The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Isn't Wolfe's thing that he writes a book on American society for every decade, or something? Well, if so, this seems to be the late 50s to mid-60s. Phil Spector is at this peak and The Rolling Stones make a quick, ghost-like cameo. A proto-hippied crash pad pot den is another foreshadow of what the rest of the decade has in store. Celebrated is Ed Roth and teen car culture customizations, the birth of stock car racing and the demolition derby. It's this car stuff and the colors and "boomerang" signs of the roadside attractions that has the most life in this book. Cassius Clay at the time of the first Liston-Clay fight on February 25, 1964 get an article in this compendium of short pieces. A lot of verbiage is given over to New York topics like the one-man attack on abstract expressionism by Huntington Hartford, doormen, cartoons of NYC citizen caricatures, Fashion Avenue foot traffic, and more. It is the Manhattan matters this seem the least relevant and most vapid. As if still touched by the 50s himself, Wolfe writes in a glib, post-Beat rap that is entertaining and easy to read kept pseudo-intellectual by Wolfe's ejactulations of cultural allusions.
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