Media Mole Rodeo: Wait, You Mean The Village Voice Isn't A Fun Place To Work?
We've continued to enjoy staring into the screaming id-stream that is the Gawker Media Mole inbox, so we thought we'd share another nugget of the joy with you today. Please keep in mind that all too soon we're going to have to pick a winner or two, and those lucky kids will be held down and forced to consume alcohol in our company and that of Page Six's Paula Froelich. Doesn't that make you want to give up some mole-y goods? Well, just in case, here's the address. After the jump, a dispatch from the beginning of the dark days at the Voice. Michael Musto sobbing at his desk isn't even the best part!
A few summers back, mere months before the ship really began to sink, I was an intern at the Village Voice. Though my boss rarely let his interns out of the cave he called his office, there was one day I really got to take in the wonder that was the voice staff. My boss at the time worked from home, calling in once or twice a day to bark out orders over speaker phone to the five of us in what most closely resembled some sad, slave-driven form of Charlie's Angels, and asked me to put in a request for a new phone line to his office. I did it, and a few hours later I got called into the office of former-editor-now-homeless-vagrant Doug Simmons.
Dude's fucking crazy. I'd only met him in passing before, but he sat me down like I'd been working with him for years and proceeded to give a 45 minute lecture about the seriousness of putting in a new phone line. I knew everyone on the staff hated this guy, but until then I didn't know why. To give you an idea of what this guy's demeanor is like, he presents all the charm of a swarmy businessman who spent two years locked in room with nothing but LSD to eat. So during his little tirade about how disrepectful it is for me to request a new phone line (because it was my evil bidding after all) he spins off on a rant about how he used to work as a cab driver in california in the 70s and how that and being in a punk band taught him about the fall of democracy in this country. Yea..
Once he was satisfied in exlplaining why this phone line wouldn't be possible he let me go and, shell-shocked, I went to get a cup of tea. I walked by journalist-of-the-year Nick Sylvester, an intern at the time I think, who was fawning over two other music interns and rarely ever seemed to be doing any work (imagine!). I was filling up my cup of hot water and saw Michael Musto at his desk and no joke, sobbing to himself in front of his computer. It was at that point I thought to myself how lucky I was to be a part of a news organization with such a bright future.
