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Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs
A career-spanning collection of critical essays and cultural journalism from one of the most acute, entertaining, and sometimes acerbic (but in a good way) critics of our timeFrom his early-seventies dispatches as a fledgling critic for The Village Voice on rock ’n’ roll, comedy, movies, and television to the literary criticism of the eighties and nineties that made him both feared and famous to his must-read reports on the cultural weather for Vanity Fair, James Wolcott has had a career as a freelance critic and a literary intellectual nearly unique in our time. This collection features the best of Wolcott in whatever guise—connoisseur, intrepid reporter, memoirist, and necessary naysayer—he has chosen to take on. Included in this collection is “O.K. Corral Revisited,” a fresh take on the famed Norman Mailer–Gore Vidal dustup on The Dick Cavett Show that launched Wolcott from his Maryland college to New York City (via bus) to begin his brilliant career. His prescient review of Patti Smith’s legendary first gig at CBGB leads off a suite of eyewitness and insider accounts of the rise of punk rock, while another set of pieces considers the vast cultural influence of the enigmatic Johnny Carson and the scramble of his late-night successors to inherit the “swivel throne.” There are warm tributes to such diverse figures as Michael Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Lester Bangs, and Philip Larkin and masterly summings-up of the departed giants of American literature—John Updike, William Styron, John Cheever, and Mailer and Vidal. Included as well are some legendary takedowns that have entered into the literary lore of our time. Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.
514 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 14, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 5, 2016
Since I spent the 70s, 80s and 90s trying to make a living (and doing the best I can), this excellent book of essays, reviews and criticism filled in many gaps in my experience.
The Velvet Underground wasn't a subterranean New York nightclub; CBGB was; Talking Heads I knew; Jack Kerouac I knew; William Styron's backstory I didn't know.
I was reminded how much I enjoy Amis, pere et fils. SO now I have a long list of Amis novels to read or reread.
An excellent book by an excellent writer.
The Velvet Underground wasn't a subterranean New York nightclub; CBGB was; Talking Heads I knew; Jack Kerouac I knew; William Styron's backstory I didn't know.
I was reminded how much I enjoy Amis, pere et fils. SO now I have a long list of Amis novels to read or reread.
An excellent book by an excellent writer.
March 25, 2014
Wolcott is an excellent writer, and reading this book, with its voluminous research and wide-ranging subject matter only made me realize how much I don't know about criticism. Even the writers I haven't read, music I haven't heard, intellectual critics I don't even care about Wolcott brings to life. Just the context of his writing brings about understanding. Highly worth the investment of time.
May 4, 2015
Fantastic book. Just the shot in the arm I needed as a writer and editor. Purchased at the oasis that is Vromans in Pasadena.
March 6, 2026
I haven't actually read ALL of this book, but it's very rare that I read the entirety of an essay collection. I HAVE consumed a fair chunk of this one, and will no doubt return to greedily hoover up the leftovers.
I discovered James Wolcott via his piece on John Updike in a recent London Review of Books (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n...). I confess that most of the pieces in the LRB I read, go in two eyes and out of the nostrils, with the exception of those pieces that are written with a sufficient flair and authorial style to make me think, almost (as Martin Amis wrote on more than one occasion) regretfully, that "now I have to read everything they've written".
Wolcott's piece was kind of like that, and I looked up and read some more of his for the LRB (https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/ja...), which are all worth reading, and then looked up this book. Scanning the contents page, I was particularly excited to see that he'd written not one but FOUR pieces on Kingsley and Martin Amis. I've never read more than fractions of KA, but I've read a lot of MA, felt highly conflicted about it (like a bliss inducing drug that leaves you with almost punctually horrible hangovers) and am always curious to see what an intelligent critic has to say about his work.
As anticipated, hoped, and dreaded (because my reading list is as long as an outpouring of Wilderbeast dung and my memory as short as an Elephant's), Wolcott turns out to be fascinating and funny on every subject he covers in this compendium, including: novelists, poets, film directors, and the proto and toto-punk scenes of the 70s (Wolcott was thrashing, sweating, and taking notes in the proto-moshpit at CBGBs).
I'm not sure how many of these pieces are from AFTER the 70s and 80s, but that seems to have been Wolcott's heyday. Even when the pieces aren't FROM those decades, they're about bands and authors who were in their prime back then.
The best thing one can say about a critic, I thought after reading this (and have been thinking reading Pauline Kael—one of Wolcott's mentors—since) is that they excite you to go and listen to or read or watch whatever they've been praising. This isn't a quality separable from their prose, since it's the prose that excites you. And Wolcott's essays made me want to listen to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (who I find mostly boring) and read John Cheever (who I only knew as the gay lover of George Constanza's prospective father-in-law) and even re-read that 'I must have been young to fall for that rubbish' classic 'On the Road'!
THE AMISES
The essays on KA/MA are excellent, clear-eyed about both of their personal and literary faults, but forgiving of them (up to a point: 'Lionel Asbo', which I haven't read, gets a shooing here as it did everywhere else).
It was also enlightening for me to read Wolcott's review of 'Experience', a book I've re-read about 4 or 5 times, because of the light it sheds on the context in which Amis wrote it and about events which Amis himself describes in his memoir. (For example, that Isabel Foncesca, whom Amis left his wife and two sons for was nicknamed "Isabel Funseeker".)
As an MA fan (an MA student?), I've often felt ambivalent even about "Experience", which might—taken as a whole, an elegant construction—be Amis's best book, given how meandering even his best novels are. Wolcott puts his finger on what irked me about the book, and has irked me about Amis's work at large:
"In 'Experience', [MA] eschews any dynamic capework as seducer, careerist, and bankroll artist to offer himself in the passive role of sufferer... There’s almost a rhythmic lilt to his sorrowful refrains. Progressively, Experience becomes a lyrical crying jag... With fame and maturity his prose has lost its racing stripes. The slang and noise-density of his early work have been replaced with leather upholstery and a parliamentary drone. Plain statement is sacrificed to Listerine-gargling locutions... He can’t describe a beach holiday without turning it into an Updikean meditation... 'How one primes it with oils and unguents, how one braces it with the alerting asperities of sand and salt and solar fire …” Solar fire, no less!"
Yes, this is it, the leaden pomposity and embarrassing straining of Amis when he's in that stern and serious mode. Actually, Amis can 'do' serious: there's plenty of genuinely moving passages in 'Experience', and countless acute passages of serious analysis in 'The War Against Cliche', but his natural gift was always for comedy, particularly cruel and scabrous satire.
More and more over the years, the genius comic became self-parodic and the 'parliamentary drone' gained more territory, rising to fever pitch in the 00s with his opinion pieces re: 9/11. (Perhaps it was his desire to compete with 'the Hitch' whatdunit?)
"Importance resonates like a gong through every page of Experience. With its quotations from Kafka and Borges, its Nabokovian parallels (Eric Jacobs, Kingsley’s prize-booby biographer, is compared to the clueless Kinbote of Nabokov’s Pale Fire), and its fondling of Saul Bellow’s brain, the book seems to be making Literature’s Last Stand against the pygmy tribes of press snoops."
KINGSLEY
"Amis’s novels are always operating at two speeds simultaneously—a slower narrative speed and a faster judgmental clip."
"He saw literature not as a mountain range of Towering Masterpieces but as a series of individual involvements that engage us at eye level and can be divided into those books we fancy and those we don’t. Or, as he wrote, “Importance isn’t important. Only good writing is.”"
"The lavatorial byplay in Larkin’s and Amis’s letters can be defended in theory. The concentration required for creative work—superconcentration where poetry is concerned (recall that, along with being the premier comic novelist of his generation, Amis was also a superb poet)—causes an engine-room buildup of mental pressure that seeks release in gossip, puns, smut, parodies, and in-jokes,"
MARTIN
"His precocious, no-sweat flair gave rise to a popular joke that a strong candidate for Most Unlikely Book Title was My Struggle, by Martin Amis."
[Of 'Experience'] "Considering that Amis’s best novel may be Money, where cash infusions have the kick of cocaine, he’s notably reticent discussing his own itchy wallet."
LARKIN
Having read the Amis essays, I made a beeline for Wolcott's Larkin essay. This is a summation (an obituary, perhaps?), and none of what Wolcott says about Larkin was new to me, having read—for example—Amis and Clive James on Larkin.
Everyone who knows about Larkin knows what Larkin "was", as a poet, and as a man (which, in 2026, means a publicly unhappy and privately REALLY unhappy, racist, porn-dependent wanker), and so you're bound to come up against the usual observations. But Wolcott, as always, makes these routine observations clearly and hyper-articulately.
Was Larkin anti-Romantic (in the literary sense)? There is something Romantic, Wordsworthian, in a poem like 'The Trees' (https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/), but if Romanticism entails a belief in the individual's ability to grasp Fate by the bollocks and ride it to Olympus, then, as Wolcott writes "[Larkin is] Anti-Romantic in that he doesn’t believe that we carve out our destinies willy-nilly in life—tumbling the chambermaid, deposing the king—but that life itself deals the cards."
If we have doubts about Larkin's anti-Romanticism, we have no doubts about his anti-Modernism. (Though is there something post-Modernist, at least, about his inclusion into poetry of the suburban, pedestrian, industrial sites, and so on?) And Wolcott eplxinas
"[Larkin is] antimodern in that he resists fauvist forays into self-conscious technique, whether it’s John Coltrane drilling through the brickwork with an interminable solo or Samuel Beckett pitching his characters neck-deep into the dustbin. Larkin prefers the steadiness of the sane and the true. [Larkin wrote to his publisher, in defence of Barbara Pym] “I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them.…” Larkin’s complaint against the modernists—he cites particularly Pound and Picasso—is that they throw up a din of noise and images that make difficult such moments of clear-sightedness. Modernism is for him a showering of violent debris."
Wolcott (having quoted "Books are a load of crap"): "What saves Larkin from sounding merely like the saltiest wit in the alehouse is his genius for observations that have an almost caressing regard."
MUSIC [these quotes are mostly interesting ideas I want to remember, rather than examples of Wolcott's prose-skills]
[in CBGB's] "the variety and quality of talent ranges from the great to the God-condemned."
"[Tom] Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Beatles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them sound intimate..."
"A quote from ex-Velvet John Cale: “What we try to get here (at the Balloon Farm) is a sense of total involvement.” Nineteen sixty-six. But what bands like Television and Talking Heads are doing is ameliorating the post-sixties hangover by giving us a sense of detachment."
"Rock bands flourished in the sixties when there was a genuine faith in the efficacious beauty of communal activity, when the belief was that togetherness meant strength. It was more than a matter of “belonging”: it meant that one could create art with friends."
"[The music of the Velvet Underground] was in no way formally innovative... Once the values and sentiments of the psychedelicized counterculture lost their sway, the audaciousness of the music seemed sheer pretentiousness—intricate toys being passed off as sacerdotal gifts... the Velvets never fell for the platitudes of transcendence (via acid) and community (via rock) which distance us from so much of the Sgt. Pepper–era rock."
On LOU REED: "though he probably couldn’t open a package of Twinkies without his hands trembling, he enjoys babbling threats of violence."
On JOHNNY ROTTEN: "“Kiss me,” he commands, sounding as full of humanity as Caligula addressing a eunuch." (Wolcott also identifies Rotten's flaw as a vocalist "His tantrummy vocals are meant to carry one over the band’s gear meshing, and too often he becomes an operatic brutalist, making every syllable die an agonizing death.")
On THS SEX PISTOLS: "Comedy is an antiheroic device, a deflater of hopes and assumptions. And, as Lydon says in Rotten, what made the Pistols a great band is that they were the most antiheroic of all. They flunked every crunch test."
"I’ve always thought that hard-core addiction is a kind of negative nurturing—an attempt to mother oneself, to reenact the dreamy dependency of being a newborn attached to a feeding machine."
"If you listen to the Sex Pistols now, it’s amazing how usurping they still sound."
On MUSIC VIDEOS: "Rock videos don’t allow the viewer and listener to free-associate; they supply the associations for you. The looming pictures of ice-capped mists and dinosaur bogs that Led Zeppelin once conjured in the imagination are now plopped down in plain sight and photographed at Caligari-askew angles."
A VERY FUNNY ANECDOTE FROM DEE DEE RAMONE: "Dee Dee Ramone recalls seeing the vision who would become his girlfriend sitting on the hood of a car in a black evening gown and spike heels, filing her nails: “She looked like an ancient vampire countess who was definitely on a mission to capture my soul.” Her name is Connie. The next morning, the glow is off and their relationship is clarified: “She was a prostitute, I was a Ramone, and we were both junkies.”
On WOODY ALLEN (and 'WOODY-MAN':
"when [in 'Hannah and her Sisters'] Mickey questions life’s final destination, it’s a glide path we’ve flown before with the Wood Man, who has gotten a little beyond-it for all this blabby pseudophilosophizing. A fifty-year-old man shouldn’t still be waving his hands and asking, If God exists, then how come there’s evil?
"His men and women may have gotten on each other’s nerves, but their anxieties were equally
matched; they clung to the same psychiatrist’s couch—the Jewish lifeboat."
"The oral fixation in Allen’s films predates the presidential kneepads. It’s part of the larger, familiar passive aggression. Aside from whining, the Woody Man has never exerted himself much. Getting head not only liberates him from making any actual effort of his own but allows him to remain lazily detached—to tune out the woman on his lap and holster his precious thoughts."
"Whenever a Woody Man is cornered and asked to own up to his feelings or behavior, instant disavowal kicks in, as he waves his arms and sputters in broken sentences. Vagueness is his preferred avoidance technique—his verbal aikido."
"[Allen's] protected status has also made him something of a bubble boy... sealing him off from his casts, whom he treats not as collaborators but as patchwork figures, most of whom are fed only the few pages of script they need... Manhattan Murder Mystery spritzes along happily, unpretentiously, offering convincing proof that Allen needs collaborators, sidekicks, foils. Somebody—anybody—to interrupt his compulsive conversational comb-overs."
HITCHCOCK
"Hitchcock was raised Catholic and educated by the Jesuits, a moral education that wedded free-floating guilt to logical rigor, a combination guaranteed to leave one clear-minded but uneasy."
"One reason that Vertigo becomes more haunting with age (aside from the manic-depressive attack of Bernard Herrmann’s score, which harks back to Wagner and ahead to Philip Glass) is that it is perhaps the last film to treat woman as archetype and Romantic ideal."
"He never needed to follow his lovers into the bedroom. Kisses in his films are climaxes."
"The champagne afterglow of Rear Window is the reverse image of the romantic desolation of Vertigo. It’s difficult to think of any director living or dead who could express either joy or abandonment with such a fine wallop, much less both."
"Once Leigh steps into the shower of her room at the Bates Motel, the movie enters a different aesthetic dimension. Shadows are banished in a white blare of hospital light. The images are wrested from their social milieu into pure abstraction. The slashing knife, which mimics the editing cuts, introduces a formal virtuosity for which the routine functionality of the embezzlement story has left the viewer totally unprepared."
"In Hitchcock’s case, fear of falling may symbolize loss of control, letting go... he personally shied away from confrontation or intrusion that might have had awkward, unforeseen results. He was incapable of hailing his own taxi without becoming white with terror... A supreme sublimator, he made the most of his repressions and avoidance maneuvers—he transformed them into psychosexual cliff-hangers and paranoid chases that filled the screen."
ON WRITING
"Non-practitioners envy the life of a writer, even if that life isn’t what it used to be, because for all of its anxieties and discouragements, writing is the greatest form of aviation that you can perform while firmly planted: the freedom, the vistas, the right word snapping a sentence to attention like the click of a gun, the passages that stretch into long solos, the nights when everything recedes and you feel as if you’re the only one awake in the world: welcome to the pros."
"...a writer’s morale and position are much more precarious in the digital age when words have never been so promiscuously flung and cheaply held..."
I discovered James Wolcott via his piece on John Updike in a recent London Review of Books (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n...). I confess that most of the pieces in the LRB I read, go in two eyes and out of the nostrils, with the exception of those pieces that are written with a sufficient flair and authorial style to make me think, almost (as Martin Amis wrote on more than one occasion) regretfully, that "now I have to read everything they've written".
Wolcott's piece was kind of like that, and I looked up and read some more of his for the LRB (https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/ja...), which are all worth reading, and then looked up this book. Scanning the contents page, I was particularly excited to see that he'd written not one but FOUR pieces on Kingsley and Martin Amis. I've never read more than fractions of KA, but I've read a lot of MA, felt highly conflicted about it (like a bliss inducing drug that leaves you with almost punctually horrible hangovers) and am always curious to see what an intelligent critic has to say about his work.
As anticipated, hoped, and dreaded (because my reading list is as long as an outpouring of Wilderbeast dung and my memory as short as an Elephant's), Wolcott turns out to be fascinating and funny on every subject he covers in this compendium, including: novelists, poets, film directors, and the proto and toto-punk scenes of the 70s (Wolcott was thrashing, sweating, and taking notes in the proto-moshpit at CBGBs).
I'm not sure how many of these pieces are from AFTER the 70s and 80s, but that seems to have been Wolcott's heyday. Even when the pieces aren't FROM those decades, they're about bands and authors who were in their prime back then.
The best thing one can say about a critic, I thought after reading this (and have been thinking reading Pauline Kael—one of Wolcott's mentors—since) is that they excite you to go and listen to or read or watch whatever they've been praising. This isn't a quality separable from their prose, since it's the prose that excites you. And Wolcott's essays made me want to listen to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (who I find mostly boring) and read John Cheever (who I only knew as the gay lover of George Constanza's prospective father-in-law) and even re-read that 'I must have been young to fall for that rubbish' classic 'On the Road'!
THE AMISES
The essays on KA/MA are excellent, clear-eyed about both of their personal and literary faults, but forgiving of them (up to a point: 'Lionel Asbo', which I haven't read, gets a shooing here as it did everywhere else).
It was also enlightening for me to read Wolcott's review of 'Experience', a book I've re-read about 4 or 5 times, because of the light it sheds on the context in which Amis wrote it and about events which Amis himself describes in his memoir. (For example, that Isabel Foncesca, whom Amis left his wife and two sons for was nicknamed "Isabel Funseeker".)
As an MA fan (an MA student?), I've often felt ambivalent even about "Experience", which might—taken as a whole, an elegant construction—be Amis's best book, given how meandering even his best novels are. Wolcott puts his finger on what irked me about the book, and has irked me about Amis's work at large:
"In 'Experience', [MA] eschews any dynamic capework as seducer, careerist, and bankroll artist to offer himself in the passive role of sufferer... There’s almost a rhythmic lilt to his sorrowful refrains. Progressively, Experience becomes a lyrical crying jag... With fame and maturity his prose has lost its racing stripes. The slang and noise-density of his early work have been replaced with leather upholstery and a parliamentary drone. Plain statement is sacrificed to Listerine-gargling locutions... He can’t describe a beach holiday without turning it into an Updikean meditation... 'How one primes it with oils and unguents, how one braces it with the alerting asperities of sand and salt and solar fire …” Solar fire, no less!"
Yes, this is it, the leaden pomposity and embarrassing straining of Amis when he's in that stern and serious mode. Actually, Amis can 'do' serious: there's plenty of genuinely moving passages in 'Experience', and countless acute passages of serious analysis in 'The War Against Cliche', but his natural gift was always for comedy, particularly cruel and scabrous satire.
More and more over the years, the genius comic became self-parodic and the 'parliamentary drone' gained more territory, rising to fever pitch in the 00s with his opinion pieces re: 9/11. (Perhaps it was his desire to compete with 'the Hitch' whatdunit?)
"Importance resonates like a gong through every page of Experience. With its quotations from Kafka and Borges, its Nabokovian parallels (Eric Jacobs, Kingsley’s prize-booby biographer, is compared to the clueless Kinbote of Nabokov’s Pale Fire), and its fondling of Saul Bellow’s brain, the book seems to be making Literature’s Last Stand against the pygmy tribes of press snoops."
KINGSLEY
"Amis’s novels are always operating at two speeds simultaneously—a slower narrative speed and a faster judgmental clip."
"He saw literature not as a mountain range of Towering Masterpieces but as a series of individual involvements that engage us at eye level and can be divided into those books we fancy and those we don’t. Or, as he wrote, “Importance isn’t important. Only good writing is.”"
"The lavatorial byplay in Larkin’s and Amis’s letters can be defended in theory. The concentration required for creative work—superconcentration where poetry is concerned (recall that, along with being the premier comic novelist of his generation, Amis was also a superb poet)—causes an engine-room buildup of mental pressure that seeks release in gossip, puns, smut, parodies, and in-jokes,"
MARTIN
"His precocious, no-sweat flair gave rise to a popular joke that a strong candidate for Most Unlikely Book Title was My Struggle, by Martin Amis."
[Of 'Experience'] "Considering that Amis’s best novel may be Money, where cash infusions have the kick of cocaine, he’s notably reticent discussing his own itchy wallet."
LARKIN
Having read the Amis essays, I made a beeline for Wolcott's Larkin essay. This is a summation (an obituary, perhaps?), and none of what Wolcott says about Larkin was new to me, having read—for example—Amis and Clive James on Larkin.
Everyone who knows about Larkin knows what Larkin "was", as a poet, and as a man (which, in 2026, means a publicly unhappy and privately REALLY unhappy, racist, porn-dependent wanker), and so you're bound to come up against the usual observations. But Wolcott, as always, makes these routine observations clearly and hyper-articulately.
Was Larkin anti-Romantic (in the literary sense)? There is something Romantic, Wordsworthian, in a poem like 'The Trees' (https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/), but if Romanticism entails a belief in the individual's ability to grasp Fate by the bollocks and ride it to Olympus, then, as Wolcott writes "[Larkin is] Anti-Romantic in that he doesn’t believe that we carve out our destinies willy-nilly in life—tumbling the chambermaid, deposing the king—but that life itself deals the cards."
If we have doubts about Larkin's anti-Romanticism, we have no doubts about his anti-Modernism. (Though is there something post-Modernist, at least, about his inclusion into poetry of the suburban, pedestrian, industrial sites, and so on?) And Wolcott eplxinas
"[Larkin is] antimodern in that he resists fauvist forays into self-conscious technique, whether it’s John Coltrane drilling through the brickwork with an interminable solo or Samuel Beckett pitching his characters neck-deep into the dustbin. Larkin prefers the steadiness of the sane and the true. [Larkin wrote to his publisher, in defence of Barbara Pym] “I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them.…” Larkin’s complaint against the modernists—he cites particularly Pound and Picasso—is that they throw up a din of noise and images that make difficult such moments of clear-sightedness. Modernism is for him a showering of violent debris."
Wolcott (having quoted "Books are a load of crap"): "What saves Larkin from sounding merely like the saltiest wit in the alehouse is his genius for observations that have an almost caressing regard."
MUSIC [these quotes are mostly interesting ideas I want to remember, rather than examples of Wolcott's prose-skills]
[in CBGB's] "the variety and quality of talent ranges from the great to the God-condemned."
"[Tom] Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Beatles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them sound intimate..."
"A quote from ex-Velvet John Cale: “What we try to get here (at the Balloon Farm) is a sense of total involvement.” Nineteen sixty-six. But what bands like Television and Talking Heads are doing is ameliorating the post-sixties hangover by giving us a sense of detachment."
"Rock bands flourished in the sixties when there was a genuine faith in the efficacious beauty of communal activity, when the belief was that togetherness meant strength. It was more than a matter of “belonging”: it meant that one could create art with friends."
"[The music of the Velvet Underground] was in no way formally innovative... Once the values and sentiments of the psychedelicized counterculture lost their sway, the audaciousness of the music seemed sheer pretentiousness—intricate toys being passed off as sacerdotal gifts... the Velvets never fell for the platitudes of transcendence (via acid) and community (via rock) which distance us from so much of the Sgt. Pepper–era rock."
On LOU REED: "though he probably couldn’t open a package of Twinkies without his hands trembling, he enjoys babbling threats of violence."
On JOHNNY ROTTEN: "“Kiss me,” he commands, sounding as full of humanity as Caligula addressing a eunuch." (Wolcott also identifies Rotten's flaw as a vocalist "His tantrummy vocals are meant to carry one over the band’s gear meshing, and too often he becomes an operatic brutalist, making every syllable die an agonizing death.")
On THS SEX PISTOLS: "Comedy is an antiheroic device, a deflater of hopes and assumptions. And, as Lydon says in Rotten, what made the Pistols a great band is that they were the most antiheroic of all. They flunked every crunch test."
"I’ve always thought that hard-core addiction is a kind of negative nurturing—an attempt to mother oneself, to reenact the dreamy dependency of being a newborn attached to a feeding machine."
"If you listen to the Sex Pistols now, it’s amazing how usurping they still sound."
On MUSIC VIDEOS: "Rock videos don’t allow the viewer and listener to free-associate; they supply the associations for you. The looming pictures of ice-capped mists and dinosaur bogs that Led Zeppelin once conjured in the imagination are now plopped down in plain sight and photographed at Caligari-askew angles."
A VERY FUNNY ANECDOTE FROM DEE DEE RAMONE: "Dee Dee Ramone recalls seeing the vision who would become his girlfriend sitting on the hood of a car in a black evening gown and spike heels, filing her nails: “She looked like an ancient vampire countess who was definitely on a mission to capture my soul.” Her name is Connie. The next morning, the glow is off and their relationship is clarified: “She was a prostitute, I was a Ramone, and we were both junkies.”
On WOODY ALLEN (and 'WOODY-MAN':
"when [in 'Hannah and her Sisters'] Mickey questions life’s final destination, it’s a glide path we’ve flown before with the Wood Man, who has gotten a little beyond-it for all this blabby pseudophilosophizing. A fifty-year-old man shouldn’t still be waving his hands and asking, If God exists, then how come there’s evil?
"His men and women may have gotten on each other’s nerves, but their anxieties were equally
matched; they clung to the same psychiatrist’s couch—the Jewish lifeboat."
"The oral fixation in Allen’s films predates the presidential kneepads. It’s part of the larger, familiar passive aggression. Aside from whining, the Woody Man has never exerted himself much. Getting head not only liberates him from making any actual effort of his own but allows him to remain lazily detached—to tune out the woman on his lap and holster his precious thoughts."
"Whenever a Woody Man is cornered and asked to own up to his feelings or behavior, instant disavowal kicks in, as he waves his arms and sputters in broken sentences. Vagueness is his preferred avoidance technique—his verbal aikido."
"[Allen's] protected status has also made him something of a bubble boy... sealing him off from his casts, whom he treats not as collaborators but as patchwork figures, most of whom are fed only the few pages of script they need... Manhattan Murder Mystery spritzes along happily, unpretentiously, offering convincing proof that Allen needs collaborators, sidekicks, foils. Somebody—anybody—to interrupt his compulsive conversational comb-overs."
HITCHCOCK
"Hitchcock was raised Catholic and educated by the Jesuits, a moral education that wedded free-floating guilt to logical rigor, a combination guaranteed to leave one clear-minded but uneasy."
"One reason that Vertigo becomes more haunting with age (aside from the manic-depressive attack of Bernard Herrmann’s score, which harks back to Wagner and ahead to Philip Glass) is that it is perhaps the last film to treat woman as archetype and Romantic ideal."
"He never needed to follow his lovers into the bedroom. Kisses in his films are climaxes."
"The champagne afterglow of Rear Window is the reverse image of the romantic desolation of Vertigo. It’s difficult to think of any director living or dead who could express either joy or abandonment with such a fine wallop, much less both."
"Once Leigh steps into the shower of her room at the Bates Motel, the movie enters a different aesthetic dimension. Shadows are banished in a white blare of hospital light. The images are wrested from their social milieu into pure abstraction. The slashing knife, which mimics the editing cuts, introduces a formal virtuosity for which the routine functionality of the embezzlement story has left the viewer totally unprepared."
"In Hitchcock’s case, fear of falling may symbolize loss of control, letting go... he personally shied away from confrontation or intrusion that might have had awkward, unforeseen results. He was incapable of hailing his own taxi without becoming white with terror... A supreme sublimator, he made the most of his repressions and avoidance maneuvers—he transformed them into psychosexual cliff-hangers and paranoid chases that filled the screen."
ON WRITING
"Non-practitioners envy the life of a writer, even if that life isn’t what it used to be, because for all of its anxieties and discouragements, writing is the greatest form of aviation that you can perform while firmly planted: the freedom, the vistas, the right word snapping a sentence to attention like the click of a gun, the passages that stretch into long solos, the nights when everything recedes and you feel as if you’re the only one awake in the world: welcome to the pros."
"...a writer’s morale and position are much more precarious in the digital age when words have never been so promiscuously flung and cheaply held..."
March 20, 2014
Enjoyable read by a writer who has a superb writing style
April 27, 2016
I first read James Wolcott 25 years ago in the Village Voice. He was a great TV critic. He recognized as I did the brilliance of Bosom Buddies. Certainly Tom Hanks finest work. I prowled through this massive collection of reviews and critiques of TV, music, comedy, movies and books over several months and was never disappointed. Wolcott has great taste and his likes generally conform to mine. He uses prose like a rapier or sledgehammer depending on the effect needed. Wolcott is not an academic but a working journalist who entertains and informs. I think he must be living a great life scrambling along writing about things that really interest me.
Don't try to read this 500 page collection of reviews in a short period of time it is. Bette enjoyed in 40-50 page chunks. A series of satisfying meals for the mind. If. There is. Any justice somebody will figure out how to post all of Wolcott's vast output on the Internet I would even pay to read a weekly helping of his columns.
Don't try to read this 500 page collection of reviews in a short period of time it is. Bette enjoyed in 40-50 page chunks. A series of satisfying meals for the mind. If. There is. Any justice somebody will figure out how to post all of Wolcott's vast output on the Internet I would even pay to read a weekly helping of his columns.
January 8, 2017
Books of multimedia criticism and cultural comment are my new favourite kind of book, and this is a very good one of those (albeit low on freespinning comment).
Wolcott is excellent on films and tv, and very good on books and music. He isn't as outrageously caustic as some critics, tending more towards fair-handed assessment. But he still has a mean turn of phrase on occasion, and a solid eye for quoting the acidity of others.
Entries such as those on the Michael Mann film Heat and on New York Noir illustrate the difference between someone who knows what they like and can articulate why, and the rest of us mere mortals.
The book probably isn't expected to be read from cover to cover in order, but that's what I did. And not once did I skip or skim.
Wolcott is excellent on films and tv, and very good on books and music. He isn't as outrageously caustic as some critics, tending more towards fair-handed assessment. But he still has a mean turn of phrase on occasion, and a solid eye for quoting the acidity of others.
Entries such as those on the Michael Mann film Heat and on New York Noir illustrate the difference between someone who knows what they like and can articulate why, and the rest of us mere mortals.
The book probably isn't expected to be read from cover to cover in order, but that's what I did. And not once did I skip or skim.
February 25, 2015
I'd never heard of James Wolcott but apparently he's an incredibly prolific film/book/music/media critic whose career started way back in the '70s. This book is a sweeping collection of his essays about aforementioned films/books/music/etc. over the past four decades. Wolcott definitely knows how to turn a phrase, but my main takeaway from this compendium is that all of the directors, comedians, actors, and writers (especially the writers) under his microscope are depressed, misogynistic, philandering, alcoholic, backstabbing, racist individuals filled with equal parts self loathing and bloated sense of self importance. Sheesh.
June 20, 2015
While beautifully and often brilliantly written, this collection of essays isn't for everyone, especially if you're young or have no knowledge of the New Yorker set circa Truman Capote and Normal Mailer.
April 5, 2014
A really good collection of Wolcott's essays on popular culture. Divided into sections on film, literature and culture.
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