds, 1974-1982,' with 124 tracks and 36 previously unissued recordings, demos, outtakes and remixed versions of Blondie's initial six studio albums. Burke reflected on the discovery in an Associated Press article: 'We never would have thought that we would still be here today. Looking back at our archives, it's pretty amazing.' The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame described Burke in a post Monday on the social platform X as 'a versatile and distinctive drummer who played exactly what each song required – and, when called for, let loose with blistering punk rock energy.'
