Lucking Out
My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell.”
That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him. Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and, paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as “Downtown” became a category of art and life unto itself, he embarked upon his sentimental education, seventies New York style.
This portrait of a critic as a young man is also a rollicking, acutely observant portrait of a legendary time and place. Wolcott was taken up by fabled film critic Pauline Kael as one of her “Paulettes” and witnessed the immensely vital film culture of the period. He became an early observer-participant in the nascent punk scene at CBGB, mixing with Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, and Tom Verlaine. As a Village Voice writer he got an eyeful of the literary scene when such giants as Mailer, Gore Vidal, and George Plimpton strode the earth, and writing really mattered.
A beguiling mixture of Kafka Was the Rage and Please Kill Me, this memoir is a sharp-eyed rendering, at once intimate and shrewdly distanced, of a fabled milieu captured just before it slips into myth. Mixing grit and glitter in just the right proportions, suffused with affection for the talented and sometimes half-crazed denizens of the scene, it will make readers long for a time when you really could get mugged around here.
BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook includes an excerpt from James Wolcott's Critical Mass.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grunge, glitz, and gossip decorate this lively, catty memoir of Manhattan's Me Decade creative ferment. Vanity Fair critic Wolcott (Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants) arrived as a college dropout in 1972 and scored a writing gig at the Village Voice a snake-pit of feuds and nude editing that inducted him into the city's hippest scenes. Chief among these was the punk-rock incubator at the bar CBGB, which affords him vibrant portraits of Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, and other punk luminaries against a backdrop of Hells Angels. Wolcott cameos celebrities from Bob Dylan and Gore Vidal he doesn't so much drop names as spike them like a running back in the end zone to the glamorous, squalid city itself, with its crime and crazies and open-air gay trysting. Wolcott's hip, closeup yet detached narrative falters during worshipful scenes of his mentor Pauline Kael, the New Yorker movie reviewer who elevated criticism to "a higher power"; his reminiscences of dishing and cackling with Kael at screenings and soir es feel claustrophobic and dull. While his commentary on the cultural commentary sags, Wolcott's take on New York's culture itself, from schlubby porn impresarios to diaphanous ballerinas, is entertaining and evocative.
Customer Reviews
An Exceptional Writer, an Unexceptional Story
The guy can really write. His syntax is electrifying. He is truly an English force. Unfortunately, his life and experiences are not that interesting, devolving to a list of people virtually unknown or not interesting. A name dropper extraordinaire, but a really, really good one.