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

[robin dunn <rdunnrn@yahoo.com>]

i haven't read it; i'd like to.  i did read his novel (called "catsitters", i
think), which has a verlaine reference (something about it being a lucky
portent when tom verlaine is seen out in daylights, IIRC).
 
r
 
 
 


--- On Wed, 8/24/11, Graham Urquhart <gurquhart@madasafish.com> wrote:


From: Graham Urquhart <gurquhart@madasafish.com>
Subject: (TV) Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies
New York
To: tv@obbard.com
Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 11:32 AM


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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