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[Editor's note: This is a slightly expanded version of a letter, by San Francisco-based critic Paul Parish, sent to the Editors of the Village Voice.]

To the editors:

The recent buy-out of the The Village Voice, and the firing of the arts editors, including dance editor Elizabeth Zimmer, according to the article "Village Voice Dismisses 8, Including Senior Arts Editors," by MOTOKO RICH in the NY TIMES, Sept 1, 2006, has "decimated the senior ranks of its arts staff." Though the move was not a surprise to anyone who has noticed the troubles at the LA Times or Knight Ridder (where "shareholder interest" has been cited to justify "downsizing" writers in order to raise productivity), it is a landmark of the most depressing kind, not just for us dance-critics (though we're the most marginalized of the intelligentsia), but for everyone.

When I was first setting out as a critic, I was writing for an alternative paper in Berkeley, CA, that was directly inspired by The Village Voice. During the Free Speech movement, The Daily Californian threw off University ownership and became not a student paper but an idealistic independent collective — which collapsed in the 90s, when UC regained control, but till then it aimed to be a paper like the Voice, intended for everybody on the UC campus and in town, and Everybody was assumed to have a very good mind.

So the most important effect the Voice has had on my life, one I owe incalculably for, was not the direct influence of the paper's great dance critics but rather the virtues of the paper overall, the kind of citizenship-of-the-world it embodied. The Voice's values were the virtues my editors valued. In particular, they liked voice, they liked the sound of someone thinking, someone in particular. My piece could be at first glance improbable, so long as it made sense in the end. It could be thoroughly personal, as long as it was not about me but rather demonstrated my mind at work, thinking about something, or about the relations of two things. It was best if the piece were an essay masquerading as a review. And it was perfectly OK for me to reserve judgment; it was not necessary to rank things to establish my authority, I did not have to sound know-it-all, and it was best for me to use similes to give the feel of a movement to the viewer ("she moved like smoke").

I've got to thank the arts editor, Roger Anderson, for encouraging me to be awkward if necessary, to struggle with mixed feelings, show some effort, even venture an opinion I'd acknowledged I was only 75% confident about — so as to treat the reader as an equal. He encouraged me to write UP rather than down to my reader's intelligence: if I threw in a quote from Shelley ("O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!"), he not only wouldn't cut it, he'd use it as the headline. And it was fine with him that the piece was in fact an essay on ideal movement as the essential link between "high" forms like ballet and "low" forms like cartoons and roller-coaster rides, using examples from all three kinds. (The illustrations were a picture of Tom and Jerry and a lithograph of Taglioni.)

That respect for the intelligence of the local reader is a direct spread of the values of the Voice, and I'd say it is a great, even a noble legacy for a newspaper. If the new management have been accurately quoted (by the NY TIMES) as finding the Voice "an embarrassment," then they should be ashamed of themselves. I'm afraid I have little doubt that the new regime will treat readers as victims to be alternately curried and bullied and delivered starving to the advertisers.

Thanks for listening.

Yours truly,
Paul Parish

PS To my mind, the real danger is what's happening to classical liberal-arts education, and what's happening to journalism is just a smokescreen in the foothills; if the universities can be turned into R&D centers, whose worth can be accounted for on a value-added basis, and experts will sit like dragons on their hoards of lore, we will have really thrown away our heritage for a mess of pottage.

Volume 4, No. 32
September 11, 2006
copyright ©2006 Paul Parish
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