(TV) Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York

[Graham Urquhart <gurquhart@madasafish.com>]

Anyone heard about this? Book by film critic James Wolcott. Specific 
mention of 'mixing with Tom Verlaine' in the blurb:

"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 propor-tions, 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".

Graham
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