James Wolcott, wise dildo

The best chapter in “Lucking Out” is the one on punk rock. It is a tour de force of observation, reportage and cultural analysis. Wolcott’s most pumping valentine is for the punk poet and singer Patti Smith, who comes across as a genuine star and nice person. But it’s clear Wolcott loves most of these people (he does seem a bit stingy is his assessment of Lester Bangs, but it is with good reason if Bangs was half as annoying as Wolcott makes him out to be). Wolcott entered CBGB right as the famous punk and new wave club was lifting off, hosting young and then-unknown acts like Talking Heads, Blondie, Television and The Ramones. When he saw what was going on there, Wolcott became a fan and a booster. He explains it in one of my favorite sentences from the book: “One thing I learned from Pauline [Kael] was that when something hits you high and hard, you have to be able to travel wherever the point of impact takes you and be willing to go to the wall with your enthusiasm and over it if need be, even if you look foolish or ‘carried away,’ because your first shot at writing about it may be the only chance to make people care.” These days rock writers, muted with their own self-importance, never let go like this — which is why most are unreadable.

What makes “Lucking Out” difficult to square is that Wolcott has a sensitive radar to cant, even if it is liberal cant, yet is himself a knee-jerker outside the pages of his memoir. In “Lucking Out,” Wolcott describes the humorless “political correctos” who have taken over The Village Voice. Wolcott notes that they “found the light touch suspect” and “were grunting out copy as if handcuffed to a rowing machine.” Elsewhere he laments that niche journalism has made too many writers “dildos for rent.” Yet read Wolcott’s Vanity Fair blog, or watch some of his TV appearances on YouTube. (My personal favorite is where his dismisses the tea party as a passing fad — “I don’t think the tea parties are going to catch fire.”) It’s all the usual suspects: lame jabs at Herman Cain, shots at Fox, snot-rockets at The Daily Caller (he bashed us on day one), pitches for Stalinist hacks like Alexander Cockburn (a buddy from The Voice days). Didn’t Wolcott read his own book? Is he really the soul behind so much of its wisdom and joy? Perhaps like so many New York liberals, Wolcott has never met or actually talked to a conservative. William F. Buckley makes a couple brief appearances in “Lucking Out.” Perhaps Wolcott should have visited him once or twice. Because these days he himself seems like a dildo for rent — to tiresome lefty hairdo Graydon Carter.

This brings us to an absolutely breathtaking passage in “Lucking Out.” It comes in the book’s chapter about porn. Wolcott once went to a sex show in the bad old Times Square of the ’70s, and the part where he describes the darkness of it is worthy of Richard John Neuhaus, or even Augustine. “The human wastage of Times Square [in the ’70s] weighs too heavily against slumming nostalgia,” he observes. When Wolcott goes into a live sex show, he is assaulted by a “booming distorted intercom voice” repeating the name of the show: “The Pimppp and the Whorrre…” Wolcott: “It was a better Brechtian alienation effect than anything I’ve ever seen in Brecht, the sense of dehumanization compounded by the knowledge of the performers of this sketch were repeating it four, five times a day, like the last damned dregs of vaudeville. Forget Sartre and No Exit, this is what hell must really be like: an endless reenactment performed by dummies for dummies, and you’re one of the dummies.” With such insight, maybe Wolcott should be writing for The Daily Caller.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.