Farewell, Village Voice

For the last decade or so, I have only occasionally read Village Voice, mostly online, but once upon a time, when I was in my 20s and living in Boston, acquiring a copy of the Voice at one of the news stands there, and perusing it to find out what was happening in New York, was one of the highlights of my week. (Back then I also read the New York Times in print almost every day too.) The Voice provided a trove of news about politics, in New York and beyond, as well as some of the most invigorating criticism about art, entertainment, the broader culture and the world, that you might find anywhere. For me it constantly outmatched Boston's own Phoenix, that city's alternative paper, and was part of a national ecosystem of similar papers that offered fresh, often left-leaning and progressive but always counter-mainstream perspectives on the state of the world. Now, the Voice is gone.

It's where I first learned about New York's legendary Public Theater and its pathblazing directors Joseph Papp and George C. Wolfe; it was one of the mainstream places where I regularly found informative reportage, Andrew Kopkind, Richard Goldstein and others, about about HIV and AIDS. It was a regular-go to learn about the newest and less common films, books, music, theater and performances of all kinds. The Voice also brought to me and countless readers original photography (Sylvia Plachy, C. Carr, etc.), cartoons by Jules Feiffer, Ted Rall, Lynda Barry, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Tom Tomorrow, and literature (I recollect reading a story by the great poet Elizabeth Alexander's there, among other gems). I was enthralled by Greg Tate's, Joan Morgan's and Gary Indiana's criticism, and when my friend Scott Poulson-Bryant (now Dr. Poulson-Bryant, and a professor at Fordham University) secured an internship and then a job there, it seemed like an unimaginably wonderful thing had occurred. Other than Greg Tate, the one columnist I made sure never to miss was Michael Musto, whose tour through NYC's once inimitable queer club scene will probably never be equalled again.

When C and I moved to the New York area, the Voice remained a paper I rarely missed reading. I'd even looked in its ads section in my search for an apartment when heading to NYU. When Annotations appeared, a young writer named Colson Whitehead wrote one of the most insightful, praiseworthy reviews the book received, and it meant everything to me that it appeared in the Voice. When the Voice became free in New York in 1996--which I loved but also figured was a bad sign--I would grab a copy in Manhattan before heading back to New Jersey, where we still had to pay for them. Yet I also paid attention to the labor strife that was wracking the paper in 2005 and 2006, and again in 2013: editors fired or resigning, writers sharing their fears over decreased benefits and the new owners' tunnel vision, and worse. Even as its leadership changed, the Voice remained one of the rare news organs that seemed not to coddle the rich and powerful--I recall Wayne Barrett's extensive  reporting on Rudy Giuliani's administration, and the time it ran an article outing New York's conservative Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan--and continued to employ incisive writers like Steven Thrasher. Yet in the end, its most recent owner, and the shifts in the media industry, ensured its demise.

Established in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Willcock, and Norman Mailer, the Voice was the US's first alternative weekly, and received a wide array of honors over its 63-year existence, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Press, and George Polk awards. It survived a number of owners over the years, until it was sold in October 2015, by its penultimate owner, Voice Media Group, to billionaire heir Peter Barbey. In August 2017, the Voice announced it would cease to exist as a print publication, and its final print issue appeared on September 17, 2015. Although Barbey said that he wanted to save the Voice, and despite his considerable financial reserves, he claimed that financial exigencies required him to shut down the paper, even as he allegedly has been searching for someone to buy it. Yesterday, the electronic edition ceased publication, half the staff were laid off, and those who remain will assist for a limited period in archiving the paper's rich store of articles and materials. Yet the fact remains that one of the once truly vital organs of reportage, investigation and criticism, for New York, the US and the globe, is gone, and with it passes an era--many really--that we will somebody

Abramovic Video Game + Gamers Solve Difficult Chemistry Puzzle

In the spring of 2010, while I was teaching that wonderful Conceptual Art/Writing class, one of my most favorite of all the courses I've taught over the last 15 or so years, I had the good fortune to be in New York and go to the Museum of Modern Art to see Marina Abramovic perform "The Artist Is Present" live, and subsequently blogged about it. I even stood in line to participate in the face-off, but after waiting for a long while I bagged and instead caught some of the other exhibits, including the enthralling retrospective of her work. I did draw her on my iPhone, though, because the guard forbade me to take photos while in line (though as countless other blogs and sites demonstrated others present did not hesitate to keep photographing away, and, in any case, I did snap some pictures once out of his sightline). As I say, I was lucky; many New Yorkers and everyone who could not get to New York were unable to catch the performance, and have viewed it online, in still photos and via MoMa's servers, as well as via countless blogs. That was the way most of my students saw the performance.

Pippin Barr, a New Zealander now resident in Denmark who creates art and games, writes commentary about technological topics, blogs and teaches at the Center for Computer Game Research at IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, however, has come up with a video game, entitled "The Artist Is Present," that allows participants the virtual experience of facing off with (or against) Abramovic.  But, it has a few catches: as I and others experienced in real time, if you play the video game you must wait in line for a period of time, and it restricts the hours when you can play (to MoMa's). There are no guards preventing photos or screen captures for that matter, though.  The Village Voice's Rosie Gray, who tried to play the game, interviewed Barr last Friday for the Voice's "Running Scared" column, and he had some interesting things to say about it, his long interest in comics and how this translated into "The Artist Is Present," and what games he's planning for the future. Next year his book, How To Play a Video Game, will be published by Awa Press.  When I have a free moment I'm going to try out his game.  On a related note, I also take it that Abramovic (nor MoMa) is not hassling him for use of the name/concept/etc. "The Artist Is Present," which is great to hear.  But then doing so would not be in the spirit of conceptual art or Conceptual Art, wouldn't it?

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Speaking of games, a remarkable story: a brilliant group of gamers using Foldit, an online collaborative game, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled researchers for years, and did so in astonishing time. Three weeks. As Alan Boyle relates it in this MSNBC article, what they did was to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme, retroviral protease, from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Doing so would aid researchers in designing drugs to neutralize HIV. Neither sheer mindwork nor computers programs geared towards protein folding, like Rosetta, sufficed in mapping out the right configuration, but Foldit, which has over 236,000 registered participants, allows players to tinker with virtual molecular structures--much as in chemistry classes with physical models, but with far greater complexity--and rewards those who devise the most "elegant structure[s]," according to chemical laws, with points, while subtracting points for designs tending toward the opposite direction.

A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular puzzle. (University of Washington)

A small subgroup, the Foldit Contenders Team, comprising 12-15 regular participants living in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, other European countries, and New Zealand, solved the problem.  These players "worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme," astounding lead researcher, University of Washington biochemist Firas Khatib and his colleagues.  Rawstory.com notes that "The exploit [will be] published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where--exceptionally in scientific publishing--both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors." Collaboration as a form of play, with incentives, apparently does pay off, and video games can be a serious epistemological tool. Foldit, which was developed and  by UW computer scientist Seth Cooper, and according to Boyle's article, it and similar games, forms of what he calls "citizen science," may prove vital in solving and resolving other scientific quandaries, whether they be pharmacological puzzles or bioengeering.  Boyle ends his article with an email from "mimi," one of the participants in solving the Pfizer-Mason enzyme problem, who notes that rather than receiving individual recognition within the article the gamers asked to be accredited as Foldit Contenders Team and tops off the missive by requesting that instead of a real name, Boyle use the gaming tag: mimi. Indeed.