James Wolcott
James Wolcott
James Wolcottis an American journalist, known for his critique of contemporary media. Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair and contributes to The New Yorker. He also writes a blog...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth10 December 1952
CountryUnited States of America
allowed misbehave tv writers
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.
bin clan endless flavor hulk mtv music pop provide
Pop music has been all but relegated to the remainder bin at MTV and VH1, where high-maintenance concoctions such as Paris Hilton, Flavor Flav, and Hulk Hogan's biohazard clan of bleached specimens provide endless hours of death-hastening diversion.
hurt laughing alive
Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.
wall cds ipods
As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.
art book design
Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
mistake writing tears
One of the mistakes they often make is the designers over-accessorize or over-elaborate. So you realize: this would work if they removed X and Y. And actually, that's the sort of thing that translates into writing, because a lot of the time you realize, I feel I need to add something here but actually what I need to do is subtract. And then there's always the psychodrama and the tears and the rage and the feuds.
nostalgia entitled
Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.
peace war lying
The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.
romantic-love romance comedy
It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
views clubs sides
I've always stayed on the periphery of things. When I used to go to the punk clubs and things like that, I was never up front. I always wanted to be in the back, or on the side, because I wanted to get the whole view, rather than be staring up at someone's nostrils.
peace war believe
It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
peace war life-is
Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
zoos mean race
I understand the people-watching, but I've never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.
voice office fever
At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.