A Guide to the Voice Blogs

While we cherish the attendance of our dozens of readers as well as the helpful advice of our commenters (e.g., "Get your facts straight," "MORE MSM LIES"), we feel obliged to remind you that ours is not the only blog under the Voice umbrella, and suggest you check out our colleagues, who are at least as adept at wasting your time, and in several different genres:

 

Press Clips. Mr. Ward Harkavy used to get up an hour before he went to bed, smoke a pack of Luckies, read 126 papers (all the way down to the obituaries and shipping news) and analyze the hell out of them. Management figured: why not let Mr. Harkavy get some sleep, and make Press Clips a quick but thorough skim of the morning news? We gave it Flash! Good morning Mr. & Mrs. America and all the ships at sea feel and made the proprietor wear a fedora. Result: Newsy news for the news-needful!

 

The Smart Asset. Mr. Harkavy is still with us, as Voice news editor, gadfly, and proprietor of The Smart Asset, with which he makes business and financial news -- a species of reportage that normally makes us want to vomit from our eyeballs -- crisp, clear and fascinating, as if it had something to do with our actual lives, which of course it really does these days. For an example, see yesterday morning's take on the auto bailout, "GM, Chrysler seek to dump their companies on UAW, taxpayers." Who knows what depredations he's parsed this morning.

 

Sound of the City. Studies show 90 percent of Voice readers are looking for a good film, concert, or erotic massage. So arts reporting is where it's at, and our arts blog has to keep up. This is why we poached celebrity journalists Camille Dodero and Zach Baron to chart zeitgeist eruptions wherever they may occur, from American Idol to Twitter to Nerd Nite to pr0n. They also do world-class interviews that get picked up by Rush Limbaugh. If you don't know what's going on culture-wise, read a few pages of Sound of the City and you'll be able to nod sagely at parties with real authority.

 

Fork in the Road. We eat out of Tupperware and paper bags, yet somehow Robert Sietsema, Sarah DiGregorio, and Chantal Martineau speak to us. (We mean their prose; no one here actually speaks to us. What if someone saw them?) We are told by people with palates that our food critics speak to them, too. They not only describe dishes and drinkables in ways that make you horny, they also read the labels, interview the mongers, and report the news from the gustatory scene.

 

La Daily Musto. As everyone knows, Michael Musto has ornamented the Voice since dish was something they gave away at movie theaters, so he doesn't really have to blog; he could just have his footman deliver us his weekly columns and spend the rest of the week at his mountain cabin, watching egrets nest. Yet blog he does, and puts in plenty of oomph. While the rest of us were doing quick, who's-this obits of Bea Arthur, this fucker was telling us things Bea Arthur said to him. He reports breaking scene news and, in his idle moments, asks delighted fans Socratic questions like "Who's Your Favorite Plus-Sized Male Movie Star?" It's his name management invokes when they tell us, "See, that's why we can't pay you more."

 

All City. Sometimes, you know? All you want to do is look at pictures of street art. With maybe a little copy to quiet the voices in your head. All City does that for you, and for all of us.