THE ITS VERY VILLAGE VOICEY FOR FREE

For over a dozen years, from 1977 to 1989, on the back pages of downtown New York’s former preeminent local crier, The (Village) Voice, was a picture window. An oddity by most any standards today- already then more an atavistic throwback to the underground press of yore- its curious fit within t he low-end commercialized zone of this once radical weekly seemed with each passing year ever-more like some out of time eccentricity, a past whimsy that by the grace of its wit somehow continued to survive on amidst pop culture’s pernicious progress. Thinking back on it now, Walter Gurbo’s Drawing Room was not just a weird hole punched into the wall of babble, but something of lost strand connecting the impoverished means and grand illusions of New York City at its late Seventies economic nadir and creative apogee to the rising bottom lines. He knew that he was the eye of The Village Voice, and covered anything from a Beat Generation cocktail party and the Stonewall uprising to the art scene. Fred McDarrah was an incredible early influence on the paper as a photographer and editor. Escalating costs and rising expectations that have only grown exponentially since then. The Voice had much more engaged photojournalismbeing on the scene, being very present. So playful, theSe drawings never grew up, got tired or sold out. The print run for the Village Voice is 1600 copies and it is delivered. Nothing can surprise New Yorkers it’s true, but that’s a good part of why they make a perfect audience for the absurdities that made the Drawing Room such a comfortably familiar fixture among all the other cropped views and mini-dramas glimpsed like prurient snatches in the tenements, towering offices, migratory street corner socials and (of course) subways of Gotham. It is used very successfully for quizzes, wine tastings, coffee mornings and has. In a maze of walls, canyons that make anything above gutter level seem like big sky country and a compartmentalized nexus of endless boxes, you get used to looking through windows. I’m not sure we could have ever really understood or collectively shared Gurbo’s vision if it were not inherently blinkered. It’s not a picture unless it has a frame, and it’s not a view unless that frame is a window. More than thirty years since they were first dreamt the drawings remain here, hut the room is gone.

That sort of space can hardly exist when neither the premium of real estate in the media nor the city can afford such follies. Also lost is this peculiar kind of disjointed view, now all but obliterated by the new tide of luxury high rises. Please contact Jane on if you wish to join.But to remind ourselves that we are still a tribe of urban eavesdroppers, it’s only when you listen rather than look at these pictures- perhaps hard to do as they remained staunchly wordless in their slapstick pantomimed anarchy- that the artist’s voice sounds oddly familiar. The choir is currently full, but we hold a waiting list.

THE ITS VERY VILLAGE VOICEY FOR FREE

The choir is run by Jane Smith, and is accompanied by her husband, David Smith. It is published by the Parish Council four times a year and distributed for free to all local Ardingly residents. Our last trip was to Bratislava and Vienna in October 2018. We then went on a short tour to Paris and environs in October 2013, and then Tuscany in May 2016. In October 2011 we went to Belgium, singing in Ghent cathedral, De Panne, Bruges and in the Last Post ceremony in Ypres.

Following this tour, we were invited to sing at the Kilkenny Celtic Festival in October 2009. We perform regularly in Seer Green and other places in Bucks, and went on a very successful short tour to Prague in 2008. While NYC needs genuine, hardliner local journalism, nothing will change until the formula of dopamine filling shitty. The culture of the village in itself is dead, and at best you'll find it spotted in places like sunset park, ridgewood, or ditmas park (seen several band performing on lawns).

We are a friendly, welcoming choir, who enjoy singing music of many different styles and from different eras. The Village Voice represented an era long gone. Now the choir is 80 strong, with members from many of the villages around Seer Green. We started out in 2005, and the initial membership was mainly made up of mums at Seer Green CE Combined School. I contributed investigative political pieces, commentary, and book reviews, thrilled to see my byline in a publication of such renown.

Special-purpose language in the publishing business. The Village Voice Returns, and Its Very Village Voice-y. Can refer both to characters and to authors. Based in Seer Green in Buckinghamshire, the Village Voices is a women's community choir. tchrist My impression from a bit of Googling is 'voicey' having an individual, recognizable way of speaking.

The its very village voicey