“I like Christmas music. I like the schlock and I like the religion. I like sentimental innocence and I like trancing out on the same standards sung and resung. So here, with what I sincerely hope is the right mix of Christian charity and obsessed consumerism, is a guide to some of the season's better music”
Originally published December 23, 1981
“Incidents of violence against black people in the United States have reached epidemic proportions. When the police department — which is supposed to stop these crimes — is in fact implicated in them, genocide as official policy against black Americans cannot be far behind”
Originally published January 28, 1981
“These transcontinental urban griots echo the despair, pain, and anger of the South Bronx and Harlem (the world's two major rap centers), which a lot of the cool-jerk white liberals and b.s. black bourgeoisie don't want to hear.”
Originally published January 21, 1981
“For both black and white, there is a pride in the fact that Atlanta has long been an oasis of relative political enlightenment surrounded by the redneck mandates of the rest of the state”
Originally published May 5, 1981
“Every age gets the journalism it demands and the journalism it deserves. Right now, ankle-deep in the Reagan era, the situation looks pretty grim.”
Originally published December 31, 1981
“The 34-year-old millionaire developer weaned on Brooklyn Democratic politics was once again going after a spectacular tax break”
Originally published April 7, 1981
“City-assisted projects like Trump's million-dollar-a-condo-casbah for oil sheiks escape even the minimal minority-hiring requirements of the city”
Originally published July 29, 1981
“As far as I'm concerned, there are only two valid reasons to venture downtown. One of them is the second-hand bookstores, undeniably the best in the city. The other is the obligatory trek down to The Village Voice to hand in one's copy under the duress of a deadline”
Originally published January 7, 1981
“One of my supreme ambitions is to live to be 120 years old and be able to say I never set foot inside Bloomingdale's”
May 20, 2020
“Like other forms of ghetto street culture — graffiti, verbal dueling, rapping — breaking is a public arena for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, of style.”
Originally published April 22, 1981