Getting Down in Seventies New York

In 1975 a now famous headline in the NY Daily News read, "Ford to NY, drop dead." Perhaps that was really the beginning of the culture wars. As the New York of the day represented the center of chaotic, noisy, economic and social change. It was as if all the juvenile energy of the '60's has been "matured" into a kind of angry, rebellious, adolescence that the NY of the time came to symbolize. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott captures the pitch perfect tenor of the times and his place in it, in Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York. My conversation with James Wolcott: