It's Vegas, baby, Vegas! Vegas, a tacky, American neon whirlwind of sensual overload. It's a back-country moonshine-running folk hero turned stock-car racing champ! It's jewel thieves, cabbies, and bums-yes, bums!-with big league attitude. It's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby!

In the early 1960's, Tom Wolfe and his Technicolor prose were in the employ of magazines such as Esquire and New York. The articles Wolfe penned during this period focused on his fascination with American (and New York) pop culture. Wolfe's zest for the written word placed him squarely into the middle of the New Journalism movement, alongside such heavyweights as Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion. Consisting of articles Wolfe had written for such magazines, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was Wolfe's first book, and damn, it's good!

While reading, I found it quite interesting how Wolfe's keen eye focused on what were then considered fringe aspects of American culture that are now very much within the mainstream. Just take his article on Las Vegas - Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!! - where Wolfe found a brightly-lit city teaming with oldsters bent on parting with every dime. Wolfe's Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral neon eye candy, his Boomerang Modern, has been replaced by the Fountains of Bellagio and a hoard of bloodthirsty Pirates, which now bring tourists in droves. Vegas still brings in the retirees, but also a hip young crowd sold on the "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas" mantra. Still, Wolfe was on to something when he wrote about a sign for The Dunes, ready to be installed at the airport, of all places, higher than the control tower: "Hell, you can only see that forty miles away. But exactly!" And Vegas hasn't stopped trying to outdo Vegas since.

In the title article, Wolfe turned his attention to the Car Culture of teenage America, in particular, the underground Custom Car phenomenon. In California, Wolfe met customizing legends George Barris and Ed Roth to get the skinny on hot rods and car shows. It's uncanny, really. Take a second and think about it- Wolfe's "teen-age netherworld" craze is now on prime-time cable television via shows such as Overhaulin' and Pimp My Ride. Granted, it took a few decades, but as Wolfe wrote his article, nobody really cared, other than a few teen crazies putting their entire bankroll into their fabulous autos. Only Wolfe and the publishers of Hot Rod magazine seemed to find the lifestyle worthy of ink.

And NASCAR! NASCAR, once a bunch of good old boy's always turning left. NASCAR, at the time, a purely Southern pursuit that only rednecks paid attention to. Yeah, and nowadays, NASCAR rates higher than hockey and other major sports. Try to drive around your local streets without seeing at least one car with a window decal with a number 3, or 8, or 24 on it, proclaiming the car owner's allegiance to a particular race car driver. Hell, right here in Colorado Springs, there's a guy that drives around with a car painted and decaled up to resemble Dale Earnhardt, Jr.'s # 8 car. A little extreme, perhaps, yet to this guy it's probably no more extreme than a Green Bay Packers fan painting his face green and gold, wearing a Brett Favre replica jersey, with a huge synthetic block of cheese on his head. And Wolfe found this NASCAR, this so-called fringe sport, fascinating. In The Last American Hero, he writes of the unmitigated thrill of sitting in a packed raceway, feeling the roar of an entire field starting their engines; an orgy, he called it-an orgy! And good old, aggressively charismatic Junior Johnson, son of a moonshiner, himself a former moonshine runner, turning himself into a NASCAR hero. Wolfe wanted to learn about it all, and bring it to life in a magazine.

Wolfe could take a mundane subject such as men's suits (The Secret Vice) and actually make it into fascinating reading. And that is the real beauty of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby: it's Interesting! 40-some years later, the irrelevant things that Wolfe found interesting enough to write about are still captivating, especially the subjects that are now very relevant. As Wolfe would write, it's fabulous. Fabulous!




Recommended: Yes