Since most books suffer the fate of orphans in the storm, neglected and forlorn, it’d be churlish of me to complain about the reception of Lucking Out in certain poshy publications, since as, that distinguished literary size queen Somerset Maugham once advised writers, “You don’t read your reviews; you measure them.” Column space is all, especially today, when it’s at such a tight premium for any author hoping to be rescued.

That said, be that as it may, still and all, I can’t let pass the tag-end of a sentence in the final graf of the Lucking Out notice in The New York Times Book Review (or as I charmingly call it, “that small-pox rag”) which goes: “...the author of this book went on to write for Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker, in addition to Vanity Fair, and wound up marrying a dance critic.”

That dance critic has a name, her name is Laura Jacobs, and she is not “a dance critic,” she is the dance critic for The New Criterion, the best dance critic in the country, as well as a fashion writer, the former editor of Stagebill, a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair (the author of the cover story on Grace Kelly, among other features), and a novelist of two exquisitely rendered, emotionally depth-charged works, Women About Town and The Bird Catcher, of which the Times Book Review took zero notice, being too busy preparing Joan Didion’s reliquary and fawning over the latest literary genius farted aloft from the borough of Brooklyn.

Laura Jacobs is, in brief, an accomplished writer and figure herself, not some negligible nothing attached to my personal narrative of service to the Times reviewer solely for the purpose of making some petty, dubious, sexistly reductive point.

Fox Business News finds itself celebrating its fourth year on the air face-down in the birthday cake.

This isn't how it was 'posed to be. Such was the justifiably juggernaut reputation of Fox News's lord of misrule Roger Ailes that when it was announced that a new network was in the works that would take on CNBC, it was only a matter of time before he flipped on the juice and reanimated a new Frankenstein's monster into rampaging life. Ailes even gave interviews making it sound as if CNBC were some commie-lib outfit overobsessed with corporate misdeeds and greedy excess--this about a network that employs Larry Kudlow--and Fox Business News would instead dedicate itself to celebrating the buccaneer capitalist spirit that has made this country the great land of inequality it is. It was clear that Fox Business News would share the same DNA and red-meat zeal as the Fox News of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto (who would double his anchoring duties at FBN and be its managing editor), and some at CNBC, they wuz sceered.

“The general feeling is that Fox will crush CNBC,” one pessimistic CNBC staffer told NYTV. “Politics aside, Ailes is worshiped. The leadership here is in total denial.” 

I trust that whoever that Barney Fife was at CNBC, he or she has learned bladder control in the intervening years, because FBN hasn't crushed anything except its own virile hopes. Forsooth (D.M. Levine, Adweek):

It was an abysmal month for Fox News' young sibling channel. Fox Business Network saw an average daily viewership of around 65,000 for October, according to Nielsen, which also happened to be the month of the network's four-year anniversary.

In its target 25-54 demo, though, Fox Business only drew an average of 10,000 viewers per day. This, compared to the network's chief competitor, CNBC, which saw around 201,000 viewers on average and 59,000 in the 25-54 age group. A source familiar with the network says that four years in, they expected Fox Business to be performing "a lot better than 10,000 in the target demo."

Adding to the network's woes is the fact that Don Imus' program, Imus in the Morning, which Fox Business debuted in 2009 as the network's daily morning kickoff program, is performing miserably -- with an average of just 5,000 daily viewers in the target demographic for the month and 90,000 total viewers. By comparison, Squawk Box, which airs on FBN's chief competitor CNBC at the same time as Imus' show, received 179,000 total viewers on average for the month and outdelivered Imus in the target demographic by more than 1,100 percent, with 65,000 viewers.

My math skills are a little rusty, but a difference of 1,100% sounds like rather a lot.

The unhappy irony is that Imus himself sounds better, sharper, faster than he has in ages, rejuvenated by his younger sidekicks and clearly enjoying himself. He also isn't politically doctrinaire, which can't be said of the FBN hosts that follow him on the schedule, such as the egregious Stuart Varney, who relishes every bit of bad economic news as a threat to Obama's re-election chances, Lou Dobbs, still under the delusion that he's an ornery independent, and, of course, Cavuto, who might as well be Herman Cain's corner man, massaging his shoulders between rounds.

And then there's Eric Bolling, who, even for a Fox News personality, talks a surplus of ignorant smack. He reminds me of the kind of guy in college who'd flatten a beer can against his forehead after he finished it. That can take its intellectual toll.

So many thoughtful, impassioned, eloquent, inner-wrestling pieces have been written in recent weeks about Pauline Kael and the new biography of her by Brian Kellow, but for me and many others the Self-Styled Siren's comes out tops. It--and by it, I mean this--has been the Talk of the Blogosphere.

Now I admit I am somewhat prejudiced, favorably swayed. For I know the Siren and have drinks with her and likeminded bloggers in the legendary bar that offers refuge and succor to us kindred spirits in this storm-tossed sea we call life. She also says super-kindly things about my book in the essay I'm about to excerpt, though I won't excerpt the parts about Lucking Out due to the innate modesty that has been my halo since I swam ashore from Maryland and made Manhattan my little home. The Siren:

[snip]

In comments sections, where bloggers and cinephiles flex their intelligence at one another, pretense is abandoned. Jim Emerson, a (qualified) Kael admirer, once excerpted Renata Adler’s attack on Kael and collated some Kael defenses; the brief thread this prompted is illuminating. There’s a comment from one film blogger, alleging that her fans “don't want film criticism, they don't like cinema either, they just want to have fun reading fiction, and inflamatory diatribs [sic].” Someone else remarks, “The problem with Pauline Kael is that one gets the impression that she dismissed films on the basis that they didn't get her sexually aroused.” (Adler went after Kael for what she saw as a hectoring use of the second person. Kael always said she found “one” prissy and disingenuous, and this one agrees with her.) Adds another commenter, “[he’s] right about Kael's sexual fixations, but that isn't the sole problem. There's also the fact that there's no rhyme or reason to her approach. She would, time and again, praise one movie to the skies for certain qualities, and then turn around and trash another that possessed those same qualities;” he winds up by saying Kael had a “borderline psychotic degree of subjectivity.”

When I read threads of this sort, I consider dropping by to say, “I wonder why Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber--both of whom had some blind spots and occasionally reversed themselves--don’t inspire certain people to call them irrational, or psychotic, or to speculate about their sexual fixations.” But I don’t comment, because I don’t really wonder why. I don’t wonder at all.

Reward yourself and read the whole thing.

"Y'all want me to read the dirty parts from Fawk'ner?" the poet James Dickey would sometimes ask the audience from the stage, to which the answer from the crowd was a resounding "Yeah!"

I trust it won't come to that tomorrow (Friday) night when I read from my new memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies at 192 Books (10th Avenue & 21st Street), and not just because I don't have the dirty bits in William Faulkner conveniently bookmarked and highlighted. I am hoping to supply enough grit and lurid detail from inner depths of CBGB's and Times Square to keep you heathens happy, and there will probably be questions afterwards so that you can ask me any questions burning a hole in your leopard pants.

Well, actually, they don't--whoever "they" are--but I thought I'd steal the monicker today since it is the official pub date of my memoir Lucking Out, and I can't imagine anyone will mind. (It is also the birthday of Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, which is quite apropos.) Exercising an author's prerogative, I'm going to provide a rollcall of the reviews that have appeared so far--the favorable ones, that is, because the unfavorable ones you can find on your own with a flashlight and I'm not here to feed the negativity, man. If I overlook anyone, I'll remedy it later, so don't get peeved, not when the autumn weather is so beautiful.

Tom Watson:

Lucking Out is not the story of the 1970s. There's a lot missing: Ed Koch, the Son of Sam, the Yankees (the Mets!), black people, the outer boroughs, disco and Nixon. But it captures the creative true grit of the small town that existed within a big city so beset and grimy that "entire neighborhoods were considered no-go areas where you never knew what the hell might fall from the fire escapes." There's a wistful quality that long-ago decade of my own adolescence, but Wolcott doesn't lay on the sentimentalism and it's unlikely that Lucking Out will add too much to popular 70s lore. Which is a good thing in my mind, because we live in a society where the thin veneer of the ever-widening "creative class" has created a manufactured version of alternative lifestyle and consumption that passes for critical thought; every hipster manque with 500 clams can grab an iPad and feel like a downtown denizen, both funky and chic. As Wolcott notes, "all that lore is what made CBGB's compelling long after it became a raucous shell, and what has kept the myth of the Algonquin Round Table alive, no matter how mid-range the achievements of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley appear today."

Matt Haber, Capital New York:

Looking back at his decade scratching away in his own personal mole tunnel, Wolcott is frank about his youthful fears: "For someone like myself, a bookworm with bulging lobes who drew most of his vainglorious ideas about sex, conquest, and the mercurial enigma of Woman from novels written by men who really knew how to grill up a hot paragraph, the actual act itself loomed like a parachute drop into existential night, where the chute might not open." When it comes to opposite sex, Wolcott sometimes sounds like Charlie Brown pining over The Little Red-Haired Girl, so innocent and moony are his 70s era crushes. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the objects of those crushes are each so deserving and so entirely out of Wolcott's league, like Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth ("My crush on Tina was instantaneous. It was the only correct way to respond."); Dominique Browning, then an editor at Esquire ("Everyone had a crush on Dominique. There was a secret society of Dominique infatuees who stroked her name aloud as if it had dove wings."); or New Yorker writer Veronica Geng ("scarily, sexily talented and thinky, an electrical storm waiting to happen").

When he does actually get the girl, it's kind of a disaster. In a sex scene a less honest memoirist might have left out, Wolcott writes...

Let's just stop right there, shall we, and let the tremulous suspense build.

Blue Girl, whose post really isn't synopsizable since so much of it involves byplay with The Skimmer, so read here in full.

TBogg's Portrait of a Young Man Among Artists, a curtain-raiser for the following Firedoglake Book Salon event.

And lastly for now, John Adamian's vividly titled notice, "From Punk to Porn: James Wolcott reminds us why the 70s were so loud, weird, smelly and perverse."

Yes, that was the Proustian mission I undertook in Lucking Out, and I can only pray I was up to the stinky, kinky task.

Keeping his head while others roll theirs down the gutter lane, Daniel Larison provides a typically cool assessment at his American Conservative blog Eunomia as to why Rick Perry isn't proving to be George Bush the Third in his presidential run.

Perry entered later than Bush [did for the 2000 Republican nomination]. By itself, that might not matter, but it has made his worse debate performances that much more damaging and noticeable, and his performances have been substantively worse than anything Bush did in 1999. The knock on Bush during his first campaign was that he didn’t know very much and that he was heavily coached. No one is saying the second part about Perry.

Indeedy not. Perry's performance over the last week shows that not only isn't he heavily coached, he isn't even taking the field in a helmet to keep his brains from falling out. His gray matter seems susceptible to any flu or software bug floating around, as evidenced from his picking up a strain of "birther" dementia after dinner with Donald Trump, immediately mush-mouthing about it to Parade magazine. I confess: I don't understand paying court to Donald Trump--whose pre-presidential pre-campaign was an exercise in buffoonery that ended in well-deserved public humiliation--or passing along Trump's feeling that Obama's birth certificate is fake as if it had any relevance or weight. Reviving birtherism reveals that Perry is so far behind the curve he doesn't know where the curve starts. He still thinks birth origin is an issue on which Obama is vulnerable, or at least ticklish, telling CNBC, "It's a good issue to keep alive. It's fun to poke at him." Well, no one will ever accuse Rick Perry of going overboard on what Bush the Elder called "the vision thing." He even stepped on his own messaging by messing around with birtherism the same time he was announcing his flat-tax proposal, more evidence of undercoaching. For Perry, running for president seems to be mostly shits and giggles, if I may borrow a phrase from Jane Austen.

Margin Call, written and directed by J. C. Chandor.

Although it has the title and Wall Street setting of a doomsday financial cliffhanger (I anticipated something akin to Alan J. Pakula’s Rollover, with trading floors going mad as dominos tumble worldwide), it’s actually more of a mood piece, a tone poem tolling that the Time has Come. It beautifully makes use of Manhattan in the deep of night seen from on high from a eyrie, with dawn symbolizing not a better day, a rebirth of hope, but a dream-deprived awakening to disaster. Margin Call has been compared by one critic to David Mamet’s signature work, those hyperverbalized clashes of raunch and rapacity, but apart from the presence of Kevin Spacey (he was the in-house whiphand in Glengarry Glen Ross and is even better here, mellow, filled-out), I can’t see it--or, rather, hear it. What’s remarkable and daring about the set-to’s in Margin Call once it’s clear that the company (presumably based on Lehman Brothers) is leveraged beyond the max and headed for collapse is the level tone and manner flecked with tension that the actors take. They don’t shout or filibuster, like those Mamet characters who sometimes sound as if they’re addressing a gale; with the exception of Demi Moore, it’s a man’s world in this skyscraper citadel, yet these alpha males and their beta juniors don’t have the ballsy bravado associated with Masters of the Universe. Even the late scene when Spacey (the muffled conscience of the firm) confronts chief exec Jeremy Irons (who chews his vowels as if impressed by his delicious elocution) isn’t played as a dramatic showdown. It’s more like something out of The Godfather, conducted in a cone of quiet, and all the stronger for that.

Chandor even does something interesting with the characters’ cursing, a true novelty in these sewer-mouth days. The recurring phrase in Margin Call is “Fuck me,” used not as a command but as a muttering lamentation, as in Fuck me, I’m totally screwed; fuck me, this time we’re truly fucked. It’s ironic, in context, because what the firm is about to do is totally fuck its customers by foisting crap debt on them before the entire mortgage derivatives system implodes. They’re pitying themselves on the eve of pissing on their clients big-time. With a responsive intensity that suggests his brain is grinding its molars, figuring out the next move, Paul Bettany plays this cocky narcissism with a brilliance that’s funny and yet oddly sympathetic. He positions himself as the rueful voice of veteran experience even though he’s just a couple of years older than the junior cadets around him. When one of the cadets (played by tousled Penn Badgley) remarks that “people are going to get hurt” by the fallout from this debacle, Bettany says, yes, “people like me,” to which the other guys says, “No, real people too.” Bettany’s hotshot doesn’t qualify as a real person because he’s such a self-made caricature--the lean and hungry Wall Streeter who lavishes money on hookers, bar tabs, and a zoomy convertible. But you feel that he’s tricked out on these things because this is what’s expected of someone his age and income bracket; he’s consciously playing a part. And Bettany’s Will Emerson is also the one who’s the keenest animal sniff of what’s in the air, what’s in the wings, how it’s all going to go down. At one point early in the film he sets himself on the railing of the skyscraper, as if preparing himself for the precipitous fall, rehearsing it.

Some have said that Margin Call is the movie Wall Streeters need to see to understand why the Occupy Wall Street movement has taken hold, to understand the damage they’ve done. It’s a noble sentiment, but pointless. Wall Streeters at the apex understand what’s happened since 2008, even if they haven’t personally suffered; it’s not that they can’t see, but that they don’t care. And it’s quixotic to expect them to. It’s like expecting those at a high-stakes poker game to care about the poor schmuck losing everything at roulette or the one-armed bandits somewhere else in the casino. Guys (and occasionally gals) like these only care about the others at the table; those are the stakes and the opponents that matter to them. The Average Person doesn’t register. That’s why reform has to come through rules, regulation, and reform rather than appeals to conscience, civic duty, economic justice. Crash after crash after avaricious crash is built into the binge-and-purge organism of investment capitalism, as Jeremy Irons points out while having a lordly breakfast at his little table with the panoramic skyline view of morning Manhattan lying before him. He isn’t engaging in Gordon Gekko grandstanding. The mood of Margin Call is too melancholy for that. From its opening frame, it has the gravity of a funeral for a death that hasn’t yet happened, the suspended pause before the long drop down.

Counterpunch, co-edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, is holding a fundraiser and, unless you're a Koch brother or Rick Perry's burr-remover, you should consider kicking in a little contribution. For as bleak as the political and economic scene can be, OWS shows all is not dead, and Counterpunch helps to keep the fires burning. It's also a place where, daily, you can find writing you'll find nowhere else, such as this dismally plausible scenario by Michael Brenner, Welcome, President Romney:

Mitt Romney is our next President in all likelihood.  It will not be victory for his ideas (a pastiche of Wall Street, the Tea Party and the Pentagon) nor his personality (flat and uninspiring) nor his leadership (he is timid and painfully indecisive).  Conviction, character and capability have little to do with who comes out on top in current American politics.  Participants in these tedious marathons more closely resemble aspirants to celebrity in ‘dancing with the stars’ than dedicated office holders deliberating over the nation’s needs and future.  Any search for coherence or probity will come up empty handed.

[snip]

the air is rapidly coming out of the Tea Party balloon.  Sarah Palin’s shooting star has landed in some remote Alaskan wilderness.  Her copy cats in the Republican melee (Trump, Bachmann, Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, et al) are laugh lines in any honest history of this bizarre era. Rick Perry quickly exposed himself for the parochial Texas pol he is. Yet, the Tea Party’s two year run had served its purpose in the minds of the hard people and hard interests who own the Republican Party.  It marshaled the free floating discontents of millions for the Party cause.  It terrified Barack Obama into pre-emptive capitulation which added to the gifts that he already was bestowing on the financial moguls, big business, the industrial-military-intelligence complex, etc.  It neutered the Democrats in Congress; and it muted the ‘progressives’ who dared not suggest that they had been betrayed by the White house so long as there was the specter of Sarah Palin’s finger on the button.

So the shook troops can stand down, the maverick Koch brothers can be properly rewarded, and the Republican establishment can rally around the conventional man in the grey flannel suit who frightens no one and who can be counted on to consolidate the gains, political and economic, made under Obama.  He is the natural choice.  Paul is too quirky and out of step.  Huntsman occasionally gives discomforting signs of actually thinking on his own.  This is history repeating itself.  A look back at political history shows that the Republican establishment always has know how to arouse and exploit mania – McCarthyism and the Red Scare, racism post desegregation, Commie liberation movements in Central America, and most recently the Terrorist hobgoblin.  They are smarter than Democrats – even those Democrats in whom they do not have a controlling interest via campaign donations, media coverage and dispensing the accoutrements of success in our grasping, status anxious society.

It has been an unequal contest for years.  The Republicans throw at the opposition a West Coast offense, augmented by discreet side payments to the refs.  They come at you non-stop from all angles, lots of misdirection and look to bend the rules at every opportunity. They have a lust for power and are ruthless about winning. The Democrats spend their time in dull retreats attending dreary workshops on Single Wing adjustments and the risks of switching to the T formation while quaffing refreshments donated by corporate sponsors.

I think Brenner is too quick to write off Obama politically and the power of the presidency to engineer his reelection, but it's interesting that someone on the left feels the same dreary inevitability of Romney as Daniel Larison does from his lonely isthmus on the sane right.

And where else can you read such a cool assessment of the carnival of death and bad faith attending Gaddafi's demise? From Alexander Cockburn's latest column, Imperial Massacres:

I suppose the first triumphalist imperial post mortem photo of such an execution in my lifetime  I can recall is that of Che Guevara, killed on the CIA’s orders at La Higuera in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. Perhaps Che’s finest hour came with his leadership of the Cuban anti-imperial forces deployed in Africa, defeating South African and white mercenary forces in one of the greatest acts of revolutionary solidarity the world has ever seen.

Qaddafi, even in his latterday accomodationist phase, was always a bitter affront to Empire – a “devil” figure in a tradition stretching back to the Mahdi, whose men killed General Gordon in the Sudan in 1885. I remember fondly the leftists and Republicans who trekked to Tripoli in the 1960s to appeal to Qaddafi for funds for their causes, some of them returning amply supplied with money and detailed counsel.

Dollar for dollar I doubt Qaddafi has a rival in any assessment of the amount of oil revenues in his domain actually distributed for benign social purposes. Derision is heaped on his Green Book, but in intention it can surely stand favorable comparison with kindred Western texts. Anyone labeled by Ronald Reagan  “This mad dog of the Middle East” has an honored place in my personal pantheon.

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