About book Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down And Semi-Dirty In The Seventies (2011)
I'm in that New York City reading mood, and this one didn't really hit the spot for me. I feel like the book should either have been longer or more detailed incidents to be reported. The punk rock section is not the best part of the book and it should have been. He was there at the height of the New York music explosion, yet I have read better accounts by others regarding this local earth shifting moment in our culture. What is good is description of 1970's Village Voice life, with its editors and fellow writers. In fact he writes quite passionately about fellow writers like Lester Bangs and Pauline Kael. Perhaps the whole book should have been that as its subject matter, than say 1970's New York. Also his description of St Marks Place life is good as well - but still there is an element here that is missing. Perhaps due to his large interest from TV to Punk Rock to ballet - it doesn't jell together in this book.On a side note he writes a little bit on Television's Tom Verlaine, and like other works he's mention in, he comes off as a phantom in his own narrative. Verlaine is either the coolest (in all senses of that word) man on the block or a total mystery to everyone. What can you say about a book that contains a sentence like..."Not a movie whose mention today lights the black-mass candles of Nazi-kink nostalgia (displaced by Liliana Cavini's Night Porter, where sadomasochistic decadence was represented by the ravishing desolation of Charlotte Rampling's Euro-goddess bond structure), Wertmuller's Seven Beauties was a major honking controversy when it was released in 1975, a black comedy set mostly in a concentration camp where Giancarlo Giannini, to save his cowardly hnide, submitted to sex with the obese commandant, played by Shirley Stoler, their coupling filmed as if he were mating with a hippopotamus or elephant, an abdurate, bestial, Diane Arbus bulk."I believe you had to be in James' field back then to really enjoy this book. Otherwise, to an unsophisticated boob like me, this book provided only brief out-loud laughs, but mostly seemed to be a shamless, never-ending, machine gun like barrage of endless esoteric references to known and unknown artists and their works. Get the impression I didn't like it? I was initially attracted to this book because of its 'voice' in memoir venue. But, absent a literary background, I found it difficult to stick with, although I did finish it.I won't be reading any more 'Wolcott' works for now, or giving it as an xMas gift.
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interesting memoir of writer in 70s New York City. Wolcott writes great articles now for Vanity fair
—Persephone
Read it for the chapters on moving to NYC and punk. The Kaelian sycophancy was less welcome.
—bie0630
