Radical Wolfe (2023)
3/10
Michael Lewis coming off like a deliberate obtuse ingenue. He is not.
12 December 2023
Opening scene, i said to myself who is this numbskull in the seersucker suit who grew up in New Orleans and thinks it isn't a literary town. Because he didn't pay attention to authors names, like author of the Hardy Boys as a kid? And yet comes from old New Orleans money and elite east coast education, that takes as much pride in the finer points of art as they do about entertaining and making sure their kids marry well, conservative as their tastes may be.

Here's another fun quote: i look at him as a role midel, but an imperfect role model'. But I don't think anyone else took the chances that Tom Wolfe took, not just stylistically but morally. , as we scan to a black and white still of his sartorial choice of footware.

Michael Lewis thinks there was no sense of style in newspaper journalism before the 1960's. This is just lazy writing for an audience who has largely abandoned the written word in print as a mode of creativity, communication, and craft, of vocation.

AH Liebling, Studs Terkel, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, or the early Arm Forces work of Hunter S. Thompson Joan Didion, Molly Ivins or John McPhee. I could go on. Tom Wolfe is best known as a fashion plate who had a genius for explaining in detail one or another forces of contemporary culture to the more traditional culture mavens of the day. The Electric Acid Koolaid Test is well worth reading, but then you read Ken Kesey. Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers and I am Charlotte Simmons are bookends to a career that was prime and fashionable, but doesn't age well, becomes what it attempts to skewer.

This documentary kind of has the same problem and its less than the sum off its parts, a glossary of tidbits and quotes. It's lazy and boring.
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