Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, by James Wolcott
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Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, by James Wolcott
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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.
Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, by James Wolcott - Amazon Sales Rank: #476089 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-10-15
- Released on: 2013-10-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, by James Wolcott From Publishers Weekly In essays previously published in the 1990s and 2000s, Vanity Fair culture critic Wolcott (Lucking Out) fires off acerbic surveys of cultural fads and preoccupations, taking a special interest in punk rock, film noir, comedy, and the literary canon of Great White Males. The aesthetic that binds the volume is what the author succinctly calls the writing I'm proudest of, happiest with, the pieces that carry a lift. Of the school of hard-throwing criticism, distinct from snack-dip entertainment reporting and the nut-gathering of squirrel-scholars, Wolcott wields the same powers he admires in his subjects: intelligence, wit, style, and a prodigious range of reading, with an eye for the succinct, telling detail. Wolcott, quoting novelist Kingsley Amis, says, Importance isn't important. Only good writing is. Wolcott's prose is agile, alert, kinetic; the sentences swing and hustle, cratered with barbed metaphor. Wolcott has few idols and no saints; he deplores shoddy technique, gooey sentiment, platitudes and punditry, and takes the occasional goofy jab at himself. Forthright and fair-minded, but ferocious in disdain, with the sly, smart voice of someone in the know but never caught up in the moment, this collection might be an uncoated pill, but it preserves an unforgettable specimen of that New York specialty—the well-informed wise guy. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. (Oct.)
From Booklist Critic Wolcott follows his rapier memoir, Lucking Out (2011), with a mammoth retrospective essay and review collection. A writer of mettle and skill zestfully committed to critical journalism, Wolcott pairs probing opinion with vigorous yet concrete language and pushes so far beyond the bland that his reviews, even decades later, are fiery and daring. At times prescient, as in his 1975 recognition of Patti Smith’s mustang power, he is also neatly funny. Pauline Kael was his mentor, Dorothy Parker a precursor, Susan Sontag a goad, and Norman Mailer an inspiration. Wolcott’s enthusiasm for get-it-right attacks and appreciation burns as brightly whether he’s writing about television, comedy, music, movies, or books. Wolcott’s subjects range from the seventies sit-com, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, to such current hits as Downton Abbey and Boardwalk Empire, Johnny Carson to David Letterman, Brian De Palma to Woody Allen, Ayn Rand to John Updike. He constructs each analysis and argument with shrewd, securely grounded observations and briskly establishes richly dimensional biographical, social, and aesthetic contexts. Wolcott’s provoking and illuminating critiques both channel and fuel the cultural ferment. --Donna Seaman
From Bookforum After all these years, it just blows to finally acknowledge there’s no contest. Never was. Back in those long-gone Voice days, not a few of us fancied that we were—or were going to be—pretty good. Jim Wolcott was better. Wolcott glittered from the start. —Tom Carson
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful. In-depth review: charm as well as snark By John L Murphy Readers of his articles have long praised or damned Wolcott's confident, acerbic tone, and his use of metaphor and the polished phrase to sum up or put down the figures and films he covered. Those familiar with his memoir will find certain episodes repeated from CBGBs or his movie reviews, and within this five-hundred page anthology of his past forty years, perhaps inevitably, stylistic tics ("Whatever." "nowhere fast") appear more than once. The payoff is finding Wolcott engaging, irritating, and insightful.Waiting for this collection, I first reviewed Lucking Out, his memoir of dropping out from a rural Maryland state college in 1972 to come to New York City to make it as a writer. James Wolcott surveyed the magazines which employed him, the films he reviewed under the guidance of Pauline Kael, and the music he heard at CBGBs as Patti Smith, the Ramones, Television, and the Talking Heads began their careers. Finally, Wolcott's recollections shifted into ballet and literary criticism as he looked back at the start of his long career at, in turn, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.Over six-dozen entries defy easy summation. Working through the galley proof (which limits my ability to evaluate Wolcott's style, as this hampers my scored rating), my attention did not flag, a testament to the author's commitment to record his reasons, his emotions, and his insights, honestly and determinedly.Wolcott explains he selected pieces able to stand up long after the cultural moment had passed. He leaves out those needing footnotes by now, he keeps those relevant decades later, and he even lets go some that while they "still have a bop to them" might have further damaged their targets. He laments that criticism, dulled by the medium by which you and I connect for this review, has lost its clout compared to the heyday of the underground as well as popular cultural and music magazines.Nothing monopolizes the conversation, as "mainstream dissent" in The New Yorker under Wallace Shawn once did. "Although we live in a culture of uncircumcised snark, it actually seems a more deferential time to me, the pieties and approved brand names--Cindy Sherman, Lena Dunham, Quentin Tarantino, Junot Diaz, Mark Morris, Judd Apatow, John Currin (feel free to throw other names into the pot)--more securely clamped down over our ears." Anyone taking on a "major reputation" does so more out of self-referential deference, he adds. Critics these days watch their own Twitter and Facebook feeds, fearful of their own status, careful not to upset those whom they cover.Therefore, Wolcott, while not going soft, learns from the four decades of shifts away from critical punch to online tweets. He arranges this anthology with nostalgia. "But there's solace in knowing I learned and stole from the best", and his college dropout status keeps him studying more. That aspect, considering the amount of literary as well as cinema and music and media critique this collection amasses, attests to Wolcott's largely autodidactic training (compared to many of the critics he at a doleful 1980 Skidmore conference on the decline of American culture sits through and here sends up) puts him in the tradition of many of the cultural critics he praises from mid-century, when a Ph.D., tenure, and sabbaticals might not be the prerequisites for holding forth on novels, film, and poetry.Let's look at some of the highlights of Wolcott's holding forth. "Talking Furniture" begins with television reviews. Mary Hartman, Dennis Potter, the local NYC crank Stanley Siegel (an exception to the footnote needed, but a special case close to Wolcott's curdled affection), SCTV, Vanessa Redgrave in Playing for Time, and The X-Files fill the chapters.He watches for cant, complacency, and stasis. Designing Women, in its Clinton-era cant of feminist bromides, languishes by its seventh season in its own lame-duck predicament. "The characters seem sandbagged to the set, baying to each other from the far reaches of the Naugahyde." Yet a punchy observation like that can be followed by this: "[Delta] Burke settled into the sofa as if were her baby bath. The echo in her features of Elizabeth Taylor's suggested a luxury fund of food-libido." The odd metaphors sag--bath, echo, fund, libido--and bob about each other, soggy.Turning to comedy, he cites Bob Hope as claiming comedians thrive on their own "insincerity", Wolcott applies this to 1979 Carson: "he has a gift akin to David Bowie's for copping from others and yet appearing totally self-invented." I doubt if a television critic other than Wolcott, equally attentive to rock, would make such a comparison. By 1992, the "nonstop" drummer Carson endures as the "comedy's last practitioner of white jazz", his "steady pistons" pumping on from the "bachelor pad of passé legend". Staring back at David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Conan O'Brien, Wolcott pounds away, before switching to Jerry Lewis' hectoring marathon years to typically delightful, coy, and wry effect.Music follows his memoir's subjects settled in New York City, but he looks beyond CBGBs (and ballet not at all). David Byrne's shtick by now feels at best as rehearsed as Carson's golf swing, but in a Village Voice review of his band, we see him as in 1975, fresh. He "has a little-boy-lost-at-the-zoo voice and the demeanor of someone who's spent the last half-hour whirling around in a spin dryer. When his eyes start Ping-Ponging in his head, he looks like a cartoon of a chipmunk on Mars."He decries a few whom many worship. By 1976, Lou Reed's own stage patter had worn thin: "though he probably couldn't open a package of Twinkies without his hands trembling, he enjoys babbling threats of violence". Patti Smith, whom Wolcott early on idolized, gets in a 1996 retrospective a more reflective veneration, updated in a postscript for 2013. Noting the coverage given Smith's handshake with Pope Francis, Wolcott weighs this elevation of her as "high priestess of lost bohemia" as "a testament to our own sense of loss--our bereavement over the death of the counterculture, of any hope of new rebel energies rising through the thick sediment of money, snark, accreditation, and digital distraction". There's "snark" again as our own era's characteristic, post-Occupy, post-Letterman.Furthering this look back at icons, a defense of Albert Goldman's often derided The Lives of John Lennon demonstrates Wolcott's appreciation of a principled analysis of how to fairly counter the smug platitudes, sung or paraded, of the counterculture. As for smug, the Rat Pack contrasted with the remake of Ocean's 11. The original, filmed in Vegas when the sun was high, after the Pack had lounged away each night, makes them "look like sirloin in the atomic light of day".As expected from a protegé of Pauline Kael, much of Wolcott's volume scrutinizes movies. Brian De Palma and Woody Allen gain multiple exposures in related reviews; Sam Peckinpah, Alfred Hitchcock, New York noir, and an eager endorsement of "the greatest film Billy Wilder never made", The Americanization of Emily, show Wolcott's range. He captures as he did in his memoir the glare of his adopted city, refusing soft-focus. "You'd ride the New York subway just hoping to reach your destination, hell, any destination, suffering claustrophobia from the graffiti-sprayed windows, the lights blinking on and off like a submarine under attack, staring impassively ahead as predators loped from car to car, stalking prey." The feral rhythms of his longtime home, as he peers back at the B-movie antiheroes of the 1970s, cement his credibility as a critic who has met his subject personally.In the literary section, he opens up, with asides and instances taken from his own study of the classics, old and new. He can drop a reference to War and Peace in as nimbly as the Cowsills or woefully as Pauly Shore. When Wolcott takes on mournful Joyce Carol Oates for her own forays into the grave and the Gothic, "wonders of reckless energy and dishevelment", the resemblance to scattered passages in Critical Mass persists. There are places as with his memoir where he loses the trail, and pays too much or too little attention to his writing style.However, Wolcott can charm. "Since Updike knows intimately every blade and pebble in Proust, he can alight like a robin and spot the worms in Pinter's adaptation, removing them with a few light tugs." Even Ayn Rand earns grudging respect for her pop-culture pull. He sees her "as the last industrial novelist, the last to lyricize the urban might of stone and metal". For whomever he analyzes, Wolcott shows patience.Near the end of this hefty collection, Wolcott approves Gore Vidal's put-down of professorial "scholar-squirrels" who dig among the detritus of a writer's life and texts to find a petrified scrap. Wolcott, who never gained "accreditation", sought to emulate Norman Mailer, the New Journalism, and "mainstream dissent". He made it in the Big Apple by hard work, with a dash of luck.Critical Mass testifies to his ability to avoid "academic robot-speak" and to convey his critiques of high and low culture, transmitted on stage, in print, on television, and at the movies, in a winning way. His own small slips make his achievement more accessible to us. We look on, over his shoulder, as he directs our eyes and ears to the intellectuals, entertainers, performers, and/or celebrities who have graced, cursed, or captivated him ever since he quit Frostburg State and hit Woody's Manhattan.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Laser Vision, Rapier Pen, But LessThan Worthy Targets By Mark Mosca Woollcott writes brilliantly, originally and I dare you to find a single cliche. The problem: a significant part of the collection is focused on "media studies"' and the media content under his glass is too often out dated - the late 70's and the 80's are given far too much space in this many- hundred page book. This means admittedly skilled and funny deconstructions of Dino and the Rat Pack, Dick Cavett, and what Marianne Moore said about Lillian Hellman on Carson one night. OK if that's your aging meat, but . . . The latter part of the book, on literary subjects of continuing relevance, are of much greater current interest. So, not a bad book at all to choose from, but it could have been edited down to more current and relevant topics.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Forty years of American Cultural History. By peter manos James Wolcott has heard so many comedians, read so man books, seen so many movies, and listened to so many musicians that Critical Mass is more than a collection of sparkling critical essays. It is a forty year American cultural history. Because of the current emphasis on math and science education (with a subsequent devaluation of the liberal arts?); a veritable electronic wall of social media; and of course, their youth, many young people have never heard of, for example, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, or of the controversies they were involved in. Not that it's tragic; it's just that there is more to recent history than war and politics. And Henry Ford notwithstanding, history is not bunk. Critical Mass also provides the older generation--who you talking about, sonny?--the opportunity to re-encounter movies, comedians, music, TV shows, and books, in the form of dazzlingly witty and telling analyses. Other have noted how well Wolcott writes, so I won't go on and on about it. (No more than I already have.) Many readers of the New Yorker will be fascinated to read about its "elusive, yet "legendary" thirty-five year editor William Shawn, who besides publishing "some of the most far-reaching and deep-rippling journalistic prose of the post war era," persuaded Harold Ross, the editor-in-chief before him, "to devote an entire issue to John Hershey's Hiroshima." He had an interesting sex life as well. *** "You concupiscent browser!" "Oh, please." *** Dramatic encounters between talented people with big egos occur throughout the book, amusing, sad, or shocking, as the case may be. Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, for example, "blew their fuses" while live on TV. "When Vidal called Buckley a `crypto-Nazi' (he meant to say crypto-fascist but words for once failed him), Buckley responded: `Now, listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.'" Steve McQueen tries to hit Sam Peckinpah with a bottle of champagne; Charlton Heston tries to "shish-kebab" Peckinpah with a saber; and of course, Norman Mailer was always getting into scrapes, verbal and physical. *** "My dear sir, this is voyeurism, isn't it?" "Go away." *** Although I enjoyed discussions of familiar artists more than of the unfamiliar, each of the seventy-five essays kept my interest. They were not only well written--oops, I said it again--they were (forgive me) educational. Wolcott places the art or artists in their times: Film noir grew out of German expressionism (low-key black and white films) and hardboiled-detective novels. The chaste Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies lost their glitter with the onset of the sexual revolution. The lone anti-hero vigilante movies (Billy Jack, Dirty Harry, Walking Tall) proliferated during the seventies, a period Wolcott characterizes as "riddled with lost illusions", "seeped" in a sense of lawlessness, urban neighborhoods decaying. At random, here are some of Wolcott's subjects: Bob Dylan, Johnny Carson, Breakfast at Tiffany's, the Kennedy assassination, Guy Lombardo, Colette Blonigan, Kingsley Amis, Ellen Barkin, The Sex Pistols, Vanessa Redgrave, movie directors, oodles of authors (duh), In Cold Blood, Camile Paglia, late night TV comedy shows, The Rat Pack, The X-Files, Twilight Zone--ok, maybe not totally at random--Alfred Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Jimmy Stewart, and from his own list of critics now deceased: Pauline Kael, Dwight McDonald, Mary McCarthy, Seymore Krim, Marvin Mudrick, Susan Sontag . . . . And, as I've said, more movies, books, music, TV shows, and their artists and creators than you can Twitter your tweets at. Critical Mass is so tightly packed with intelligent and thoughtful (and entertaining!) criticism, that this reviewer is inadequate to the task, but you need be no highfalutin intellectual--dad-gummit--to get a big kick out of it what Wolcott hath wrought. All right, from my perspective, there is one thing wrong with the book. I would have liked to see an index. It still gets a 5.
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Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, by James Wolcott
