Lucking Out by James Wolcott

Author:James Wolcott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, American—20th century—Biography, Authors
ISBN: 9780385527781
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2011-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

They were strange, but straight-strange, a collegiate facsimile edition of a set of bland-seeming Warholian ironies about everyday objects, brand merchandise, and candy-pill colors bestowed on its citizens by a big, shiny, bountiful milkshake-machine America. “Don’t Worry About the Government” went one song title, a sentiment that cut against the paranoid grain of the post-Watergate era, when The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor sent their heroes into furtive phone booths to make desperate calls and Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s Conversation ripped his apartment apart like an archaeological dig in a futile effort to locate the electronic bug. But this pose of benign acceptance, like Warhol’s, laid a curved sheet of glass over a grid of nervous tremors, putting the aesthetic on a minimalist feed:

When the Velvets made their reputation at the Balloon Farm, they were navigating through a storm of multi-media effects; mirrors, blinking lights, strobes, projected film images. Talking Heads works without paraphernalia in a cavernous room projecting light like a television located at the end of a long dark hall. The difference between the Heads and the Velvets is the difference between phosphorescence and cold gray TV light. These people understand that an entire generation has grown up on the nourishment of television’s accessible banality. What they’re doing is presenting a banal facade under which run ripples of violence and squalls of frustration—the id of the vid.

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