Sure glad I’m not an idol-worshiping Republican heathen.
Some days when I’m patting my pockets down and zipping through my own mnemonic of “Keys, coffee, carrying-case…cats, cash, can’t recall the last “k” thingie” and before I go out into the world, I remember, “Cott! Wol-cott!”.
Idiot!
And I put my cake and kaftan and candelabra down and sprint back inside and check out what the best writer in Bloggerton is up to. I’m always richly rewarded, as this paragraph from today’s menu can attest. So go now, you, and read:
It’s amusingly obvious why NRO has thrown its nonexistent critical weight behind Cinderella Man. It's everything Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby quietly, subversively wasn't. Eastwood's allegorical chamber drama violated the pious strictures of family-value entertainment as chiseled on stone tablets and brought down from the mountain top by Michael Medved. The fighter’s family in MDB is a gimme-gimme pack of trailer-trash Snopeses; Braddock's family in Cinderella man is a warm, movable hearth. Million Dollar Baby enters a dark tunnel and travels the length of it to accept death as a personal choice and deliberate destination. For all its somber coloration, Cinderella Man is as life-affirming as a Frank Capra movie without all the corny humor of contrived eccentricity. Million Dollar Baby took a girl-power story and existentialized it. Cinderella Man enshrines masculinity in a humble wooden frame.
And after I read, first comes the pure, toe-curling, OMG awe. Even content takes a back-seat to gobbling up the sheer effing style of it during my greedy inital pass. Then I slow down and take in the actual shape and substance. More prose-gasms, followed, I admit, by a little flush of shameful envy; in a future incarnation, if I am very, very good, a kindly God will let me occasionally put together a paragraph this well.
Then comes the giddy awe back 'round again, that this guy is swinging his Big Lumber for the team I’m on: Bwahaha! Who shall stand against us with this man on our side!
Finally comes something akin to pity for the Little Mikey Medved GOP; I wonder if they even realize how fucked they are with the full arsenal of Wolcott’s prose merrily arrayed against them.
Then comes the realization that I’m running late, and my clever, moderately alliterative mnemonic is in shambles, so I randomly grab my cartwheel and CDs, my Camus and my camera and haul ass to the office…
…laughing like a crazy man -- like Alastair Sim during the last ten minutes of “A Christmas Carol” -- all the way there.
12 comments:
I'm so happy for James Wolcott. Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, he and Alexander Cockburn wrote some of the greatest columns I've ever read for "The Village Voice." They both stuck out like sore thumbs with their brilliant, foppish writing style and were probably despised by their more "serious" colleagues, but that only made me love them more.
Cockburn was the "Press Clips" critic and Wolcott was the Television critic, though they both seemed to write about whatever they felt like. I remember one hysterical column by Wolcott, in particular, where he questioned why anybody in their right mind would give a damn about the Academy Awards. The irony, of course, is that he ended up being berthed at "Vanity Fair" which is one of the primary architects of the Academy Award Entertainment Industrial Complex.
Playing the old sage of the blogging community seems to have revived Wolcott, however, and you're right. I don't walk out the door in the morning without checking him out. He's not only righteous, he's obviously having fun again.
I agree that Wolcott is a national treasure, but don't sell yourself short, drifty. I can't speak for the others here, but personally, I'm glad you're back: I was really jonesing for my daily driftglass fix.
"Just a pinch to ease the pain...
I'll never bother you again."
style AND substance are a deadly combination. wolcott has both, and i'm glad that he does.
btw, don't hate on ron howard, folks. he makes solid, all-ages entertainments. it doesn't mean he's evil. i'll bet there's some moderate-to-liberal people who will love this movie, as opposed to, say, raging bull (haven't seen million dollar baby yet. soon i will.)
that doesn't mean they're evil or wrong.
Great post, I enjoyed reading it.
Adding you to favorites, Ill have to come back and read it again later.
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