I just discovered that Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is scheduled for a new film adaptation this year. One of my favorites, I decided take the book off the shelf and pick out some favorite quotes. It is a fun book that explores the hippie and LSD movement in America, so if that’s your cup of tea then I suggest picking it up! Even though Wolfe is a journalist and this book is a “nonfiction novel”, he is able to harness his language in a way that allows you to feel and see the chaos described in the book. Here are a few nuggets:
"The cops now know the whole scene, even the costumes, the jesuschrist strung-out hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads, temple bells, amulets, mandalas, god's-eyes, fluorescent vests, unicorn horns, Errol Flynn dueling shirts—but they still don't know about the shoes. The heads have a thing about shoes. The worst are shiny black shoes with shoelaces in them. The hierarchy ascends from there, although practically all lowcut shoes are unhip, from there on up to the boots the heads like, light, fanciful boots. English boots of the mod variety, if that is all they can get, but better something like hand-tooled Mexican boots with Caliente Dude Triple A toes on them. So see the FBI—black—shiny—laced up—FBI shoes—when the FBI finally grabbed Kesey—"
“I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”
"None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to say about it. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked your ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do. I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about."
“Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: ‘You're either on the bus...or off the bus.’”
“...We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't.”
"Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols."
“’An LSD experience without the LSD’ -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice.”
“It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.”
“Agent number one wasn’t the most brilliant cop in the Americas, but time was obviousally running out in old Mexico. It was time to get the Movie going on all projectors. And the bus. The new fantasy was to get on the bus and keep moving; roam through Mexico and give Acid Tests and be on the bus, keeping the Pranksters movie going at top speed at all times.”
“Sandra, the girl from Bucks County, sits in a clump at the foot of the mattress. She is a very pale, tender little teenage clump. A single morsel, gone in one gulp, sitting under the room’s one article of furniture, a bridge lamp, no longer goofing off the radio, just sitting in a teenage clump and listening to Jack tell about the letter:”
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