Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York by James Wolcott

On November 5, 2011, in Book Review, by admin

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

“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.

About James Wolcott

JAMES WOLCOTT is the longtime culture critic for Vanity Fair and a blogger for the magazine. He is the author of a novel, The Catsitters, and the nonfiction work Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

“Longtime Vanity Fair cultural critic Wolcott (Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants, 2004, etc.) celebrates the Big Apple as a haven for the writers, artists, musicians and eccentrics who thrived at its core in the 1970s. Of the many sentences in Wolcott’s memoir that will have contemporary Manhattan-philes gnashing their teeth in envy is this one recounting how the author dealt with losing his on-site staff job at the Village Voice: “From that point onward I never worked a regular office job again, solely writing for a living, something that would have been impossible if New York hadn’t been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes.” Actually, the entire book is not only a bittersweet valentine to a much-maligned era but a model of exemplary prose that any writer would do well to study. Wolcott’s talent for choosing words, shaping sentences, constructing paragraphs and crafting each of the five sections into an essay that stands on its own reveals an architectonic approach lacking in many current memoirs. The author also understands how to apply his individual experiences to the larger context of the zeitgeist. For example, the section entitled “Bodily Contact” weaves personal encounters into a critique of “Me Decade” sexual mores, drawing on Bob Fosse films, the seedy atmosphere of pre–tourist friendly Times Square, the emerging gay-rights movement and concerns about the dark side of the pick-up culture prevalent at both straight and gay bars. Wolcott also rubbed shoulders with the luminaries of the day, including his mentor, the rabble-rousing author Norman Mailer, punk songstress Patti Smith and legendary movie critic Pauline Kael. His poignant reminiscences of Kael pave the way for the book’s plaintive conclusion. Gives the lie to the belief that the ’70s contained nothing but disco decadence and self-help solipsism.” —Kirkus Reviews

“No fan of memoirs, Vanity Fair cultural critic Wolcott has nonetheless written one about his wonder years in New York City in the 1970s. Given his role as tastemaker in writing about music, movies, television, and books, Wolcott presents both a self-portrait as a novice arts journalist and a portrait gallery of the scene makers during the heyday of consequences-be-damned criticism. With some offhand encouragement from Norman Mailer, Wolcott quixotically quit college, moved to New York, and badgered his way into a job at the then enormously influential Village Voice. His hilarious account of his trial by fire at this veritable “gladiator school” for journalism is acidly revealing of the dynamics at work in crisis-riddled New York, a crucible for gutsy creativity. Wolcott incisively celebrates such key figures as Patti Smith and David Byrne, caustically annihilates prominent writers, and praises to the skies his guiding light, film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael. A work of mettlesome personal remembrance and piercing cultural history, Wolcott’s electrifying tale of the forging of a writer can also serve as a course on writing laser-precise and propulsive prose.” —Booklist

“Lucking Out is a sleek, funny memoir of James Wolcott’s adventures as a freelance writer in the seventies. Wolcott and I shared that decade and those deadlines, so I can attest to the veracity of his tone and tempo, to the gaga adrenaline rush of writing about everything all the time: Stiv Bators in the morning, Balanchine that afternoon, Mailer from midnight to dawn, then a nap before David Hockney—all alone we were, up in the treetops, floating from limb to limb like flying squirrels with tigers down below. This rough joy is borne out in Wolcott’s bubbling pace, in his invariable preference for amusing modesty over mythological grandeur, and, most admirably, in the delicate candor with which he treats the cruelty and competitive savagery of that decade in New York—vicious but fair would be my characterization. For myself I am happy to be reminded that, once upon a time, we were not only quick and funny but kind of brave as well.”—Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar

Reader Review

Is the modest title of James Wolcott’s “Lucking Out” a discreet rebuke to Norman Podhoeretz’s bullish “Making It”? I suspect so.

“Lucking Out — Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York” (full title) — is a compact charmer of a book. It taught me things about the 1970s I didn’t know, and described what I did know in better prose and with more style and wit than I’ve read anywhere else. As a memoir, this one has the advantage of being written by someone more interested in the rest of the world than in himself, so what personal details we get are telling, touching, and to the point, rather than rambling, irritating, and self-involved. (i.e., the usual memoir.)

The portrait of the late New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, is just fabulous. Though I grew up on her reviews, I knew very little about Kael herself, and reading this intimate, first-hand account was a real treat. (Not just because it was about a famous critic, either. It’s because she’s a great character, and because Wolcott is a great observer.) The section on the Village Voice in its uber self-serious heyday makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in (a) journalism or (b) how the computer changed everything.

Not only can Wolcott write better than almost anyone, he really has a story (or rather, a cluster of intersecting stories) to tell here, and when you reach the final page you just wish he’d dive straight into the 1980s, however soulless they may have seemed compared with the previous decade, and keep going.

For anyone even mildly curious about New York, movies, punk, journalism, writing, ballet, or the Times Square of the “Taxi Driver” era, this book should not be missed. Think of it as Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” only with real intellectuals as opposed to fake ones. It’s a treat from start to finish, and the only reason I’m not giving it five stars is that there’s no indication given that the author intends to continue his reminiscences with at least two more volumes, taking us up to the turn of the century. - ChesterM, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Starting Out in the ’70s

The New York Times Book Review – November 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

False modesty is running amok. In the past month or so, these memoirs have been published: “Luck and Circumstance,” by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; “Lucky Bruce,” by Bruce Jay Friedman; and now “Lucking Out,” by James Wolcott. Any one of these authors might have borrowed the title “Making It” from Norman Podhoretz, who could have used a little false modesty.

To be fair, Wolcott was always an outsider and needed some luck. In the fall of 1972, he came through Port Authority not as a precocious Ivy League graduate but as a college dropout from working-class Maryland, arriving in New York “just as everything was about to go to hell.” In fact, the 1970s were made to order for an aspiring critic and sexually frustrated young man like him: it was the decade of Hilly Kristal (the owner of CBGB), Vanessa del Rio (a vivacious porn star) and Ugly George (an ugly guy named George).

As a sophomore at Frostburg State, Wolcott had written a piece for the student newspaper about the rumbustious “Dick Cavett Show” featuring Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Janet Flanner. Unlike the rest of the world, Wolcott thought Mailer had acquitted himself well, so he mailed him the article. Easily flattered, the Great Man — “I had been a hero-worshiper of Mailer’s since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower,” Wolcott mind-blowingly declares — was kind enough to send a letter of recommendation to Dan Wolf, the editor and co-founder (as was Mailer) of The Village Voice. [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

VAMPIRE ASCENDING by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

http://frogenyozurt.com/2011/11/lucking-out-my-life-getting-down-and-semi-dirty-in-seventies-new-york-by-james-wolcott/

Comments are closed.