The Village Voice building at 36 Cooper Square will become just another building. Hartz Mountain Industries has decided, as part of its renovation of the building, to take down the black-lettered "Village Voice" from the facade of the building, according to the alt weekly's blog.

If the paper's blog is anything to go by, staffers are less than pleased:

The plan is to make the place look "like it did years ago," [Hartz Mountain Assistant Vice President Brian] Chabrunn told the blog. He also says the removal of our name is "no secret" though, as we mentioned earlier, nobody told us.

Viewers of True Blood, HBO's Southern vampire gothic, may have noticed a politically loaded piece of background art this past weekend.

Prominently featured in a scene set at Fangtasia, a vampire bar, was a painting of George W. Bush sucking blood from the neck of the Statue of Liberty. (A version can be found here.) The image was created by comic book artist and illustrator Alex Ross and ran on the cover of The Village Voice in October 26, 2004 to accompany an article by Nixonland author Rick Perlstein. At the time, the image struck some on the right as offensive.  read more »

In the wake of Norman Mailer's death Saturday, it's seemed like every news outlet in the city has had extended coverage of the writer's rollicking life and his influence on American letters. But the paper Mailer helped found in 1955, The Village Voice, had surprisngly little to say.

This week's edition of the paper contains a 1,200-word obit that starts at the bottom of a page dominated by a large cartoon. The cover, which highlights a story about the dangers of getting hit by a bus in New York, makes no mention of Mailer. But the paper did run a two-page spread on longtime Voice photographer Fred McDarrah who passed away last week--which it did flag on the cover.

Voice editor Tony Ortega explains the paper's thinking after the jump...  read more »

It's true that Norman Mailer had a "short relationship" with The Village Voice after helping found it in 1955, as Voice editor in chief Tony Ortega told Media Mob earlier today, by way of explaining his paper's decision to mark Mailer's death with only a 1200-word obit on an inside page. The incendiary weekly column he wrote for the paper only lasted a few months, and once he gave that up—apparently he couldn’t take all the typographical errors--he pretty much checked out.

But according to one of Mailer's two co-founders, Edward Fancher, he was quite devoted to the paper while he worked there.

   read more »

Buried deep inside Tom Robbins' article this week on the taxi strike was this interesting line about Noach Dear, a commissioner on the Taxi and Limousine Commission who is reluctant to discuss publicly his race for civil court judge:

“When the Voice recently tried to ask TLC chairman Matthew Daus what he thought about the massive amount of campaign funds that one of his commissioners, former city councilman Noach Dear, was harvesting from taxi companies, Daus ignored the inquiries.”

Here’s one small example of that I found in about five minutes of research. In June, Dear received a $200 donation from the “How Are You” corporation, whose address is 41-25 36th Street. At that same address is All Taxi Management, Inc., which donated $500.

A man who answered the phone at All Taxi told me there are indeed two separate companies at the address, but that All Taxi and How Are You are owned by the same person, Neil Greenbaum.