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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 21, 1971)
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And tor our own recyclable bottles and all aluminum cans Rainier will contribute double what we normally pay—or 2c each (50c per case of 24) for the bottles and lc each (25c per case of 24) for the aluminum cans. We'll reuse our recyclable bottles and have the cans melted down and made into new aluminum products. So come out and hear Mother Earth, The Doobie Bros, and Ouroboros—but don't come empty handed Let's all do it for Mother Earth and the YMCA. Rainier Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington Wolfe ... Continued from Page 7 Grass, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Markopoulos, who is an “underground filmmaker before 1,200 students. The subject was “The Style of the Sixties.” Paul Krassner was the moderator, and Krassner has a sense of humor, but the Horsemen charged on. Very soon the entire discussion was centered on police repression, Gestapo tactics, the knock on the door, the Triumph of Knout. I couldn’t believe what was happening, but there it was. “What are you talking about?” I said. “We’re in the middle of a . . . Happiness Explosion!” But I didn’t know where to begin. I might as well have said let’s talk about the Fisher King. Happiness, said Saint-Just a century ago, is a new concept in Europe. Apparently it was new here, unheard of almost. Ah, philosophers!-if we want to be serious, let us discuss the real apocalyptic future and things truly scary; ego extension, the politics of pleasure, the self-realization racket, the pharmacology of Overjoy But why discuss it now. I, for one, will be content merely to watch the faces of our leaders, political and in tellectual, the day they wake up and look over their shoulders and catch the first glimpse of their erstwhile followers—streaking—happy workers!—in precisely the opposite direction, through God’s own American ozone—Apocalyptic riders! —astride their own custom versions—enjoy!—of the 300-horsepower Chevrolet V-8 engines of this world . . . riding bareback . . . Out of context, Rex Reed could have written that, but in context it is definitely the work of a new Wolfe (maybean aging Wolfe: Tom isn’t Tom anymore). What followed the above words of his introduction are several finely wrought glimpses into a different world than existed in 1965. This is a pathetic world. The pump house gang is a group of young surfers who live totally for the surf and sand (there is nothing inherently wrong with this). But they are also a national fad. Add a dash of movie lore and a man named Bruce Brown films the whole phenomenon and gets rich. But the gang sits around the pump house and continues to sit around the pump house and finally Leonard and Donna who are 18 and 21, respec tively, kill themselves. “Nobody knew what to think. But one thing it seemed like—well, it seemed like Donna and Leonard thought they had lived The Life as far as it would go and now it was running out. All that was left to do was—but that is an insane idea. It can’t be like that, The Life can’t run out, people can’t change all that much just because gods own chronometer runs on and the body packing starts deteriorating and the fudgy tallow shows up at the thighs where they squeeze out of the bathing suit—” My god, that is sickening. We’re all caught in the whirlpool tyranny of time. Whatever happened to poor Tom, Trivial Tom? My god, that is sickening. We’re all caught in the whirlpool tyranny of time. Whatever happened to poor Tom, Trivial Tom? Hefner Then we have Hugh Hefner, recluse An empire built on sex ap propriately run from a huge sickenly round revolving bed. But as the bed revolves, Hef's head seems to be... “floating to the left.” And he has his own camera right in his bedroom— “putting God knows what on videotape ” But Wolfe is showing something essentially absurd in this life of Hefner. king of sex, king of the status dropouts. This is not the world of the street, the brutal street, that was becoming so prominent in American life—all those marches, all those riots. But it is strange that even Hefner, recluse, really the king of enterprise (sex, Americans, sex) found that teargas like a junky burglar is indiscrimatory in whose nose-house it will pilfer. Hefner, king of enterprise, got gassed during all those riots. In this book, Wolfe has really caught some of the contemporary aspects of America in small, strange microcosms of the entire society. It is as if the sum is made up of the whole of its parts or maybe we should reverse the whole formula...and then reverse it again. Wolfe’s new non-fiction is a sort of societal yo-yo. Dark, Dark Tom. Clownish Carol Doda is a freak but an en terprising freak. “But of course! A heroine of her times! Carol Doda wears false eyelashes, but only to go with her Easter Egg yellow hair, dyed from brown, which goes with her soapstone skin, so perfectly white from remaining forever, every night within the hot meat spigot casbah of Broadway—Electra of the Main Stem!—in order to show the But the book is uneven. At times it is so very very Kooj and at times ab solutely terrible. ThgTories. “The Mild Ones” anH r^vs.” for ^’’and “The Hair Boys,” for example, could have been left blank Pages in the middle of the book and it would have been better in the end. Ambivalence This is one of the troubles the reader has with Wolfe When he is good, he is very very good but when he is bad, he is just poor Tom, trivial Tom The worst part of the problem is that the badness seems so obvious. Throughout his w*rk the triviality occurs when either his subject matter is merely a zoom-zoom thing or when he tries to treat a person superficially. Tom’s bomb in "The Mild Ones” is an example of one of these zoom-zoom things. This guy builds this terrific motorcycle and it goes zoom-zoom and the reader goes: So what? Toms says, there he goes. Reader says, so what? Tom is only humming, no lyric to-hi? song. An example of the super superficial treatment is Ken Kesey. I first read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test shortly after I moved to Oregon. I didn’t read it for Wolfe but because Kesey is such a “big name in dees here parts of the country.” a movie and when it happens, as it has happened in countless movies, the reader’s mind’s ear can hear the cheering of the theatre audience. That was the whole tradition of Douglas Fairbanks—Burt Lancaster—Sean Connery leaping through that window! Oh, joy! Then flash! It’s all irony. We don’t actually know that those footfalls are Black Maria’s until Kesey has made his mad dash and then an instant later she steps through the door. It’s the old O. Henry twist! As in Catch-22, we are stopped short by the basic ironic insanity of man. Kesey The worst part of the book is the skim-the-surface treatment of Kesey. Here is a young author of two very fine novels. Eccentric? Yes, but complex too. Tom doesn’t catch the complexity. Kesey is merely A PRESENCE. Presenting just a presence, Tom can not answer the question, So what? The answer lies in exploring the com plexity. At the end o the book, Tom has Kesey going “We blew it. We blew it.” I remember that same line at one point in Easy Rider (Fonda and Hopper probably took it right out of this book— the similarity between that movie and this book could be explored quite CD continue to improve express feelings directly identify put-downs have no expectations don’t rationalize have new experiences paraphrase when unclear seek new perceptions accept feedback read body language discuss reality ignore other’s illusions perception check give behavior observations touch and help others don’t interrupt interpret when asked negotiate relationships accept fantasy focus on the moment and trip The list at left is an outline of the monograph Communication and Learning written and published locally by Mike Sprague. He calls it, “A newly articulated description of human interaction and potential.” It could be called a how-to-live system but falls short. The attempt is to synthesize thinking of ten important psychologists including Peris, Adler, Dreikers and Frankl with ideas of Fuller. Russell, and E.T. Hall into a clear concise framework to understand human behavior. Sprague claims to uncover two new principles that govern human functioning explaining the relationship of anxiety to perception. He says there are two human feelings: anxiety and joy. Anxiety is defined functionally as the brain’s signal to itself through the senses of a current misperception. The other concept—the mind can focus on only one thing at a time which is limited to the past, present or future mysticism excluded. The whole theory is based on absolutely defining ultimate or ob jective reality with being totally in the here and now as the primary goal. Some words are defined in a new way, but he fails to adequately explain joy and being on the moment, and leaves out such important human realities as images, depression, and fear. The consistency of the system is tight but individual interpretation can lead to confusion. The concept of reality and some of the other ideas need more explanation. The uncompromising position of ab solutism may remind the reader of religious dogma, but if the author accurately describes reality as he claims, he’s unusually perceptive, otherwise it’s one big mistake. Sold in local bookstores. new world a pair of—at last!— perfected twentieth-century American breasts. You have only one life to live. Why not live it as a put-together girl?” Maybe Carol Doda is a clown. Maybe Hugh Hefner is a clown. Maybe American sex is clownish. Sex, or at least Wolfe’s vision of it, might just be all embodied in the irr, irr of Hefner’s bed and referred to as “it” in much the same manner as Carol Doda refers to them as “them.” Mlirror Then we have a profile of Marshall McLuhan (do not read this page, people). Wolfe presents McLuhan’s theories—radical and startling, a quick smack of the possible future for men still involved in the past—against the repetitive uttering of “What if he is right?” But there is an unsettling effect in that repetitious question. It is almost as if the sound went out: What if his right? and the echo came back: What is going to happen to us? This effect is one of the central essences of this book It is almost as if Wolfe is giving a series of portraits of pathos and is making us actually enjoy it If the reader enjoys the book, it is almost as if he has become one of the chapters in it. Does reading reflect back like a mirror on the reader? The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is on the whole the worst thing Tom has done. Yet it does have its good points. Tom is so uneven. Technique The main good point is technique. The ability to hold the language together, to extend the style, is quite good. This style is part acid language and part movie reporting. However, there are only two good scenes in the entire book and for dif ferent reasons. The first is the Hells Angels scene and the second is Kesey’s escape from the house in Mexico. The Hell 's Angels scene is well done because it moves the reader—right to the toilet to retch. The reader is disgusted. This is the pathos of man staring him in the face—so one person got gang banged, so what, she asked for it. Kesey’s escape is well done because of the interlinking of two elements. Kesey is waiting in a house in Mexico and he is getting really paranoid—it seems every pig in the world is after him f inally Black Maria shows up and when Kesey hears her footsteps, it freaks him out-IT’S THE F B I! With one mad dash-go!— he leaps out the window and runs off through the jungle That's a scene out of satisfactory). The effect is the same we went out to discover America and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Tom, however, stops right there. Easy Rider had one more scene and that scene captured part of America. I get the impression that the real story of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test begins about where Tom ends. "Miss and hit” Reading Tom Wolfe is a hit and miss proposition. Or maybe I should say a miss and hit since first he missed (Kandy-Kolored), then hit (Pump House), then missed (Kool-Aid Acid) and finally hit again—Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Some of the pieces in The Pump House Gang and the “Radical Chic essay of this latest volume comprise the best writing Mr. Wolfe has done. Radical Chic is the story of a party at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment given to raise money for the Black Panthers. It is also the story of a phenomenon of the upper crust s 1m pluse to identify with the lower classes even if that identification may actually be contrary to the upper crusts in terests Wolfes style of presentation is nearly perfect. Concise, not flashy, compact, no unnecessary description, the style presents a devastating air of objective observation. Perfectly he conveys the impression of “this is what happened." He has caught the ac curacy—it seems— of an event. What makes this essay so im portant, however, is the subject matter. Wolfe finally has tackled a relevant subject. He has attacked the American liberal’s myth of wanting to feel guilty. But his attack is not really an attack, per se. He is merely serving as the rope which these people use to hang them selves. The phenomenon that took place at Lenny’s is called nostalgie de la boue (literally—“nostalgia for the mud”). It is the romanticizing of primitive souls and those souls are the Black Panthers. And the true motive of the entire radical chic can be summed up with: “most of the people in this room have had a problem of being unwanted." Don’t you want us, Black Panthers? Chic Wolfe is devastating. The beautiful people are sincere: “Who do you call to give a party?” The beautiful people are involved: “I’ve never met a Panther— this is a first for me.” The beautiful people are with it— Latin American servants, far freaking out. And when the chips are down: "In general, the Radically Chic made a strategic with drawal, denouncing the ‘witchhunt’ of the press as they went. There was brief talk of a whole series of parties for the Panthers in and around New York, by way of showing the world that socialites and culturati were ready to stand up and be counted in defense of what the Panthers, and, for that matter, the Bernsteins, stood for. But it never happened. In fact, if the socialites already in line for Panther parties had gone ahead and given them in clear defiance of the opening round of attacks on the Panthers and the Bernsteins, they might well have struck and ex traordinary counterblow in behalf of the Movement. This is, after all, a period of great confusion among the culturati and liberal intellectuals generally, and one in which a decisive display of conviction and self confidence can be overwhelming. But for the Radically Chic to have fought back in this way would have been a violation of their own innermost con viction. Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style: in its heart is is part of Society and its traditions. Politics, like Rock, Pop and Camp, has its uses; but to put one’s whole status on the line for nostalgie de la boue in any of its forms would be unprincipled.” Mau-inauing Balanced with Radical Chic is “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Together they seem to indicate that the Blacks have definitely understood the Black-White relationship in the country. They have cut to the very center of the white mentality and ex ploited it. Mau-Maing is the description of a technique to gain money from bureaucracy of the poverty program. It is a technique founded on sheer in timidation (much the same as Whites have used for years on the Blacks). They wear their ghetto rags. They come in groups. They plunk down their weapons. And they scare the hell out of the bureaucrats. Success. We try to call it racism but way back in our minds the thought lingers: is it really only common sense. Con tentwise, Wolfe seems a pig; but that has nothing to do with the politics of Wolfe hits. Tom misses. If the pattern continues, it’s time for a miss poor Tom. What if he hit again9 The pattern will be broken Does that disturb us? Is life worth living9 Mike P e t r y n i ALI BABA Home of exotic Arabian food featuring a great variety of fine Arabian food at the >5. most reasonable prices around. Dinner is only $1.25. Each night we feature a different dinner. No set menu. % Dinner time is 5:30 - 8:30 pm We're located between Eugene & Springfield at 3758 Franklin Blvd. 746-9290. Closed Sunday. Free parking. P S. 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