Clip Job: Keg Party for Washington Square

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, May 9, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
July 30, 1958, Vol. III, No. 40

Keg Party for Square

Beer drinkers and all those who would like Washington Square to be a park rather than a parkway are invited to a “keg party” tonight (Wednesday) at the home of Mrs. Mary Perot Nichols. An admission charge of $2 will entitle you to as much free beer as you are capable of downing.

The address is 48 Carmine Street, second floor (near Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street); the sponsors are the Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic.

To Readers
In deference to the dog days of summer, the editors of The Village Voice have decided, one and all, to take vacations. That is the reason we must beg your indulgence for an occasionally depleted newspaper. It will all be over shortly, when everything will be back to better than normal.

The Sean Bell Protests in the Papers: Peaceful and Orderly

Posted by Heather Muse at 10:53 AM, May 8, 2008

When it comes to the Sean Bell trial, verdict and aftermath, the Daily News continues to place this story prominently in the paper, including a full-color photo of Al Sharpton and Nicole Paultre-Bell's arrest at the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge and photos of other protestors and shooting victim Joseph Guzman on the bus that carried protestors away. The Post again trots out its cover from the initial incident and devotes 2/3 of page 7 to the events.

Both papers comment on the preparation the protestors were given from Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, which included a list of "dos and don'ts" that included "do have valid ID" and "don't be on parole, have an open warrant or owe money to the city." The Post gives a rundown in the sidebar, while News columnist Michael Daly provides a "slice-of-life" description of the protests outside police headquarters, referring to it as "the most civil of disobedience."

The Post describes the scene as "although loud and raucous, the demonstrations were mostly peaceful," and the News called the pray-ins "two hours of controlled fury."

As he emerged from 1 Police Plaza after his arrest, Sharpton declared, "The Sean bell movement has been born." We'll see how that develops; Sharpton and the Bell family are set to meet privately with Gov. Paterson today.

Clip Job: Early Answering Machines

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, May 8, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
July 23, 1958, Vol. III, No. 39

A Matter of Record

By John Wilcock A few weeks ago I installed one of those recording devices on my telephone—the Bell system rents them for $12.50 a month—and since then I’ve been having a great deal of fun when I set home at night, playing back the messages people leave for me. Anyone who calls my home number (WA 9-123*) when I’m out hears my recorded voice and has about 20 seconds in which to leave a message of his own. Many of the callers make wisecracks about how they’re coming to me in “live, stereophonic color” or about how they want to my “first poison-pen telephone call.”

There aren’t too many of these machines in use—around 2000 in the N.Y.C. area—but a Bell official, while giving me a brief tour of a roomful of softly purring phone devices last week, told me about some of their varied uses.

“Sometimes the answering machines are used for puposes we can’t condone,” he said. “Like the girl who was offering sexy pictures of herself until the Post Office stopped it. But on the other hand there’s a bird-watchers’ group in Boston that leaves a recorded message about what’s been sighted lately, churches that offer prayers of the day, movies with time schedules, stores announcing bargain items, groups giving fishing information and highway conditions, and an association up in Westchester that provides the latest stockmarket news.”

The whole subject’s very interesting, I think, and there’s almost no limit to the sort of taped messages I could leave for callers. Wouldn’t you like to call up and hear me reciting a brief poem to a jazz background? Or to find out where there was a party next Saturday? I could leave definite and final word that No, I do NOT know about any vacant apartments (contrary to popular belief) or simply record the terse message: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Carole Janeway, a Village ceramist, also has one of these recording devices, and we’ve discussed the possibility of getting the two machines to talk to each other—so far without success. Carole, incidentally, ends all her recorded messages with a commercial. The current one is: “And remember, the road to heaven is paved with Janeway tiles.”

[John Wilcock is still going strong at ojaiorange.com]

Anatomy of a Murder Has the Consistency of Kleenex

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, May 7, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archivesJuly 16, 1958, Vol. III, No. 38

The Lively Arts

By Gilbert Seldes

For over six months now a book called “Anatomy of a Murder” has been on the best-seller list—during the past eight weeks or so it has led the list. The book has the quality, consistency, and attractiveness of a wad of Kleenex which has inadvertently dropped into the bathtub. It was a selection of the Book of the Month Club.

When I first read this book I thought Eric Stanley Gardner ought to sue the BOMC. Not because the book is in any sense a plagiarism—there isn’t a line in it that has the brisk clean style of a Perry Mason story. It’s just that the BOMC has passed over 50 Perry Masons and has given its accolade to a third-rate imitation.

The BOMC called it “a wickedly quizzical novel” and says “it’s a melodrama of the law “raised to the level of adult narrative.” I’ve been an adult longer than most people and have found ESG pretty good. I found the Club’s choice sub-adolescent. Writing the justification which accompanies a BOMC selection, Clifton Fadiman, who knows better and who does know a piece of cheese when he smells it, said the book “may remind some readers of Smollett and Defoe.” If may remind them of authors they’ve never read. It reminded me of Eric Stanley Gardner—and the comparison is all oin his favor.

The book is published under a pseudonym (I was about to say an alias) and the author really is a judge (gee whiz!) and the rape-and-murder case it describes and dulls up to an unbelievable extent really took place (jiminy crickets! isn’t that wonderful?).

Now I put it to you dear reader, if you wanted to do a novel centering on a scene in court and had no talent whatsoever for writing and couldn’t tell a live character from a store-dummy—I ask you, what would you do? You’d go to a master—to that same ESG mentioned above. If you were clever, you’d avoid the obvious and (not how judicious I am) alias Robert Traver has done this. He doesn’t bring in Perry Mason. No.

But who does come in? The weakest of all ESG’s characters—the prosecutor who’s hoping to run for governor, the character ESG (anything for a laugh) named Hamilton Burger. It’s a joke, son, Ham-Burger. I wonder whether ESG has regretted that name as much as the late Dorothy Sayers must have regretted Lord Peter Wimsey.

In any case, there he is, in the middle of a book which purports to be—actually is—telling about a real event. It is so palpably managed that you have to sit back and think for a minute. Maybe ESG got this character from life, and, maybe, in this case life imitated art.

And for the record, another character comes in. That sad, drunken, but incomparable sleuth, from the works of Craig Rice. Maybe he/she ought to sue the BOMC.

The book is a best-seller. Virtually any book chosen by the Club becomes one. The publisher gets a wad of dough he can spend on advertising—the publicity is great in any case. The book has been moderately well received. The best thing anyone, outside Mr. Fadiman and his associates, has found to suggest is that because it’s badly written it has the accent of truth. Some say it’s easy to read. It’s easy if you can slog through wet Kleenex.

The BOMC has often explained that its choice is not presented as the one eternal god-given classic published that month. It does however imply that the book is a good one—and good of its kind. And the BOMC, which prospers only if the habit of reading continues and spreads, owes some deference to the republic of letters. It owes some respect to the art by which it lives. It has singularly abused its position in this case.

Clip Job: The Outrageousness of HUAC

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, May 6, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
July 9, 1958, Vol. III, No. 37

Achieving the Obvious

By Nat Hentoff

A Boston city-planner I know recently returned from a Washington conference on metropolitan affairs and reported as the quote of the conference: “Politics is the art of achieving the obvious.” Not only politics, as some of these variations on that theme may indicate.

On June 25 the New York Times finally—and effectively—commented on the outrageous House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. “To what purpose?”—asked the Times—were these scarecrow Congressmen in New York. “To emulate Communist and other kinds of totalitarian societies by persecuting people for holding radical beliefs?” But when will the Times also score NBC and CBS for their quivering collapse before the committee? The Sarnoffs, father and son, William Paley, and Frank Stanton have a lot to make up for. And where were the voices of Murrow and Sevareid? It’s always safer to put down hooligans when your own pay check isn’t affected.

My favorite fantasy of many weeks was Elfrida von Nardoff telling Jack Barry, on camera, before the first question on “Twenty-One” that next Monday evening: “Take your quarter of a million dollars. I’m ashamed to be on a program and a network that fired the director of this program for exercising his Constitutional rights.” But Elfrida frowned and concentrated as usual, giving America her version of the noble, hungry intellectual.

Congratulations to Don Hogan and Peter Braestrup for their Herald Tribune series on the garment district. So where was the New York Post? I’m waiting however, for a Herald Tribune Sunday supplement—with ads, naturally—on Franco Spain. I’m sure Trujillo would take half a page…

Clip Job: Martin Luther King on Integration

Posted by Tony Ortega at 9:39 AM, May 5, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
July 2, 1958, Vol. III, No. 36

Dr. King on Integration

The federal court ruling to delay integration in Little Rock High School will set back the fight for Negro rights several years, the Reverend Martin Luther King told The Voice last week. He was in the Village to address a meeting of Christian Action at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Street South.

“There will be most tragic consequences if the higher courts sustain the ruling, for it will give the green light to violence in the South,” Dr. King said. He added that pro-segregation groups will think that they can achieve their end if they stir up enough strife and trouble in the schools that are under court order to integrate.

He said that President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to enforce the Little Rock desegregation was not an act of violence, but was simply “the intelligent use of police power.”

“While I firmly believe in non-violence, I am not an anarchist,” he explained. “This was not an army going to war, and anyone resisting the troops would have received a fair trial.”

In Montgomery today, the buses are completely integrated and the boycott by Negroes is a thing of the past, Dr. King remarked. The Negro minister first achieved national prominence as the leader of the non-violent boycott.

“There have been a few incidents, but generally the people of Montgomery now accept the integrated buses. Although some Negroes still move to the rear of the buses, those who want to may ride anywhere.”

In his talk to a packed audience at Judson Church, Dr. King stressed the use of non-violence to end segregation. He emphasized that the choice is between “non-violence and non-existence.” Physical violence results only in “corroding hatred, and in the end creates more social problems than it solves.”

The minister said that in his opinion, President Eisenhower is a man of “basic good will and genuine integrity,” but that he fails to understand the dimensions of the struggle for equality.

At the meeting, Dr. John Hutcherson, professor of religion at Columbia University, presented him with a check from the New York chapter of Christian Action for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In accepting the check Dr. King said that the Conference would use the money in its current campaign to get out the Negro vote in the South.

The Reverend Howard R. Moody, pastor of Judson Memorial Church, presided at the meeting.

Clip Job: Joe Papp Stands Up to HUAC

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, May 2, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
June 25, 1958, Vol. III, No. 35

Creation or Destruction?

On Thursday of last week Joseph Papp, producer and creator of the New York Shakespeare Festival, refused to answer questions about his political beliefs before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was immediately fired from his job at CBS—unit manager of the TV show “I’ve Got a Secret”—on which he had sustained himself while bringing into existence the Shakespeare productions which some 100,000 New Yorkers have seen, for free, in Central Park and the East River Amphitheatre. The Village Voice invited Mr. Papp to comment on the issue. Here are his remarks:

For myself, I am more than ever determined to devote my energies in bringing the classical theatre to all people regardless of their ability to pay. I will not be diverted from considering my work in the theatre a social as well as an artistic responsibility.

My philosophy is no secret. It is most clearly expressed in the founding and development of the New York Shakespeare Festival. And although I have no reluctance to discuss my opinions and beliefs with anybody, I will not be coerced into revealing names of innocent people. I will not be intimidated into repudiating the meaning of my life. I will not cooperate with an irresponsible, publicity-seeking committee bent on destroying reputations and spreading the insidious blacklist.

There are many problems in the theatre: unemployment, the lack of permanent theatres where performers and technicians can learn their crafts, just to name two. It would be well for officials to concern themselves with this real problem and help to contribute to the cultural well-being of our people, rather than to destroy what little exists.—Joseph Papp

Clip Job: Jules Feiffer Reads for A Sane Nuclear Policy

Posted by Tony Ortega at 12:21 PM, May 1, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
June 18, 1958, Vol. III, No. 34

Jules Feiffer, father of “Sick, Sick, Sick,” will read off captions from a series of his original chalk cartoons at an open meeting of the Greenwich Village Committee of a Sane Nuclear Policy, which will be held at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, 141 West 13th Street, on Tuesday, June 24, at 8:30 p.m. The cartoons will then be auctioned off, and he will present the proceeds to the committee to aid it in its work. Other objects contributed by prominent people will also go into the auction.

On the program with Mr. Feiffer are Dr. Harry Lustig, chairman of the physics department at City College, and Trevor Thomas, chairman of the National Sane Nuclear Committee. Edwin Fancher, publisher of the The Voice, will act as chairman for the evening. There will also be live musical entertainment.

Clip Job: Jean Shepherd Says: Dig the Folk!

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 30, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
June 11, 1958, Vol. III, No. 33

Dig the Folk

By Jean Shepherd

Some night when the espresso tastes flat and you tire of hearing third-rate poets shout above fourth-rate jazz groups and you happen to be near a radio, I would suggest you dig a few sounds that are truly closer to the pulse beat of America than anything around today.

Most of the stuff that passes for Americana is as contrived and phony as a class-B English-movie version of Chicago mobsters. It has a dated self-consciousness that would be amusing if it weren’t so embarrassing. The average urban “folk”-singer, for example, would be totally unintelligible to a genuine hill-country audience of today. The folksiness they sell to hip-type, guitar-playing, subway-riding, undergrad neo-folk has all the authenticity of an Amsterdam street band playing New Orleans jazz.

It is pretty hard being a genuine nineteenth-century folk midway through the twentieth century, especially if you live on MacDougal Street and majored in business law at Syracuse U. So what can you dig, man, if you want to really get at the roots of now and fell the way it is? The way it really is…It’s tough being beat when you can only wail after office hours and on the two-week vacation. Like it doesn’t make it. Ya’ dig? Excuse the use of the vernacular; sometimes one gets swept away by the sheer emotion of the now and the loveliness of it all.

Getting back to the radio, you’ll find some strange and exotic stuff away down at the far end of the dial. Move the pointer away from NYC and QXR some night late and start fishing around between the loud local stations at the high-frequency end of the band. Where the static level is high and the living is not easy. You’ll hear more of what America really sounds like today than anything I know. Stuff will come in from tank towns in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Michigan, and Minnesota. Everywhere. I’m not referring to music particularly, but to the whole beat and sound of each station as it jabbers away to the local rednecks. I listened for three hours one night to a station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and after a while I had the feeling that I was truly eavesdropping on something I shouldn’t have heard.

TV will never have this flavor, since even local stations all over the country rely on net-produced shows and films with only an occasional local newscast, but radio is today more and more the voice of individuals in specific places as network radio dies and the locals come into their own. The old rules of formality have been knocked down and the 250-watters are getting less inhibited by the day. One night I monitored a guy doing a play-by-play broadcast of a softball game somewhere in West Virginia, in W. Va. Patois, sponsored by a furniture dealer who did his own spots and whose daughter played first base for the strong local nine. Only in America.

It is really a gasser to hear what a local news commentator on a Texas station has to say about the Supreme Court and desegregation. He drawls on and on and sounds exactly like twentieth century Texas. He is followed by two guys who play records of people called the Delmore Twins and Granpa Copas. Between discs they hawk plastic Christ statues that glow in the dark in “real-life” color, a pocket Bible with a metal cover guaranteed to protect the heart from bullet wounds and stabbings, a quilt-making kit, plastic ukuleles with instructions “that can be understood even by those who can’t read,” wallets autographed by Elton Britt, and books for “serious” students of sexology (must be over 21, we trust you). They go on all night in two languages and 150 percent modulation.

Man, dig the folk. They have many sounds and different beats and it isn’t hard to pick up on some of this Vox Humana. The one thing it is, if nothing else, is authentic. Most local stations work on such narrow budget margins that they can’t risk getting out of touch with the listeners. They rarely rely on jazzy (and largely phoney) polls to find out what is being dug by the citizenry; hence what they dish out is pretty close to the main stream. It is all pretty hairy stuff, rich and ripe, but as American as the “folk” can ever get.

Clip Job: George C. Scott Wins an Obie

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 29, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
June 4, 1958, Vol. III, No. 32

from Obies 1958 coverage…

By Jerry Tallmer

He looks like a Marine, he walks like a Marine, he talks like a Marine, biting off his words sardonically, glancing at you coolly down his long nose; and once indeed he was a Marine, for four years—“burying people in Arlington Cemetery”—but now he’s an actor and a damn fine one. The transition came at he University of Missouri School of Journalism, after he got out of the service in 1949. What happened to the journalism?

“I got disenchanted, bored, and backed into acting. That wasn’t journalism’s fault”—the glance flicked with quick detached courtesy at the scribbler across the table—“but mine. I did six shows at the university and then went into the Stevens Playhouse, Columbia, Missouri, where, since they paid me, I guess I became a professional.”

George C. Scott, this year’s Best Actor in the Village Voice “Obies,” sat there in his sports shirt and G.I. suntans, a two-weeks’ growth of beard blackening his jaw, and watched his 1-year-old son Matthew crumble crackers into his father’s beer. “Beanie,” he said, making a fist—a very square one—“you’re going to get a knuckle sandwich.” The kid cooed up at him and desisted…

Village Voice Off-Broadway Awards
Season 1957-1958

Best Actress: Anne Meacham (Garden District)

Best Actor: George C. Scott (Richard III, As You Like It, Children of Darkness)

Best Director: Stuart Vaughan (New York Shakespeare Festival)

Best Play (Foreign): Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Best Play (Adaptation): The Brothers Karamazov by Boris Tumarin and Jack Sydow

Best One-Act Play: Guests of the Nation by Neil McKenzie

Best Revival: The Crucible by Arthur Miller, directed by Word Baker

Best Comedy: Comic Strip by George Panetta

Distinguished Performances (Actors): Leonardo Cimino (The Brothers Karamazov), Michael Higgins (The Crucible), Jack Cannon (New York Shakespeare Festival, Children of Darkness), Robert Geiringer (New York Shakespeare Festival, Guests of the Nation)

Distinguished Performances (Actresses): Tammy Grimes (Clerambard), Grania O’Malley (Guests of the Nation), Nydia Westman (Endgame)

Special Citations: The Phoenix Theatre, The Theatre Club, Lucille Lortel
Judges: Joseph Anthony, George Freedley, Jerry Tallmer

Clip Job: Hipness Vs. Beatness

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 28, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
May 28, 1958, Vol. III, No. 31

The Scene

Dear Sir:

OK, I’ve heard enough. This is the generation after the beat generation talking, and here’s the scene:

Like the beat generation was about the uncoolest that ever walked the earth. Overtly after kicks, open to the muck and fever.

Hipness starts where beatness leaves off. And where all the 1930’s humanism shuts its trap too (this is for you, Voice).

And it has nothing against form. It is form—almost nothing else. Because form is cooler than any experiment in or out of the book, and you can swing farther out inside a set of rules than you ever could naked. E.g., Cocteau, who knew this 30 years ago. Dig also Radiguet.

And it’s an ethic. Based probably on a deeper and more abiding respect for the human personality than any humanist can conceive of. Like it asks nothing of people. And pushes nothing on them. Including love. Like there are some silences you don’t break.

Which is the ethic. Leave People Alone. The cleanest one you can get to in this love-thy-neighbor freudian marxist rot. (Side note: beware determinism. You start to tamper with causes to get at effects.)

Hipness is based on a more intimate knowledge of being beaten than the beat generation would have stood.

Just like any human being digs that all men must die and that jazz—the really hip cat digs that the whole human scene has come to a standstill. Like it’s all over. And that’s nothing to protest about.

Like protest as a gesture is OK. Do not go gentle and that jazz. Good for individual (sic) sense of honor. In a way hipness is knowing just how much is gesture.

(Writing letters is a gesture.) You can see I’m only on the fringe of this scene. Belong to a hung generation some place between the Beat and the Next.

Like the only really hip cats are going on 16 now. Wait until they grow up.

— Diane Di Palma, East Houston Street

Clip Job: How to Steal Other People's Blind Dates

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 25, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
May 21, 1958, Vol. III, No. 30

The Blind-Date Bit

By John Wilcock

A guy I know with plenty of time on his hands has a system for what he calls “taking the guess out of the blind-date bit.” It’s a pretty simple operation, consisting simply of taking your pick of other people’s blind dates.

The most popular spots where strangers agree to meet, it seems, are outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, beside the Washington Square Arch, under the clock at the Biltmore, and by the information booth in Grand Central Station. At any of these places and many others, says my friend, pretty girls will always be waiting, with at least a few of them waiting for men they’ve never met.

“I look them over carefully whenever I want a date,” my informant explains, “and I pick out the ones who are obviously waiting for blind dates. Somehow you can always tell; they seem more apprehensive. Anyway, I choose the nicest-looking girl and, approaching very nervously, I say: ‘Excuse me but are you…?’--always letting the sentence trail off.

“She’ll invariably smile and finish it for me. Then next comes the time when you must listen very carefully, because she’ll usually counter with: “Oh, you must be--?’ and you have to be very attentive, because that will tell you what your name is, or anyway what it’s supposed to be.

“Naturally you’ll make a mistake occasionally, but so long as you remember to be charming and a little shy, and to apologize and leave when you’re obviously not going to get away with it, you’ll find there’s scarcely any risk at all.”

(Incidentally, if you want to invest in a white carnation for your buttonhole, that’s fine, but you don’t really need it. Research has proved that the most common identification symbol among blind dates is a New Yorker magazine tucked under the arm.)

Once the contact has been made and the conversation is under way, my friend suggests all that’s needed are a few remarks like: “Gee, you’re much prettier than I expected” or “Is my watch fast or slow? I’m sorry if I kept you waiting” or “Excuse me if I seem a little nervous but I’ve never done this before.”

“By following developments pretty closely,” he adds, “you can usually bluff your way through. But if she suddenly asks a question that throws you, or seeks information about some mutual friend that you have never met, I’ve always found a good way to play for time is to say: ‘Well, let’s go have a coffee and we’ll talk about it.’ Once you get that far, you can even afford to be honest with her. You’d be amazed how easy it is to salvage the date as long as you can convince her how much better you are than the man she was supposed to meet.”

[John Wilcock is still going strong at ojaiorange.com]

Clip Job: In Defense of Madison Avenue

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 24, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
May 14, 1958, Vol. III, No. 29

In Defense of Madison Avenue

By Marc D. Schleifer

Judging by his column in The Voice on April 16, Nat Hentoff has been impressed by the swelling chorus of liberal intellectuals damning Madison Avenue from here to the pages of the New Republic or the Nation. The variations have been numerous, but they all have evolved from one indignant theme—that Madison Avenue is responsible for the mediocrity and vulgarity in our American culture.

The basic role of an advertising agency is to create and place ads for a client with the purpose of persuading an audience to purchase the client’s item…The creation of advertisements involves writing and art, but not as an end in itself…

If the liberal intellectual has come to recognize that there is mediocrity and vulgarity in the American culture, let him place the blame where it belongs.

But this he finds difficult to do…Advertising can only reflect taste, not set taste. When the consumer-audience for a particular product is reasonably literate…then advertisements for that audience are distinctively literate.

Of course I am aware that the liberal intellectual will raise the banner of “social responsibility” and education as a role that the agency must assume. But such an argument is neither functional nor logical. The agency does not ask the educators of America to sell products—that is the agency’s job. The agency should not be asked to assume the educator’s job.

Until mass media does merit approval, an individual who finds it lacking should simply refrain from participating in its audience. No one forces the intellectual to read the Daily News, and there is no one forcing him to watch television or listen to commercial radio.

The advertising agencies and the networks serve as butler to a consumer-public master. The television set, the radio, and the printed ad constitute the master’s dining table. If what is served on that table is of superior quality, it is the master, not the butler, who is considered the gourmet. But if the master has vulgar taste and demands that he be served inferior fare, where is the justice in damning the butler?

Clip Job: Kenneth Rexroth on the 'Madison Avenue Pismires'

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 23, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
May 7, 1958, Vol. III, No. 28

‘Sometimes I Come On Real Sweet’

By Alan Bodian

Kenneth Rexroth, reluctant father of the Beat Generation, was staying with a friend on Sixth Avenue near 56th Street. It was just past 11 a.m. when I arrived, and he was breakfasting on black coffee.

“All this stuff about me and the others in San Francisco is mostly from articles in Playboy and Esquire. In Playboy, I’m supposed to have said at a party: ‘Anarchists must unite.’”

“Did you?”

“No. I’ve been an anarchist all my life. All these Madison Avenue pismires have invented this stuff. Can you imagine? I once said that wine should be chilled to be enjoyed. Now they stand around—everyone at these New York parties—drinking iced wine…

“I think that article was typed with the left hand while the right hand, well…Imagine that Madison Avenue mob standing around drinking iced wine (ha, ha, ha) because they think it’s bourgeois to drink it at room temperature, they turn up their hi-fi’s at full-blast with nothing more Dixieland than Thelonious. Girls come to these parties in cashmere sweaters and at midnight take off the sweaters and walk around, well…nothing happens. They’re mostly PR girls, anyway…”

Clip Job: Women Behind Bars Riot

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 22, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
April 30, 1958, Vol. III, No. 27

Villagers Watch as Women Riot In Local Prison

A prison riot last Saturday night that began with girls shouting ended 2 ½ hours later with fire trucks standing by. At the height of the disturbance the inmates of the Women’s House of Detention, Greenwich Avenue and 10th Street, drew a crowd of several thousand Villagers by tossing flaming bedclothes from their windows.

The outbreak, which began on the sixth floor with a fight between two girls, caught on quickly and spread to the rest of the building. The inmates shouted down to the spectators, who were kept at a distance only through the strenuous efforts of the police, that they were being starved and beaten.

A number of people in the crowd were apparently relatives and friends of the imprisoned women. One man standing on Greenwich Avenue cupped his hands and called out whenever there was a lull in the excitement: “Essie, I’m here.”

Correction Commissioner Anna Kross, following the riot, blamed overcrowding and lack of personnel for the trouble. She denied that the girls had been beaten or were not getting enough food, but admitted the food budget had been cut. The girls had matches because they are allowed to smoke, she said.

Mrs. Kross had announced shortly after her appointment as commissioner, that the Village building should be abandoned as obsolete as soon as the projected women’s prison is erected on an island in the East River.

Clip Job: Kenneth Rexroth on the Beat Generation

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 21, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
April 23, 1958, Vol. III, No. 26

Beat Generation?

The other day Kenneth Rexroth, in town for some jazz-poetry readings at a local bar, dropped by these offices for a chat. Urged to commit his remarks to paper, he said he would write The Voice a letter. Here it is:

from Kenneth Rexroth

Pursuant, as they say, to our conversation, the Village hasn’t changed much… The place is full of uptowners. It always was. It is expensive, it was in 1920. As a way of life, it goes on unchanged, amongst the call girls, customers’ men, aboriginal Italians and Irish. But where one girl wore colored stockings in 1905, thousands wear them today. Where Floyd Dell read Nietzsche, untold numbers read Beckett in the dim light of cold-water walk-ups.

As for the Beat Generation. Let’s all stop. Right now. This has turned into a Madison Avenue gimmick. When the fall book lists come out, it will be as dead as Davy Crockett caps. It is a pity that as fine an artist as Jack Kerouac got hooked by this label. Of course it happened because of Jack’s naivete—the innocence of his heart which is his special virtue. I am sure he is as sick of it as I am. I for one never beatified nor pummelled. I’m getting on, but I’ve managed to dodge the gimmick generations as they went past; I was never Lost nor Proletarian nor Reactionary. This stuff is strictly for the customers.

As for Jack himself. Yes, I threw him out. He was frightening the children. He doesn’t frighten me, though when he gets excessively beatified he bores me slightly. I think he is one of the finest prose writers now writing prose. He is a naïve writer, like Restif de la Bretonne or Henry Miller, who accurately reflects a world without understanding it very well in the rational sense. For that, Clellan Holmes is far better on the same scene, shrewd and objective; but, as I am pretty sure he himself would be the first to admit, not the artist Jack is, and lacking, because of his very objectivity, Jack’s poignancy and terror. One thing about Jack and Allen Ginsberg, who, I might remind you, are Villagers, and only were temporarily on loan to San Francisco: I had to come back to New York to realize how good they are. They have sure as hell made just the right enemies.

Now about jazz poetry. Let anybody who wants to have started it go right ahead and have started it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti and I did first start it off as public entertainment before concert and club audiences. For better or worse, I guess we started the craze. It is a lot more than a craze as far as I am concerned. I am not interested in a freak gig. I think the art of poetry in America is in a bad way. It is largely the business of seminars, conducted by aging poets for five or six budding poets.

Jazz poetry gets poetry out of the classrooms and into contact with large audiences who have not read any verse since grammar school. They listen, they like it, they come back for more. It demands of poetry, however deep and complex, something of a public surface, like the plays of Shakespeare that had stuff for everybody, the commonality, the middle class, the nobility, the intellectuals.

Jazz gives poetry, too, the rhythms of itself, so expressive of the world we live in, and it gives it the inspiration of the jazz world, with its hard simple morality and its direct honesty—especially its erotic honesty. Fish or cut bait. Poetry gives modern jazz a verbal content infinitely superior to the silly falsities of the typical Tin Pan Alley lyric. It provides people who do not understand music technically something to hook onto—something to lead them into the complex world of modern jazz—as serious and as artistically important as any music being produced today. And then, the reciting, rather than singing voice, if properly managed, swings more than an awful lot of vocalists. As you may know, most jazz men like two singers—Frankie and Ella. With a poet who understands what is going on, they are not at the mercy of a vocalist who wants just to vocalize and who looks on the band as a necessary evil at best. Too, the emotional complexity of good poetry provides the musician with continuous creative stimulus, but at the same time gives him the widest possible creative freedom.

All this requires skill. Like you just want to blow a lot of crazy words, man, if you think jazz is jungle music while the missionary soup comes to a boil, if you believe in the jazz myth of the hipster, you are going to fall on your face. Charlie Parker, or many younger men, are just as sophisticated artists as T.S. Eliot, and in some cases better, and have a lot more kinship with Couperin than with the King of the Cannibal Isles. And the combination of jazz and poetry requires good poetry, competent recitation, everybody in the group really digging what everybody else is doing, and, of course, real tasty music. Then it’s great, and everybody loves it, specially you, baby.

Clip Job: Young Socialists on Jack Kerouac

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 17, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
April 16, 1958, Vol. III, No. 25

The Beat Generation: A View from the Left

By James E. Breslin [No, not that Jimmy Breslin – Tony O.]

In a little gray loft around the corner from the Village, the Young Socialist League held a literary Sunday Meeting on Easter evening. Socialist Michael Harrington opened the services with a vigorous attack on Jack Kerouac and his ragged generation. Then inspired members of the beat audience “got the call,” rose, and delivered their opinions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and hipsterism.

Mr. Harrington began by justifying himself for speaking about Kerouac. Jack, leader of the “most well-advertised Renaissance” in literary history, does have a certain “symptomatic interest,” he said.

Novelist Kerouac represents the disaffiliated or marginal man: the artist retreating back from the realm of palpable reality, back into “what George Orwell has called ‘the soft warm belly of the whale,’” stated Harrington.

The Young Socialist leader quoted the “palpable and errant nonsense” of beat sage Kenneth Rexroth: “destruction, revolution” is the only way for art. Certainly, sad Jack Kerouac, peering out of the softdark warmth of the holy-belly, “feels he must protest about something. But his protest lacks substance.” Whitman had his America, Sandberg had his Chicago. But now, as any Young Socialist knows, “there is no more America.”

Kerouac, he continued, is “the most American writer in a long time.” He is part of a “tradition of mindlessness…utter Americans who have motion without motive.” Indeed, he is “the absolute end of Walt Whitman.” Kerouac’s revolt, unlike the Socialists’, is a “protest without program.”

Yet, his novels “have a vitality.” They send a breath of fresh air into the stagnancy of the ever-competent but rarely inspired works of the academicians.

The floor was open. An elderly gentleman who identified himself as a “poet” vociferously declared that the artist need not write a political manifesto, but “merely present the picture.” Dave Amram, French-horn man of the beat-poetry rituals, asserted that Kerouac “is an artist, not a hipster.” One spectator called Kerouac “neurotic” and his work “just pornography.” This remark drew menacing murmurs from the crowd, and the grinding of many beat teeth.

Mr. Harrington then summarized. Kerouac has yet to create a “complex felt reality,” and, as someone in the audience suggested, “it’s not that he hasn’t provided any answers—he hasn’t even asked the questions.”

Clip Job: Nat Hentoff on Steve Allen, TV Critic

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 16, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
April 9, 1958, Vol. III, No. 24

Steve Allen and the Evasion of Criticism

By Nat Hentoff

Steve Allen’s prolix shadow-boxing of Jack O’Brian’s ears in this journal on March 19 detonated a small brouhaha. Columnist Hy Gardner noted approvingly that Allen was being congratulated by the trade; Allen noted approvingly that Allen was being congratulated by the trade; and Time magazine ran a characteristically inconsequential story on the incident. (Time leads all publications, including U.S. News and World Report, when it comes to missing the basic point of any story in any context.)

O’Brian says he is not going to answer the Allen term paper so I will, although I’m in on a pass. Contrary to appearances, Allen’s essay was not an answer to my column in TV critics—in which I had largely praised O’Brian—but was already written and was just looking for a home. I find, by the way, that the fact of my lauding O’Brian has puzzled and occasionally angered several liberal friends of mine who cannot understand how I can approve a reactionary in any area of his activities. (O’Brian’s definition of a reactionary, incidentally, is a guy who reaction to any situation you can predict before the situation even occurs.) I repeat, however, that although I find O’Brian’s gratuitous hauling of Roy Cohnisms into hs columns thoroughly repugnant, I fault him on one score at a time and don’t condemn him in toto. Except for his being the David Lawrence of TV columnists with regard to politics, I still think O’Brian is second only to Jack Gould in this city for taste, courage, and knowledge of the medium he’s writing about.

…During the substance of Allen’s argument, the main charges seem slim indeed. He objects to O’Brian’s consistent harpooning of Godfrey, Sullivan, and others of “the biggest names in the business.” If a man is aware of the capacities of a medium, he rightly becomes enraged when that medium is being consumed by mediocrities and fools. It’s to O’Brian’s credit that he keeps measuring the small talents (has Allen ever read Shaw’s music criticism?)…

…Allen’s own skill as a TV critic is, I trust, not to be wholly judged by his astonishing statement that David Brinkley and Chet Huntley “are two peas in a pod.” As O’Brian rightly has noted, they are almost completely different. Huntley is humorless, not particularly incisive, and, in general, an average, competent “news-analyst.” Brinkley is drily funny, unusually perceptive—he is almost in a class with Howard K. Smith—and much the warmer of the two personalities. Allen writes that O’Brian puts down Huntley because “he suspects Huntley of liberal political inclinations.” Yet it is Brinkley who is the more outspoken liberal of the two and the more effective and anti-Administration marksman, and Brinkley whom O’Brian has praised. I’m surprised actually that O’Brian does occasionally have something good to say about Brinkley, and at least he doesn’t call the tandem “two peas in a pod.”

…Allen’s vision of the world…is of an “adjusted” society wherein we are all polite to each other and suppress those of our feelings that are not approved or that might get us—the worst of all penalties—disliked by someone. I would think that if the positive measure of a critic is that he be on polite terms with everyone he writes about, we had better replace Murray Kempton with Norman Vincent Peale, Jack Gould with Charles Kenny, and B.H. Haggin with Harriet Johnson. Allen knows better, I think. His own approach to comedy, the fact that he wrote the article about O’Brian, and some of his short stories would imply that he realizes that the primary danger to our society is the growing queue of the bland leading the bland. Politeness, hell. The need is for more people, including critics, to learn to express their feelings again, to say and write what they feel, not what they hope their audience wants to hear. All men area weak; let’s not make them any weaker.

Clip Job: Uniformity Can Be Fun

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 15, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
April 2, 1958, Vol. III, No. 23

Uniformity Can Be Fun

By Nat Hentoff

It is a dolorous measure of the soft mediocrity of most of the executives in commercial TV that during his tenure as head of NBC, Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver, Jr., achieved a reputation as the daring iconoclast of the industry. His battle, as he puts it, was “to build an instrument that is flexible, useful, and valuable to all interests.” It is the same Mr. Weaver who appraised Martin Mayer’s book, “Madison Avenue, U.S.A.,” in the March 29 Saturday Review and concluded with this unwittingly appalling final paragraph:

“I believe,” says Weaver, “that many thinking men and women are coming to realize the really revolutionary role that advertising and the mass media have been and are playing in our society. Since the First World War we have seen a dramatic mutation in society, still in process. The motivation for that change, to many of us, is the picture of what man can have if he will work and save and solve problems and even spend to get that world. This we call our incentive system, unique in history. Under its impact we are moving from a society of status to a truly democratic society. And such a society must have a huge area of uniformity in dress, customs, language, to allow groups within the society to intermingle without feelings of fear or inferiority. This uniformity is fortunately created through the mass media…”

…The kind of uniformity Mr. Weaver finds positive, allowing “groups within the society to intermingle,” was in distorted evidence in Albany a couple of weeks ago. The Legislature, under pressure, killed a bill to allow Orthodox Jews and Seventh Day Adventists to open their stores on Sunday in view of the fact that they observe another day of the week as their time of rest. After all, if weekday uniformity is to be regarded as an optimum condition, how much more spiritually essential is Sabbath uniformity?

Think too of the shattering damage to our “truly democratic” society if some stores were able to stay open Sundays without paying graft. What saddened me most about the Albany disgrace was that even the ablest member of the Assembly, Daniel Kelly of the West Side, who is an insurgent Democrat, yielded to the heard-fear that defeated the measure.

Clip Job: The Defense of Rock ‘n Roll

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 14, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
March 26, 1958, Vol. III, No. 22

Rock ‘N Roll

By Bob Reisner

“In this country it is taboo to express sexuality, and our adolescent population is very inhibited. The music brings some outlet to them. They need this. It is a medium in which they can express themselves.” Thus begins the defense of Rock ‘n Roll by Beverly Ross.

Not too long out of high school herself, Miss Ross is a hot property of the E.B. Marks Publishing Company. She is the composer of many hits. Her latest, “Lollipop,” will net her $20,000 in royalties. The working titles of two of her recent songs show her contemporaneous touch: “Queen of the Study Hall” and “I Want to Be a Scientist.”

She feels the music is not a matter of corruption from within but from without. “You can’t sell the kids anything good, they won’t buy it.” The majority of the big hits are written by the kids and performed by them. The things are so unprofessional and illiterate that publishers are besieged. Everybody thinks he can write now because the standards are so low. The buying public’s age is between 12 and 17, and this is what guides the industry.”

I asked her about the state of the industry’s psyche. She was frank: “Everyone in the business is confused and very disturbed. They ask each other every day: ‘When will it end?’ The good song writers who used to look with condescension on the R-‘n-R writers now ask: ‘How do you do it?’”

Miss Ross states that the small independents were the first. Record companies like Atlantic, Apollo, Rama, and Gee were outselling the majors with R ‘n R, and so the race was on.

Since I described the somnambulistic dancing of the kids on TV, it has come to my attention that there are other routines being done outside the FCC. In addition to “The Bop,” “The Stroll,” “The Hop,” and “The Circle,” there is the intercourse-simulating dance called “The Fish,” and an even bolder one called “The Grind.”

Clip Job: Steve Allen on Jack O'Brian

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 11, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
March 19, 1958, Vol. III, No. 21

Jack O’Brian and the Art of Criticism

[In the Village Voice for March 5, columnist Nat Hentoff praised the Journal-American’s Jack O’Brian as one of the few good television critics in New York City. A contrary view has now been submitted by Steve Allen, who needs no further identification—Ed.]

By Steve Allen

At least 50 times during the past several years I have heard TV people say “Something really ought to be done about Jack O’Brian.”

It should be explained at the outset that this article is not a simple instance of a performer taking personal issue with a reviewer. There are few more pathetic spectacles than that of an actor pulling critical barbs out of his skin and demanding naively to know what right the press had to attack him. One of the first things a performer must learn is to take the bitter with the sweet.

It should also be made clear that this protest concerns Mr. O’Brian alone. With rare and isolated exceptions, all other TV critics have been eminently fair with me, as they are with other entertainers. No, O’Brian is unique. He alone, among his hundreds of colleagues, has so abused his position and power that a statement concerning him must be made, and publicly. I say publicly by way of establishing that the majority of new York television people are privately willing to express their contempt for him at length.

Recently I dined with a group including one of television’s biggest comedians, one of our top singing stars, and a popular emcee. O’Brian’s name happened to come up and, as if reacting automatically to the stimulus, each performer in turn had shocking stories to tell of unfair treatment at his hands.

That there has never been a public protest about him before is explained by the fact that most performers are conditioned, and correctly, to feel that it is pointless to become involved in controversy with critics, and by the fact that were any actor to be tempted to speak out, he would be advised that O’Brian could retaliate daily in his column. I am well aware that O’Brian’s response to this piece will more likely be a series of personal attacks on me than a response to the charges against him, but I feel that my discomfort is a small price to pay in this instance. Mr. O’Brian has assumed the role of the neighborhood bully. His conduct demands attention. There is a job to be done. No one else has seen fit to do it.

There has never been a scoundrel on earth, of course, who could not rally a certain number of people to his support, but the fact remains that by far the greater number of TV people openly disapprove of O’Brian’s professional methods. And I propose to limit this article to those methods, to what can be learned of the man from his written word. Concerning his personal life I shall say nothing, since all men are weak. I would be remiss, however, were I not to report that this gentleman who so frequently speaks for virtue in his column impresses many people as shockingly vulgar in speech and social deportment.

But the business at hand is an analysis of O’Brian as critic. Such an examination, I submit, can not fail to substantiate the opinion that he is derelict in his duty to his readers, unethical in his methods, and beneath the respect of the industry because his column is frequently an outlet for his personal emotional delinquencies rather than a reflection of intelligent, fair, responsible criticism.

It can not be emphasized too often that the reason performers consider O’Brian anathema is not simply that he is from time to time displeased with what he sees on television. Hundreds of other columnists are able to discharge this duty, with varying degrees of finesse, but always with honor and with some consideration of the fact that they are writing about fellow human beings.

O’Brian alone, because of his emotional immaturity, writes criticism that is characterized by clumsy reporting and vindictive displays of pique. He alone has reduced his column to an adolescent potpourri of brick-bats for those whom he personally dislikes and posies for those who are, or pretend to be, his pals.

The list of entertainers who are consistently treated unfairly by O’Brian is long and imposing and, significantly enough, largely comprised of the biggest names in the business.

O’Brian’s anti-Arthur Godfrey attitude, for instance, is so unbending that if there is not enough bad news he can relate about him, O’Brian will drag Godfrey’s name into print for no other reason than to express contempt. Examples: “Bill Gargan doesn’t own any of his new Martin Kane TV films, and they’re selling like Godfrey used to.”

Another victim of the O’Brian love-‘em-and-leave-‘em pattern was Jackie Gleason. Initially O’Brian praised Gleason. Eventually he attacked him, at last so rudely that the two almost came to blows one night in a restaurant.

Still another performer unable to receive fair treatment at the hands of O’Brian is Ed Sullivan. If there is any news to gladden Ed’s heart you may be sure it will not be brought to the attention of Journal-American readers. If, on the other hand, Sullivan’s rating happens to slump, or a portion of his program is below par, it is fairly certain that O’Brian will mention it. His hatred of Sullivan is so pronounced that he can not even bring himself to refer to his hour as a “program.” Instead he uses phrases such as “the Ed Sullivan whatsis,” or “the Sullivan catch-all.”

Whether O’Brian’s frequent errors are the results of slovenly reporting or deliberate intent to harm it is, of course, impossible to say, but neither possibility reflects credit upon him. I can perhaps best explain what I mean by careless reporting by referring to my own experience. A few years ago my good friend and producer Bill Harbach was being badly overworked to the tune of 10 or 12 hours a day on the old “Tonight” show. In social conversation he happened to remark that the show was a man-killer and that he would welcome a long vacation, or words to that effect. A few days later O’Brian reported Bill wanted to get off the show because of “the star’s temperament.” Since this was an untruth, Bill sent O’Brian a letter explaining that my “temperament” had nothing whatever to do with the case. O’Brian ran the retraction but left the quotation marks off the word temperament, which of course exactly reversed Bill’s meaning.

Another instance: We took the “Tonight” show to Hollywood once for a two-month stay, and since our crew numbered some 20 people we could not have handled the expenses of the move without working out a “deal” with a Los Angeles hotel. The hotel agreed to put our small army up more-or-less free in return for on-the-air plugs, in accordance with common industry procedure. You would never have known that, however, from O’Brian’s reference to the matter. Omitting all mention of our large staff, he implied that I did plugs for the hotel so that I personally could avoid paying room-rent.

There were numerous examples of a similar sort. For a time I contented myself with writing fair and frank letters to O’Brian, providing him with the facts of the matters he had incorrectly reported. A trade-wise publicity man advised me I was wasting my time. “Any other critic,” he said, “will thank you for straightening him out of he gets a few facts bollixed up. O’Brian will resent being corrected, no matter how wrong. He’s a grown man with the emotions of a 4-year-old boy. If you contradict him, no matter how politely, he’ll kick and scream.”

“He can’t be that bad,” I protested.

Eventually, I was to revise my opinion. Several headaches later O’Brian printed one particular lie that caused me to write him not a peacefully worded not at all but one telling him frankly that I had a good mind to take a poke at him if he didn’t correct his untruth and fast. The facts of the case were as follows:

One evening an NBC executive called my office in a state of considerable apprehension. It seems a movie actor had walked off the Perry Como show after rehearsing for a couple of days and left Perry on the spot for a replacement. My agent, Jules Green, asked me if I wanted to fill in for the actor and I said: “Well, it’s my night off, but if they’re in trouble, naturally I’ll jump in.” The NBC man said: “Of course Steve will get his usual guest-shot price, $7500, which is okay because that’s Perry’s top anyway.” Jules told him it was a deal, I did the show, and Perry and I had a lot of fun. Then I read in O’Brian’s column that the Como show had been over a barrel because Perry had had a sore throat and that when I was contacted about replacing Perry I held the show up for big money, whereas other comedians around town had offered to go on without salary.

My letter to O’Brian about this particular untruth was phrased in such forthright terms that he referred to my denial the next day, but characteristically didn’t admit his error, saying instead that the source, for his version of the story was an NBC executive.

One of O’Brian’s uglier practices is what would seem the deliberate attempt to foster ill-feeling between performers by including in a single paragraph a compliment for one with a criticism of the other. To select one example: “David Brinkley of the NBC-TV news twosome is very good, dry, and interesting; can’t say the same for Chet Huntley.” Any intelligent viewer can observe that Huntley and Brinkley are two peas in a pod; the apparent reason for O’Brian’s criticism is that he suspects Huntley of liberal political inclinations. O’Brian is perhaps the only critic in the nation who judges television fare according to the political opinions of those who present it.

Like many people who are themselves ultra-sensitive to criticism, O’Brian has the sensitivity of a mastodon when it comes to the feelings of others. An orchestra leader who has appeared on my program wears a toupeé, presumably because he does not want people to know he is bald. O’Brian informed his readers about the musician’s baldness. He can be equally cruel to women regarding their physical endowments of the lack thereof. Recently he referred in print to the fact that one TV comedienne wears “falsies.” Such insensitivity is hardly the mark of a gentleman.

One reason for the preparation of this statement, incidentally, is my feeling that new, young TV performers will benefit in being warned that destructive evaluations of their talents by O’Brian need not be seriously entertained. By way of example consider the case of Dody Goodman, who appears with Jack Paar. I find Miss Goodman amusing, and so do most of the people with whom I have discussed her.

On the program one night several weeks ago she happened to say to Hans Conreid: “Oh, shut up,” in a tone obviously intended as playful. O’Brian attacked her cruelly the following day and has done so on many occasions since. One of his more shocking comments about her began: “Dody Goodman—who isn’t funny—.” I watched the program the night of his initial attack and observed the Miss Goodman was uncommonly subdued and not at all her usual happy, scatterbrained self.

Suspecting that O’Brian was to blame, I wrote advising Dody that millions of TV viewers knew that she was funny, and warning her that the critic for the Journal-American was the one TV columnist whose criticisms were beneath respect because of his record of irresponsibility. Her reply confirmed my suppositions as to the reason for her depressed on-the-air demeanor; she told me that a number of other people had given her substantially the same advice.

It must not be supposed that O’Brian’s rudeness is directed only toward performers.

Many publicity people and secretaries relate stories of his chip-on-the-shoulder attitude if they are first assured that their words will not be broadcast, for they tell you frankly that they fear O’Brian. It is precisely that fact which has had much to do with the preparation of this article. That decent, hardworking publicity and network people feel fear of this irresponsible man is deplorable. Part of that fear is understandable, of course, although not entirely excusable.

There exists the baseless impression that O’Brian is the Journal-American, that to antagonize him is to alienate the Hearst organization. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Several J-A people have told me they can not abide the man, and they laugh at the idea that he is a power on the Hearst team.

One highly placed Journal executive told me over a year ago that O’Brian was on the way out. Although his information appears to have been incorrect, his statement is indicative of the fact that a protest to O’Brian will not necessarily antagonize his employers by any means.

Such activity will, of course, antagonize the readily combustible and sometimes pugnacious Mr. O’Brian, concerning whose character psychologists would no doubt have an easy time drawing inferences from his choice of verbs in sentences pertaining to the relative ratings of television programs.

His column of November 12, 1957, leads off with the announcement that the “Maverick” show “mauled” Ed Sullivan and myself in the overnight Trendex competition. Since “Maverick” topped Sullivan by only 2.8 and since our rating for the same half-hour was 17.6, it will be seen that the verb “to maul” is A: an exaggeration, and B: an indication of a wish on O’Brian’s part, either conscious or unconscious, that Sullivan and Allen be mauled, either professionally or physically.

It is true that any columnist, rushed by a deadline, and seeking a colorful phrase, might employ such phraseology without malicious motivation, but such wordage is not the exception with O’Brian, it is the rule. To describe the difference in rating between programs, he habitually uses terms like “clobbered,” “swamped,” “buried”—all of which may cast more light on the real Mr. O’Brian than the “clobbered” shows.

His most famous boner in this particular area has become something of an industry joke and was perpetrated one week last year when Lawrence Welk had a rating of 21.7 to Sid Caesar’s 21 even. Describing this difference, which all TV people know is completely meaningless statistically, O’Brian wrote that Welk “walked all over Sid Caesar.”

Something else that throws interesting light on O’Brian’s characters is his attitude toward psychiatry. In his column of November 1, 1957, he expresses approval of the Western series, “Boots and Saddles,” but makes use of the opportunity to drag in by the heels the following outburst:

“It (‘Boots and Saddles’) isn’t one of the avant, or nouveaux, double-dome Westerns with delusions of intellectuality…it simply is a very good, straightforward film series without the fidgets or idgets of the egghead cowpokes, who too often are not the good, simple, homespun cowhands and nineteenth-century American soldiers of pioneer fortune, but irritating cerebral explosions of the new spate of TV authors who wish to extend lessons learned on their head-shrinker’s couches to those among the TV audience who, psychiatrically, are considered members of the great unwashed-brain brigade.”

The circumstance whereby the individual most in need of psychiatric aid is discovered to be he who denounces it most vigorously is too classic to require further emphasis.
O’Brian does have his occasional “normal” working days when his modest critical ability manifests itself, but there are others when he can find little to please him in this world. His column of September 24, 1957, for example, contained 36 separate items. Of these only three could be construed as complimentary.

Despite all this, the man is not entirely without virtue. If a program is truly inept, O’Brian can sometimes do an accurate, if heavy-handed, job of pinpointing its inadequacies. Upon occasion he has shown that, when he is not emotionally involved in the issues he is covering, he can be a capable reporter.

The case against O’Brian has so many particulars that I have been able to do little more than summarize it here. In doing so there is no question but that I have reflected on popular opinion, even among other New York columnists, most of whom openly dislike the man. What is perhaps open to question is the matter of result.

What good will have been done by the publication of this article? Well, first, as I have pointed out, performers who are relatively inexperienced will be cheered by the knowledge that O’Brian’s destruction criticisms are in most instances unworthy of respect. To be criticized by Crosby, Gould, Van Horne, Minoff, and the rest—especially in concert—is to have cause for concern. To be criticized by O’Brian may well be an indication that you have talent.

Will the publication of this essay have any beneficial effect upon O’Brian himself? It is not inconceivable. Perhaps O’Brian’s evil has been done all in innocence. Perhaps it truly has never occurred to him that he is the only TV critic in the nation who is rude, inaccurate, unchristian, and vengeful.

Perhaps this blunt presentation of the case for the entertainer will, after his initial shock and anger, lead him to consider mending his ways. Animosity is always unpleasant, and I am sure the hundreds of performers who presently dislike O’Brian because they disapprove of his methods would much prefer to be on the same sort of polite terms with him that they are with all other reviewers.

Clip Job: The World's Biggest Underground Bar

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 10, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
March 12, 1958, Vol. III, No. 20

Folk Music Down Under

By John Wilcock

What looks like the world’s biggest underground bar is all set to open up on Bleecker Street, just south of Washington Square, some time this month. It won’t, however, be merely a bar, because it’s to be owned and operated by Art D’Lugoff, a 34-year-old Villager who’s built his reputation in the past, chiefly by staging concerts of calypso groups, steel bands, Spanish dancers, and folk singers.

The most itinerant of these, says Art, are folk singers, and so the new bar, as yet untitled, is projected as something of an unofficial headquarters for all such strolling players. It is planned that somebody casually strumming a guitar or musing aloud about the pervasive aspects of the foggy, foggy dew will always be on tap, even though the beer won’t. (Bottled only, it will include brands from almost every country in the world.)

Location of the new bar is beneath the 60-year-old Greenwich Hotel, though the entrance is via an elaborate stairway on Thompson Street; and if you think that potential customers are likely to meet up with panhandlers in that area, you’re probably right.

When I looked over the cavernous catacomb last week it was undergoing transformation from what had been a long-disused basement, and we picked our way midst a welter of paintpots, tables, chairs, barrels, and posters advertising D’Lugoff’s various other enterprises. The cellar is tall enough and wide enough to accommodate at least a dozen of the old-type double-decker buses, assuming they could be negotiated down the narrow stairway, and will seat almost 500 people.

There’ll be food available—barbecued beef, chicken, and hamburger—but no minimum charge except at week-ends, on which evenings formal folk-music concerts will supplement the casual entertainment provided by the customers.

[John Wilcock is still going strong at ojaiorange.com]

Clip Job: Breslin on Kerouac in Brooklyn

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 9, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
March 5, 1958, Vol. III, No. 19

The Day Kerouac Almost, But Not Quite, Took Flatbush

By James Breslin

“Man, how come I like your book, but I don’t like you?” This remark was made amid loud jeering while Jack Kerouac played “meet the author” last Tuesday evening for Brooklyn college students.

Every campus Bohemian, Hobohemian, and Subterranean had donned crew-neck sweater, taken pen and notebook in hand, and marched right down to that lecture to find out just what this crazy Kerouac and his beat generation are all about, anyway.

Jack, however, who had left Columbia “because I quite the football team and had to start paying tuition,” declined to make any pronouncements for the academy.

“What’s the beat generation’s outlook on life?”

“It’s an illusion.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s an illusion, not real—man, you ought to know, you go to college!”

The simmering hostility of the crowd boiled up as Kerouac identified his literary influences as Dostoevski and Walt Kelly. He calmly informed the Brooklynites that he wrote because he was bored, and published to make money.

Jack further declared that he was a story-teller and preacher, like Dostoevski, and that his writing, like a Chinaman, “spits forth intelligence.”

When a student inquired whether Kerouac was at present sober, Danny Price, one of Jack’s bushed entourage, broke in:

“There’s probably not one person in this room who doesn’t think he can write a book. But remember, this guy you’re putting down has written one.”

“Why don’t you answer our questions?” someone complained.

“I’m a Zen Master,” replied Kerouac.

The prosecution rested, and the defense opened with two energetic readings by poets Philip Lamantia and Howard Hart. A French horn blew a muted background.

Then the Kerouac group interrogated the crowd.

“What about love—nobody has even mentioned love?”

With an answer forthcoming, Lamantia read his poem on love to close the hearing.

Clip Job: What is the Beat Generation?

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 7, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
February 19, 1958, Vol. III, No. 17

Which Definition of Beat?

Dear Sir:

As a probably Square who is not in the swim of Village social life at any level, I am hopelessly confused about the phenomenon known as the Beat Generation.

In your February 5 issue H.B. Lutz leaves the impression that Beats are identified with jazz, dope, indifferent sex, and a frenetic hedonism. That he finally characterizes the Beat as a (young) Square is a puzzling conclusion, as it seems a pure logical contradiction in terms.

In the same issue we find a Mr. A. Rosenberg (Letters to the Editor) referring to the Beat Generation in both quotes and the past tense. As I understand this writer, the Real Beat became passé “say six years ago.” Does Mr. Rosenberg mean that contemporary, practicing Beats are frauds, i.e., non-beat Beats?

Mike Wallace’s interviews with Jack Kerouac and Philip Lamentia (New York Post, January 21 and 22) serve only to baffle further. Mr. Kerouac here describes Beats as unique types of mystics who “love everything” yet are in despair over the “heavy burden of life.” Mr. Lamentia, in contrast, exhibits almost a Cheerful-Cherub sort of optimism. He speaks of beatness as an off-beat form of Christianity which synchronizes belief in traditional theological figures with jazz, marijuana, and mystic ecstasy. Lamentia’s claim to mysticism seems a contradiction of Lutz’ contention that the Beats are hedonistically oriented.

Finally, a Villager who would swear by his hipness and who purports to know personally classic Beat types classifies them as “pseudo-junkies.” The Beats, my informant insists, believe in nothing, do nothing, and have neither the courage to take narcotics nor the imagination to deny taking them.

These very few examples give evidence that the term “Beat Generation” means very different things to different people. How then, is it possible to communicate meaningfully about this socio-cultural phenomenon? What is the Beat Generation? Where is the Beat headquarters in New York? Could a statistically significant sample of beat-generation heads be counted? Or is the beat generation a lucrative, transitory myth invented by a few clever eccentrics to titillate the imagination and loosen the purse strings of the ideological Square slummer?

I. Horowitz

Jane Street

Clip Job: Dining Out at the Waverly Inn

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:12 AM, April 4, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
February 12, 1958, Vol. III, No. 16

Dining Out

Sitting there, neat and attractive in her salt-and-pepper suit, an orchid gracefully at her lapel, Mrs. Dettmers said, with only the faintest smile: “My husband thought it would be fun to have a tea room in Greenwich Village.” And he opened one.

That was in 1920. Thirty-eight years later, the Waverly Inn is still at the old stand—16 Bank Street, at the corner of Waverly Place—in the same handsome rooms, still serving plain honest New England food at wonderfully low prices. Lunches run from 85 cents to $1.50—“but they can build up to $1.75,” says Phyllis Dettmers. Dinners begin with soup or juice, vegetable plate, dessert, coffee at $1.50, and climb through a hash-type entrée, plus vegetables and salad, at $1.65, through fish or a casserole at $1.90, through the famous Waverly Inn chicken pie at $2—always a real pleasure—to the various roasts at $2.25 to $2.50.

People who discover the Waverly—I discovered it my third year in the Village—usually have come to stay. They are composed for the most part of business and professional people, on the staid side, quiet, well-mannered. Gentlemen are required to wear jackets at dinner, ladies requested not to wear slacks. “It seems over-fussy sometimes,” Mrs. Dettmers ventured, “but you know what sometimes happens.” As one who always guiltily suspected himself a prime provocator of the ruling, I did. And still I go back, tied and jacketed. Never left a scrap on my plate: literally.

Clarence Dettmers—he had once been cost-accountant for the Ritz dining room—died in 1951. Mrs. Dettmers carries on, keeping a tight rein on the books (“That’s my department”), recording every course ever ordered, charting with phenomenal accuracy just how many people will eat beef, fish, or chicken on any given day of the year, charting and predicting even the effect of that day’s weather.

Sarah M. Lowell, her partner, is the mastermind of the kitchen. Once head dietician of Post Graduate Hospital, she came to the Waverly in 1930, introduced to it the fish chowder and other specialties of her native Maine. Says Mrs. Dettmers of Miss Lowell’s menu-ing: “I can honestly say I’ve never got tired of our own food. The waitresses either.”

Famous visitors? “My husband always said our guests were privileged to eat here anonymously.” So the only noted visitor I know of is Mildred Natwick, who frequently comes to accumulate character ideas while she dines.

No bar. Closed Sundays. You’ll want to try the garden when spring comes. And be sure and try the leek soup and the Chicken Hawaiian.—Roger Maxwell

Clip Job: I've Got a Crush on Shari Lewis

Posted by Tony Ortega at 3:41 PM, April 3, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
February 5, 1958, Vol. III, No. 15

The Village Square

By John Wilcock
Maybe you don’t believe in love at first sight, or maybe you’ve just never been lucky in this respect, but with St. Valentine’s Day almost upon us. I’d like to tell you about Shari Lewis. She’s 23, 5 feet nothing, red-haired, sings well, and will soon be paying a visit to Hollywood to make a pilot TV movie.

If I have to be honest about the thing, I suppose I should admit outright that I got a crush on the girl the very first time I ever saw her, which happened to be at the unlikely hour of 8 o’clock on a recent Saturday morning.

Shari is the star of her own show, “Shariland,” over NBC television, and though this she introduces the world to her own private little family—Hush Puppy, a dachshund with a deep-South accent; Charley Horse; and Lamb Chop, a sheepish creature with long eyelashes who’s apprehensive of starting nursery school in case she’s unable to pass the entrance exam.

The puppets are worked by hand, although Shari, as the daughter of a former magician (now a professor of child-guidance), can operate marionettes too, and will soon have a book published: “How to Pull Strings and Influence Puppets.” The show’s humor is a whimsical amalgam of franctured English and animals-that-act-like-humans-would-if-humans-were-animals. (Trying unsuccessfully to cure her friend’s hiccups one day, Lamb Chop purred: “Look into my eyes, Charley Horse; look into my eyes closely and I’ll Simonize you.”)

I’ll be damned if I can explain how I came to be watching television at the impossible hour of 8 a.m. (weekdays, 9 a.m.), but philosophically, I’ll credit it to fate, thought it’s doubtful if fate will return the favor.

Frankly, I don’t think I’m going to make much progress in this little romance unless I can show that I have influential friends. Which is why I thought about you people.

I’ll be sending Shari a Valentine card if you’ll all do the same. Just mail it to WRCA, N.Y. and she’ll surely receive it okay. Put in a good word for me when you mail the card, and if there’s anything I can do for you in return, just let me know. I mean it. I’ll keep you posted on any developments there might be.

[John Wilcock is still going strong at ojaiorange.com]

Clip Job: Robert Moses & the Battle of Washington Square

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 3, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
February 26, 1958, Vol. III, No. 18

The Battle of Washington Square

Last week-end it looked as if the major engagement in the Battle of Washington Square was on in earnest. Leading the anti-Village forces was that practically invincible figure in New York civic affairs, Robert Moses. In response, the Village began to marshal its own force, which Mr. Moses has come to learn is considerable.

Word had got out on Thursday night that the Parks Department had requested the Board of Estimate to give its approval to a “map providing for realignment of two widely split, narrow roadways which were totally inadequate to serve as an extension of Fifth Avenue through the park.” Chairman Anthony Dapolito had that night informed his fellow members on the Local Planning Board that the Parks Department would make an attempt to put through its request for a 48-foot depressed roadway at a meeting of the Board of Estimate on the following Wednesday (today). This information had been given to Mr. Dapolito by Stuart Constable, Parks Department executive officer. Subsequent investigation indicated that there had been no mistake, and that this was actually the case.

Earlier in the week the Greenwich Village Association, under its chairman J.G.L. Molloy, decided to carry the fight for the Square directly to Mayor Wagner. Mr. Molloy, expressing the views of the GVA, asked the Mayor to close off Washington Square Park to all traffic. He asked also that the Mayor allow him and a representative committee of citizens to come to City Hall to state the Village case…

As of the hour this newspaper went to press, there had been no further developments on the Square. If a retreat on the part of the Parks Department has actually taken place, no one familiar with city affairs thinks it is more than a strategic, and probably momentary, withdrawal. The Parks Department holds one curious card. By its own admission, it will continue to allow the Square to deteriorate until it, the Parks Department, gets the traffic arteries it wants!!!

Clip Job: The New York Post: Sudsy Liberalism?

Posted by Tony Ortega at 8:00 AM, April 2, 2008

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives
January 29, 1958, Vol. III, No. 14

The New York Post: Sudsy Liberalism?

By Nat Hentoff

Shortly after I came to New York, a few years ago, a solicitous drunk in a bar fingered the New York Post in my hand and warned me with as much solemnity as he could collect: “Don’t you know that’s a Red paper, son? Throw it away and get a Journal.”

The missionary didn’t surprise me, since the Post at the time was putting mccarthy down in lower case. What did gradually perplex me was the attitude of most intellectuals I met in New York. The Post, the consensus seemed to be, was a container for shallow soap-opera liberalism aimed at the great overwashed middle and upper-middle class. “If one must read a newspaper,” I was told, “the Times is at least a paper of record.”

Admittedly, there is much in the Post that is as easy to parody as Time: Mrs. Schiff’s lumbering accounts of the daisies she has bestridden; Max Lerner’s constant ability to make trivia of nearly anything he tries to think about; and the variegated special series like: Lonely Girls in Arthur Murray Rest Rooms Who Became Kim Novak After Being Presented to Walter Reuther.

But there is also such a series as the first-rate “Drug Addicts, USA,” by Fern Marja and Bill Dufty that was recently concluded and that provided, I expect, the most oriented discussion of the situation ever printed in a daily paper. The Post has also several times uncovered the k