DAVID EDELSTEIN is Fresh Air‘s movie critic. He also happens to be the finest critical voice — in every sense of the word — of a generation. Today he does his year end wrap-up. But here he is talking about his early days trying to break into the big leagues:
At the Village Voice, my editor Karen Durbin had pretty firm leftist-feminist politics but was such a crazy hedonist that it never got in the way. My goal was always to shock her and make her laugh–and she probably let me get away with too many sophomoric things. But hey, if you can’t be a hot dog when you’re 25 years old at the Village Voice…! And Karen appreciated that I worked very hard. In the days before I had a computer, I’d hide under a desk when the guard locked the place at midnight, so it was just me and the rats until eight in the morning.
