Quote

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

James Wolcott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Wolcott
Age: 71
Born: 1952
Born: December 10
Journalist
Novelist
New York City
New York
Pops
Archangels
Dawn
Dawns
Popular
Craves
Longer
Archangel
Culture
Vampires
Night
Crave
Traffic
Vampire

More quotes by James Wolcott

Image
In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.
James Wolcott
Image
Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.
James Wolcott
Image
Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
James Wolcott
Image
Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
James Wolcott
Image
On August 28, 2010, Fox News messiah Glenn Beck hosted a 'Restoring Honor' revival meeting featuring sexy guest star Sarah Palin, much as Bob Hope would roll out Raquel Welch in white go-go boots on his U.S.O. tours to give our fighting men a morale lift in their khakis.
James Wolcott
Image
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.
James Wolcott
Image
Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.
James Wolcott
Image
It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
James Wolcott
Image
Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.
James Wolcott
Image
As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects - digitize and dematerialize - we approach a 'Star Trek' future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.
James Wolcott
Image
I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people's gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It's a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter.
James Wolcott
Image
Robert Pattinson is rebel cool incarnated -- the James Dean of the undead.
James Wolcott
Image
'Hairspray' was a movie turned Broadway musical turned Hollywood remake, and that is the 'Lion King' circle of life as we know it in Times Square, the creative loop that swings for the stars and sometimes crashes into the upper deck.
James Wolcott
Image
With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.
James Wolcott
Image
[Richard Crossley's] previous bird guide, for ID'ing Eastern birds, is the most imaginative, original attempt to re-envision the birding guide and set his approach apart from that of Sibley, Kaufman, Peterson, Nat'l Geo, and the other bibles in the field.
James Wolcott
Image
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.
James Wolcott
Image
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
James Wolcott
Image
The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
James Wolcott
Image
Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.
James Wolcott
Image
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
James Wolcott