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Do It
For Mother
Earth
And The
YMCA.
Come out to the big Mother Earth Day Concert at
Autzen Stadium on June 4 at 8:00 p.m.—but don't
come empty handed.
A 40 toot Rainier Brewing Company van will be
waiting there to haul all the beer, soft drink and
other bottles and cans you bring along to ap
propriate manufacturers tor recycling. Every
penny received will be turned over to the
University of Oregon and Central Lane Family
YMCA's.
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
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