December 2007 – hexachromatic

the Flamingo

“Bugsy [Siegel] pulled into Las Vegas in 1945 with several million dollars that, after his assassination, was traced back in the general direction of gangster-financiers. Siegel put up a hotel-casino such as Las Vegas had never seen and called it the Flamingo. . . . Everybody drove out Route 91 just to gape. . . . Such colors! All the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket orange. And such signs! Two cylinders rose at either end of the Flamingo—eight stories high and covered from top to bottom with neon rings in the shape of bubbles that fizzed all eight stories up into the desert sky all night long like an illuminated whisky-soda tumbler filled to the brim with pink champagne.”

—Tom Wolfe, Las Vegas (What?), from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk

“Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.”

–Tom Wolfe, The Last American Hero, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

Kandy Kolors

“The main thing you notice is the color—tangerine flake. This paint—one of [George] Barris’ Kandy Kolor concoctions—makes the car look like it has been encrusted with chips of some kind of semi-precious ossified tangerine, all coated with a half-inch of clear lacquer. There used to be very scholarly and abstruse studies of color and color symbolism around the turn of the century, and theorists concluded that preferences for certain colors were closely associated with rebelliousness, and these are the very same color many of the kids go for–purple, carnal yellow, various violets and lavenders and fuchsias and many other of these Kandy Kolors.”

—Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965.

Vernacular Baton Rouge: Bottom Line Music

Bottom Line Music, 1338 E. Washington Street.

The Use of Slang Punctuation in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968

Slang punctuation refers to the use of standard punctuation marks in non-standard ways, such as the augmentation by repetition of, for instance, an exclamation mark!!! As soon as I learned the phrase I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I had not read since high school. (I graduated in 1976, part of America’s great, slouching “Bicentennial Class.”) I remembered crazy careening punctuation, struggling to express the incredible and the inexpressible, perfect for a book about the original hippies, beamed up from 1968.
So I found a copy at my local parish library and took another look. The book is still great; a fun read at the very least. The story, of Ken Kesey
and his Merry Pranksters in mid-1960s America, reads like fiction, like fantasy, but it is Tom Wolfe at his journalistic best. But this is, or was, the “new journalism” which allowed for great liberties, such as the liberal use of slang punctuation.
The most striking typographic feature in the book is a repeated mark, but not an exclamation mark. Wolfe uses a quieter mark, one that represents a pause, a rest that is longer than a semi-colon but shorter than a period or full-stop: yes, the colon. When the reader first meets this mark it is in the context of a dappled grove, the dots suggesting perhaps specks of sunlight:

“[I]f there was any place for curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of Kesey’s in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood forest. . . . It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun came down through miles of leaves and got broken up like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a gentle wind.” (pp. 59-60)

But the repeated colon is soon used, without word breaks, to suggest the nervousness of sleep deprivation:

“Sandy hasn’t slept in days::::::how many::::::like total insomnia and everything is bending in curvy curdling lines.” (p. 95)

These Wolfeian colons, or Wolfe’s teeth, as I prefer to call them (anything but a colon block, please) are used in a more consistent manner as the book progresses. Maybe Wolfe just liked the look of them. Maybe they represent microdots. But I think it is most likely that the colons, typically five or six of them in a row, suggest a special kind of pause, maybe the chaos of primordial consciousness: thought; astonishing, unspeakable, or simply emerging thought, before it crystallizes into words:

“One night he discovers he can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has psychokinetic powers. . . . The waves crash below the Esalen cliff—and he stares at the bus and . . . unpaints it. He strips one whole side down to its original sunny school-bus yellow. The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars—then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.” (p. 125)

“Christ, man! It’s too much for us even! We wash our hands of this ::::: Atrocity :::::
::::: what . . . exactly have we done? and :::::
::::: even to some Pranksters . . . the Test was a debacle.” (p. 297)

“It will take a miracle to even get him out on bail, an inspiration, a vision ::::: ummm, a vision ::::: we can work it out ::::: Kesey’s lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan and Paul Robertson, have a vision.” (pp. 389-390)

“The Grateful Dead . . . They’ve been doing all right! Since the Acid Tests they have become a thing, the pioneers of the new sound, acid rock, with the record companies beginning to sniff around :::: hmmmmm :::: the very next thing? Freak that.” (p. 402)

Wolfe’s teeth, let us call them, are specific to this book; I can’t recall ever seeing them elsewhere. But Tom Wolfe also takes some other, more common liberties in this book, such as the use of phonetic spelling to capture dialect and inflection. This practice dates back at least to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. But Mark Twain never stretched his words this far:

“She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit you and I, and she says: ‘Ooooooooh, you really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’—finishing off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your breain and it is the weirdest of the weirtd shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” (pp. 87-88)

“‘I’m—I’m—I’m—I’m—getting the picture! We’re—all here—right? We’re all here! We’re—he-e-e-e-e-e-ere! . . .
‘I’m—getting the picture! We’re all he-e-e-e-e-ere and we can do anything we want!’” (pp. 424-425)

Sometimes the phonetics are outside of the dialog, where they give a cartoon-like sense of exaggeration and humor to some of the events in this, let us remember, non-fiction adventure:

“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev” (p. 304)

“SHHHHHHHHHHWAAAAAAAAAP” (p.317, cap and small caps)

“Urgggggggggghhhhhh the prosecutor agreed on it, her lawyer agreed on it, the Judge agreed on it. So went the Justice game.” (p. 323)

“—just then—
    FEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOO
    ¡WHOP!
    —Cassady—twenty feet away across the beachroad has suddenly wheeled andfired the four-pund sledge hammer end-over-end like a bolo and smashed the brick on top of the fence into obliteration, fifteen feet from the Mexican.” (p. 351, caps and small caps)

Did you notice the inverted exclamation mark, standard practice in Spanish, used here in an English context? Wolfe does it again here, casually jumbling the Mexican and American cultures:

“¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!” he keeps shouting. ¡Hurry up! Get your asses back to the store!” (p. 356)

Now, at this point I’m sure that many of you are wondering: where is the classic exclamation mark augmented by repetition?! Well, it’s here in the book, but it falls outside of the Tom Wolfe’s authorial voice. The stuttering exclamation mark is the voice of the common people, the generic Beautiful People, whose travels were probably inspired by the same events that inspired Wolfe’s book:

“Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:
‘Dear Mother,
‘I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried, I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlan, Mexico!!!!] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene.’” (pp. 140-141)

The hobo

“The hobo lives in a Disneyland, Pete-the-Tramp land, where everything is human lions, tin men, moondogs with rubber teeth, orange-and-purple paths, emerald castles in the distance looming. . . . The hobo has two watches you can’t buy in Tiffany’s, on one wrist the sun, on the other wrist the moon, both bands are made of sky.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Vanishing American Hobo, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.

the Black Hobo

“What about the Black Hobo? Moonshiner? Chicken snatcher? Remus? The black hobo in the South is the last of the Brueghel bums, children pay tribute and stand in awe making no comment. You see him coming out of the piney barren with an old unspeakable sack. Is he carrying coons? Is he carrying Br’er Rabbit? Nobody knows what he’s carrying.”

—Jack Kerouac, The Vanishing American Hobo, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.