Issue 171

I find
this hard to believe myself now, but not so long ago I
was a card-carrying pay-for-TV Foxtel customer. I was
living on my own in rented accommodation in Camberwell
many years ago when I was visited by a Foxtel salesman
– I was on my own and I was easy meat. I signed up as
soon as he confirmed I could get multiple sports channels
and watch Rugby Union till the Blue Bulls came home and
was soon happily watching as much Super Rugby as they
could throw at me.
Inevitably though I started to check out what was available
on other channels and dipping into some of the more exotic
ones like World Movies, for which privilege of course
I was charged a few more dollars per month. (One thing
you soon find out about Foxtel is that you can never get
the package you want and you’re paying for a raft
of channels you never watch, but the Foxtel model is suffering
on multiple fronts, not the least being that the preponderance
of Aussie TV viewers are not prepared to pay for TV and
continue to watch the free-to-air networks, mostly for
the sport and cooking programs I imagine).
Now that I’ve relinquished my Foxtel membership,
that’s exactly what I’m now compelled to do
as well. No more minority sports like rugby union for
me. Rugby simply doesn’t exist on free-to-air. That
leaves teasing out the occasionally watchable stuff more
or less exclusively from the ABC and SBS, as I can’t
stomach any of the pap on the commercial channels. Even
if they had something worth watching, the volume (in all
senses) of advertising has me grabbing for the remote.
(I did catch a minute or two of Andrew Denton on Channel
7 the other day however. What on earth is he thinking?
Probably of his bank balance I suppose, but what of his
eternal soul?)
Anyway, there is some relief from the tedium of even these
worthy institutions’ programming in the shape of
ABC iView and SBS On Demand respectively. I’m informed,
(as honorary holder-upper of the iPad I don’t really
know a lot about it myself) that iView isn’t much
chop as it doesn’t have any movies, whereas On Demand
has lots of movies as well as a swag of series. (Like
The Good Fight for instance, which series is rollicking
entertainment, stunningly current and rabidly anti-Trump
for good measure).
My princess-guide does invite me to help choose a show
from the On Demand, but we usually watch the one she first
thought of and that’s quite OK by me. Happily she
recently discovered an unmined selection of movies in
the Biography section and we haven’t looked back
since. In fact, we’ve had a heady-run of biographical
titles that have been informative and educational as well
as uniformly well put together, various degrees of entertaining
and quite often moving and unexpected in a way that only
true stories can be, even if you mostly know how they’re
going.. read
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So how
long ago was it that I read Tom Wolfe’s ‘Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test “? I suspect about fifty years
ago around 1968 when it was first published. Or did I
read ‘The Kandy –Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby’ first? More likely as it was published earlier
and I am sure that either Esquire or the New Yorker ran
one or two of the short stories from it as exemplars of
the new journalism which persuaded me to buy the Penguin
copy as soon as it was released. And if my memory is correct
the ‘The Kandy –Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby’ was about the Californian hot rod scene whereas
the ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’, a full-sized
real book, was about Ken Kesey, the author of ‘One
Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and a degenerating
drug fuelled hippie bus trip across America and into fear,
fantasy and loathing. Complete with Hell’s Angels.

Another of his earlier books that I recollect owning,
reading, and enjoying for its skewering of the New York
social scene was ‘Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing
the Flak Catchers’ may be buried there also. The
Black Panthers who were the focus of the Leonard Bernstein
gathering of New York radical socialites and ‘arm-chair’
agitators, later described Tom Wolfe as “……..
that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that
fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?”.
This doesn’t compare with Hunter S Thompson who
wrote to Wolfe, “You thieving pile of albino warts….
I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters
if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with
that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re
promoting.”
Neither book seems to be on our bookshelves now but could
be in one of the innumerable boxes scattered around the
place containing books that we are uncertain whether to
keep or give to the op-shop. Or they could be amongst
the books that you lend to people and which never seem
to come back unless you see them on their bookshelves
and repossess them.
Now that Tom Wolfe is dead, at the respectable age of
88, there were a number of questions that have occurred
to me, two of which focussed on his mannered, foppish
dress style of always wearing a white suit, shirts with
detachable collars and strange hats. The perfect Southern
gentleman twice removed, Oscar Wilde for the post Beat
Generation. The first question is; did they place him
in his coffin dressed as he always was to meet his maker,
ready to take notes and look for a suitable publisher?
The second was how did he manage to write articles and
books in which he seems to be either an invisible observer
or somebody that blends in perfectly into any environment
dressed in a white suit? Which, apparently he was. You
would think that a Hell’s Angel in some drug crazed
sex orgy might have thought that a glowing white dandy
standing in the corner with a notebook might have reason
for some comment. Or mutilation or dismemberment depending
on the amount of LSD or hash consumed. read
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