That Scrappy Little Downtown Weekly
Indulge me here a second while I dig open an old scab. In the spring of 1992 I was destitute, living in Brooklyn, writing for an alternative weekly in Philadelphia, and angling to weasel my way into the pages of NYPress. In the early Nineties the offerings across New York’s alternative newspaper landscape ranged from the venerable The Village Voice to a slew of tiny neighborhood-specific pennysavers. Founded in 1988 by a trio of refugees from Baltimore, the Press was still the new gimpy kid on the scene, and being the new kid had something to prove.
As outsiders, the immediate challenge facing the editors was out-New Yorking the existing New York papers. In contrast to the stuffy and predictably doctrinaire Old Left wheeze of the Voice, the Press was raucous, drunken, snotty and punk rock. Despite having a staunch Republican owner/editor-in-chief in the form of Russ Smith, the paper had no discernible political agenda, or any agenda at all apart from good writing and a clear desire to rile up the masses. It was confrontational, hep, funny, smartass and unpredictable. Cover stories might concern the city’s shadowy cockfighting scene, an interview with a porn star, a celebration of NYC’s growing pot delivery industry, or a first-person account of a colonoscopy. Russ Smith usually offered some conservative media criticism or an update on his latest dose of oyster-related food poisoning. Senior editor John Strausbaugh, the architect who forged the paper’s shape and attitude, covered indie and underground publishing. Spike Vrusho’s stream-of-consciousness sports reporting might have seemed incoherent at first, until you realized it made perfect sense if you read it in William Burroughs’voice. Godfrey Cheshire wrote wise, clear-eyed and eloquent highbrow film reviews, Paul Lukas wrote obsessively about unlikely and unheralded consumer products, Howard Kaplan somehow made the dull banalities of his daily life strangely compelling, and the menagerie of off-kilter geeky music critics covering the East Village scene was headed up by J.R. Taylor, an ultraconservative Christian who loved rock ’n’ roll, trashy movies, and porn. Each issue also included a smattering of one-off first person pieces about bad dates, worse jobs, bizarre sexual encounters, drug experiences, crimes and assorted mental and physical traumas. To top it all off, the Press boasted some of the best illustrators and comic strips in the city, including work by underground luminaries Tony Millionaire, Kaz, Ben Katchor and Danny Hellman. The core of every issue was always the lengthy letters section, where shut-ins, the feeble-minded, the easily offended, and the simply deranged wrote frothing, paranoid, obscenity-laced diatribes against something that had appeared in the previous week’s issue. The letters section was always a hoot.
To outsiders who rarely bothered picking it up, the Press was generally dismissed as either a right wing version of the Voice (it most certainly was not) or an incoherent, foul-mouthed, third-rate pennysaver. Those who read it religiously back then knew better. The Press was an ongoing streetwise barometer, and one that was usually five or six steps ahead of everyone else when it came to documenting shifting cultural trends.
Being a young, snotty, drunken punk rock kid with no clear agenda of his own, I figured the Press was where I needed to be. Try as I might, though, I wasn’t having a whiff of success. For all the stories and pitches I’d submitted, the fucking editors seemed bound and determined to ignore me, simply out of spite.
Then one week in that spring of ’92 they ran an ad announcing they were looking for a second film critic. Godfrey was excellent, one of the smartest and most respected critics in the business, though he tended to champion obscure art films and unknown Iranian directors. Way I interpreted it, they were looking for some kind of populist to provide a little counterpoint by skewering the big Hollywood releases.
I was no populist, and had only run a few scattered movie reviews at the Philly paper, but considering I was a lifelong insufferable movie geek, it seemed a given. This was my clear ticket into the paper. Those smug bastards wouldn’t be able to ignore me any more. The ad instructed would-be applicants to write two full-length reviews and send them into Strausbaugh for his considered judgment, so that’s what I set about doing.
The next morning I caught an early matinee of Paul Verhoeven’s overhyped and supposedly controversial Basic Instinct, which had just opened. By three that afternoon I’d written what I was sure was a profound and razor-sharp review (if I’m not mistaken I cleverly entitled it “Basically Stinky”). Then to illustrate my vast range, I wrote a glowing review of the 1975 all-star Satanic wonderment The Devil’s Rain. I printed out both reviews (these were pre-Internet days, remember), slipped them into an envelope, and sent the sure-fire package off to Mr. Strausbaugh with a sparkling cover letter. Then I opened a beer and sat back to wait for the congratulatory phone call, which I expected to arrive the next day.
Well, the call didn’t come the next day. Two weeks later I still hadn’t heard anything. Then much to my horror and shock, I opened the latest issue of the Press to find Godfrey had been joined by some HACK named Matt Zoller Seitz, a clearly delusional sort who was under the cockeyed impression he was some kind of “film expert.” What the hell was that all about?
Obviously some egregious mistake had been made. Had this diabolical Seitz ne’er-do-well intercepted my package and slapped his name on my sample reviews? Had that bumbling oaf Strausbaugh dialed the wrong number to deliver the good news, not realizing his mistake until it was too late? It wouldn’t have been the first time. In a rare moment of lucid rationality for those days, I opted against getting drunk, calling the NYPress offices and railing in a high-pitched voice about the unfathomable injustice of it all. Instead I figured it would be easier to simply stew, vowing to maintain a deep and scalding resentment for this “Matt Zoller Seitz” character until my final rattling breath.
Then two things happened. First, I started reading Matt’s reviews, and realized instantly he was much smarter than I was, more fully versed in film history, and a much better writer. Okay, then. Never mind.
Second, I did manage to con my way into a regular writing gig at the Press a few months later.
Let me pause here a moment to offer a quick object lesson in the vagaries of quarter-century old memory. The above story is one I’ve clung to fiercely for a very long time. The only problem is that I first began writing for the Press in 1993. In 1991, the same year Godfrey started at the paper, Matt graduated from college and took a job at the Dallas Observer. Meanwhile, a few other critics appeared in the Press opposite Godfrey, but they never lasted long. Matt didn’t move to New York until 1995, at which point—a full two years after I started—he joined Godfrey on a permanent basis in the film section. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but dammit I will continue to cling to that story anyway.
Back then, the main offices of the NYPress were housed on the ninth floor of the stately and gorgeous Puck Building, which stands on the border between the East Village and the Lower East Side at the corner of Houston and Lafayette. It was a perfect location considering the nature of the paper, right smack dab in the heart of everything that was happening in the New York underground scene in those days. There were also half a dozen bars less than a block away, which helped.
Apart from the NYPress on the top floor, the rest of the building housed classroom space for NYU and Pratt, art and photography studios, a couple early Internet startups and some small magazines. There were sprawling ballrooms on the ground and fifth floors, and just inside the main entrance you could find an honest-to-god rattling antique manual elevator, complete with a creepy and leering Polish elevator operator named Josef. Wandering into the building not knowing any better, it could feel like you’d just stepped through a portal into the 1930s. Then you got up to the ninth floor.
When you first opened the heavy green door and entered the Press’ office, you found yourself in a small reception area with creaking hardwood floors, a couple molded plastic chairs, three tall, narrow and filthy windows looking out toward Broadway, and a decidedly (by design) unpleasant receptionist. If you were able to talk your way past the receptionist—a post I held from 1995 to 1998—you discovered the heart of the operation was mostly open space. Although there were a couple side offices and two rows of cubicles for the ad salespeople, for the most part the office simply flowed from the sales department to administration to distribution to art and production. Shortly before I came on board, the editorial staff packed up and moved down to a separate office in a dim and forgotten corner of the eighth floor. They claimed it was because things tended to be too damn loud on nine, but I always suspected they were hoping no one would ever be able to find them down there.
Part of the real magic of the Press in those days was that the office environment was as anarchic and funny and wooly bully as the paper itself, mostly because the staffers (like the paper’s writers and artists) were a motley crew of eccentrics.
Every night at five, Russ, Strausbaugh, associate editor Sam “Skippy” Sifton and art director Michael Gentile would adjourn to their regular bar around the corner. It was there the real editorial decisions for the coming weeks were made as they got royally sloshed. Any staffers or freelancers who wanted to join them were free to do so, so long as they were prepared to deal with the free-flowing (if lighthearted) insults that marked the nightly cabal.
I would be a liar and a fool to deny the office environment was fueled by a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex on the ratty office couch, on the desks and behind the elevator, as well as occasional brief explosions of violence, but somehow the paper still managed to come out every week.
Around 1995, the NYPress had finally earned a growing reputation as a viable, cranky, smart and cynical alternative to that dusty and self-righteous The Village Voice. You never knew what you were going to find in any given issue of the Press, but you could rest assured there would be something that made you laugh really hard or pissed you off to no end. The paper began to grow considerably, with more ads, more pages, and more writers and artists to fill those pages. C.J. Sullivan, a court officer and former cop, came aboard to write Bronx-based crime and human interest stories. Jonathan Ames wrote about his assorted fetishes. Aspiring actress Amy Sohn chronicled her endless sexual misadventures. Alan Cabal channeled Hunter S. Thompson while writing about Satanism and conspiracies. Little Ned Vizzini, who started at the Press when he was about fifteen, documented life as a gifted, overachieving New York teenager. Mistress Ruby offered accounts of her day job at an upscale dungeon, George Tabb covered the punk scene, David Lindsay wrote about patents and inventors, and William Monahan wrote long, brilliant and wickedly funny essays about whatever the hell he wanted. The paper also contained a good deal of serious political commentary, but again commentary that ran the gamut from anarchist to ultraconservative, including weekly columns by notables like Christopher Caldwell and Alexander Cockburn.
Despite my shaky memory to the contrary, Matt joined Godfrey on a weekly basis in October of 1995 with his review of Paul Auster’s improvisational Blue in the Face. Together they made the film section a centerpiece of any given issue, garnering a large percentage of the both enraged and laudatory mail in the likewise growing and crazy letters section.
Godfrey was a hip bespectacled Southern gentleman, polite, direct and charming. Along with his breadth of knowledge about the film business, he was friends with R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and quite familiar with the ins and outs of the Southern music scene. Not only was he the first American critic to call attention to the bourgening Iranian film industry (often reporting directly from Tehran), but over there he was considered a celebrity. Matt was younger, a product of the Star Wars generation, but equally sharp and extremely funny. While Godfrey focused more on indie arthouse cinema, Matt was a genre specialist. I could talk to Matt about most anything across the vast spectrum of American pop culture—not just films, but TV, music, books, whatever. Long before Paul Thomas Anderson appeared on the scene, I remember the two of us trying to decide what living director would be best suited to adapt a Thomas Pynchon novel (Matt’s vote was for Cronenberg, mine for Craig Baldwin). His frighteningly hilarious review of the big-budget all-star Michael Crichton trainwreck Sphere [see page 116] remains a personal favorite, a review that stuck with me for years after first reading it.
The most important thing to keep in mind through all this is that at the NYPress, despite all its eccentricities and drunken tomfoolery, the writing was always paramount. Regardless what you had to say, if you didn’t say it extremely well and with a certain unblemished pizzazz, you’d never make it past Strausbaugh or Sam Sifton. We could have run semi-literate rants about city council or some local band, just piled up the obscenities and crude insults, but that’s too cheap. and too easy to ignore. The fact writers like Matt, Godfrey, Strausbaugh, Monahan and the rest were so damnably talented and intelligent, readers, whether agreeing or pulling out bloody clumps of hair, were foreced to pay attention and respond to what they were reading.
In May of 1997, the editors announced they were bringing on a third film critic. Things were going gangbusters at the Press. They were exciting times to be around the office. The paper was still growing, and we’d even forced the Voice to go free in order to compete. Still, there was a bit of head-scratching at the announcement. Godfrey and Matt seemed to have things well in hand, everyone liked and admired them a bunch, so why bring in this Armond White?
I admit being a bit startled when he first entered the office. Armond can be an imposing figure if you don’t know him—a tall and burly man in a trenchcoat, mostly bald with thick glasses. He had an odd way of talking, both shy and deeply self-assured. I sometimes had the odd feeling when we spoke he was actually talking to someone else who wasn’t there. I got over that, though, and in the years that followed we talked quite a bit, mostly about goings on at the paper and, of course, films.
Born in Detroit, Armond first appeared on the New York scene as editor of the Brooklyn’s City Sun. An African-American film critic, his thought-provoking, unpredictable perspective quickly established him as the go-to critic among his peers, who always took notice of his challenging mindset. Writing from his own unique perspective, he also became one of the city’s most unpredictable voices, often flummoxing readers and fellow critics alike by, among other things, publicly turning against Spike Lee after hailing Do the Right Thing, championing Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and pointedly attacking fellow critics for bad faith reasoning. Race aside, Armond was a staunch individualist, unswayed by the general consensus about this or that film.
It turns out Godfrey was the one who recommended Armond in the first place, the two coming to know each other through the New York Film Critics Circle. In accordance with the well-established attitude of the paper, Armond was seemingly brought on to piss the hell out of cinephiles, casual moviegoers, and even people who hadn’t seen a new film in years. Being the genetically contrary sort, he seemed to do this with ease. An intellectual African-American film critic who attacks African-American filmmakers while heaping praise on Steven Spielberg? That’s just crazy talk! Why, I oughtta...
But Armond wasn’t merely a provocateur—again that would be too easy. He was extremely intelligent, had a fierce command of the language, and knew his pop culture history as well as anyone, but wrote from a singular point of view which, while absolutely valid, ran counter to most mainstream sensibilities. As controversial as his reviews could be (when comparing Titanic and Amistad, he described the former as “a film for people who would rather watch white folks die than black folks live”) [see page 114], he could always cogently defend his arguments.
In a blink, compared with the Voice, the Times, or any other major publication with multiple film critics, the press could lay claim to having what was unquestionably the most unique trio of radically distinct voices in town, which was reflected on those rare occasions when all three were allowed to review the same film.
The film section became a very lively place, with all three taking jibes at one another in their reviews. Although I was never in attendance, I’m told the regular meetings in which they divvied up who got to review what films in the coming weeks could get mighty heated at times. Still, the mutual respect they felt for one another was always evident. Most of the time, anyway.
Just a quick personal aside here. Godfrey, being a Southerner, always took some offense when films portrayed Southerners as a bunch of inbred hicks. That’s understandable. But in his 1996 review of Fargo [see page 58], he transferred that umbrage to the Coen Brothers, accusing them of portraying the solid upstanding folk of the northern Midwest as a bunch of rubes and buffoons. The exaggerated accents were the dead giveaway. Well, having grown up in the upper Midwest myself, and with most of my extended family living not that far from Brainerd, Minnesota, where much of the film takes place, I had no choice but to call him on it. “Godfrey,” I remember telling him. “The Coens weren’t making fun of them—those were all my relatives.” I didn’t mention that many of my relatives were, in fact, rubes and buffoons.
Later in 1997, mostly because we needed more space, the paper packed up, left the storied Puck Building, and moved into a new office on the fourteenth floor of 333 Seventh Avenue, a couple blocks due south of Madison Square Garden. Again I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that with the move, things slowly started to change.
The freewheeling open office of the Puck suddenly became a honeycomb of cubicles, separate wings for each department, and lots of closed office doors. It was a bit like moving a rambunctious carnival sideshow into the headquarters of an insurance underwriter.
Things grew much quieter. The paper’s various departments were now isolated from one another, and interaction was kept to a minimum. As the receptionist at the Puck, I was privy to everything that was going on at the paper via simple osmosis. Learned a helluva lot more than I wanted to sometimes. Up in the new Chelsea digs, separated from the rest of the office by a heavy wooden door, I only learned what was happening when someone passing through the lobby decided to fill me in. There were a few of the inevitable staff changes, some for the better, others less so, and in 1998 I was finally allowed to leave the reception desk to become a full-time staff writer. The paper changed its format and logo a few times. Sections came and went. Even the traditional post-work bar conference seemed to fizzle in the new location, which suddenly seemed so far away from what had always been the Press’ street level lifesblood in the East Village. But crazies kept finding their way up to the fourteenth floor, the writers and artists kept at it, and the paper still came out, and still delighted, dismayed and disgusted readers in equal propportions.
In December of 2000, shortly after his seminal two-part “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema” essay sparked a nationwide debate [see page 181], Godfrey was abruptly fired. It came as a surprise to everyone, particularly Godfrey. Russ Smith claimed it was because Godfrey had been there a decade and it was time for a change. There were also rumors it was simply a move to save money, or revenge for a recent hit job he’d run on The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane. Whatever the reason, Godfrey’s sudden disappearance from the Press prompted an eruption of angry letters from readers who’d come to rely on his balanced and thoughtful reviews every week. No replacement was ever brought in, leaving Matt and Armond to soldier on alone.
When the twin towers came down in September of 2001, Russ Smith, who lived just a few blocks north of the WTC, began thinking it was time to move his wife and kids back to Baltimore. As the paper’s owner and president as well as editor-in-chief, this raised one very large question.
In December of 2002, he called the entire staff together for an impromptu meeting. Throughout the paper’s history, he’d only done that once before. The first full-staff meeting was a victory rally to announce the Voice had buckled and decided to go free. A lot of us were pretty certain this one wasn’t going to be so rah-rah.
After gathering us all together, Russ announced he’d just sold the paper to a small media company that put out a handful of gay publications, including the weekly New York Blade. As he was making this announcement, someone else put in a call to Strausbaugh, the man who made the paper what it was. Strausbaugh was on vacation in Florida at the time, and when he answered his phone he was informed he’d just been fired. He had always been the heart of the paper, and no one knew what was going to happen after he was gone.
It was a rough few weeks as the new owners moved the staffs of their other publications into the Press offices and undertook the first of what would be several rounds of firings and pay cuts. A number of regular contributors walked in solidarity with Strausbaugh, and over the next few years most of the writers and artists so closely associated with the paper would disappear for one reason or another.
The new owners made it clear the paper’s historically confrontational style was bad for business. The editorial staff was booted into a string of shabby cubicles in a forgotten wing of the office. It was obvious they considered us an embarrassment, an unruly adopted kid who needed to learn to shut up and behave.
After that things just got sad. Half a dozen editors came and went, each more incompetent than his predecessor, but more in tune with the owners’ vision of transforming the paper into a bland pennysaver that offended no one. The page count began shrinking. A memo was circulated instructing the writers (in direct contradiction to the Press’ strict longstanding policy) to shamelessly plug advertisers in their stories whenever possible. As the only staff writer, I found myself assigned pieces about coat sales and flower shows, and niceties like “copyediting,” “proofreading,” and “factchecking” went out the window.
In the spring of 2006, Matt’s wife Jennifer died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving him alone with two young children. It was a terrible shock to everyone at the paper, particularly those of us who’d known him since he first came aboard over a decade earlier. A few weeks later in June, he submitted his final review, for Superman Returns [see page 410], and retired from the Press, leaving Armond the paper’s sole film critic.
At almost the precise moment Matt was submitting his final review, I was called into the then-editor’s office and fired. He explained I was being canned because I was “not a team player.” I told him that had he asked me thirteen years earlier I could have told him straight out that I wasn’t a team player, thus saving everyone a lot of grief. But of course he hadn’t been around back then, and back then being a team player was the last thing anyone was looking for at the Press.
It was kind of a relief, though it took me a few days to realize it. It just wasn’t fun anymore. The only two writers left from that Golden Era in the late Nineties were J.R. Taylor and Armond, both of them friends of mine. I had little or nothing to say to the blank-eyed little twenty-year-old urchins who surrounded me in the office. Plus I was tired of writing about coat sales.
Ironically enough, as I was carrying my box of meager belongings to the subway after leaving the office for the last time, I ran into Armond on the sidewalk. He was just on his way into the office to pick up his mail, and I told him what happened. We stood there on Seventh Avenue and talked for a long time. It was good to see him. Only recently did it occur to me that my tenure at the paper began with Matt (I’m still clinging to that story), and ended with Armond. In an odd way it made sense.
The Press was sold again shortly after that, and shortly after that it simply vanished. It’s worth noting that after it folded and the domain name was sold, any and all online archives of the NYPress evaporated. Even the New York Public Library collection of back issues is spotty at best. The Press, in it’s eighteen year run, may well have represented the last truly great expression of the possibilities of an honestly independent underground paper. The fact it’s been so thoroughly erased in the Internet Age helps explain why volumes like this are so very necessary. The Press Gang may not only be the best historical record you’re likely to come across concerning the state of the cinematic arts in the Nineties and early 21st century, but it also stands as a reminder of what reading and writing and thinking were like in what may well be the final literate era we’ll ever know.
After leaving the Press, Godfrey continued writing criticism and went on to make a documentary about his North Carolina family’s plantation, Moving Midway, which had its New York premiere at the New Directors/New Films festival, gained national distribution and was added to MoMA’s permanent film collection. Armond continued writing as well, continued to be a singular voice running counter to the establishment, and continued garnering a lively response. Among other things, he authored books about Prince and Tupac Shakur. Matt authored several books about film and television, curated a number of film series, and began producing and directing a number of indie projects. His debut feature, Home, was imbued with a spirit that always reminded me of those early rollicking days at the paper.
Regardless of the dispiriting clear decline in those final years, the NYPress did leave behind a fairly remarkable legacy, with so many who’d gotten their start in the pages of that scrappy little downtown weekly going on to some mighty big things. Long before he became the darling of the NPR crowd, David Sedaris debuted in the Press after Strausbaugh edited a sloppy collection of handwritten notes on looseleaf paper into a story called “The Santaland Diaries.” William Monahan became an Oscar-winning screenwriter and director. Jonathan Ames likewise moved to the West Coast and created Bored to Death and other TV series. Other Press alumni have gone on to win Emmys, Pulitzers and Pushcart prizes. A number of stories that first appeard in the Press have been included in the annual Best American Essays anthologies. Contributors have worked on hugely popular cartoons, wrote award-winning bestsellers, and took high-profile jobs at The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The National Enquirer, the NY Post and New York magazine. It was a bit like Hollywood in the Seventies, when Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles and so many others came out of the Roger Corman school of no-budget indie filmmaking to quietly infiltrate the major studios. Pretty amazing to look back now and see the long-term effects that snotty underground paper has had on mainstream culture, considering when we all started out, our primary goal was to give that same culture the finger.
jim knipfel
2019
Jim Knipfel was a columnist and staff writer at the NYPress from 1993 to 2006, as well as the paper’s receptionist there for a spell in the middle. He is the author of Slackjaw, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, The Blow-Off and several other books.