Monday 24 May 2010

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe


Looks like a very good book about one group of hippies in California in the late 1960:
“The incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge intho the suburbs.” (Wolfe, 1971, p.38). “

This group uses LSD to help them expanding perception: “He compared the brain to a reducing valve.” “We’re shut off from our own world”

But they recognize that LSD gives them the experience, opens the door, but they also have to come back. So they try to overcome acid: “Beyond acid. They have made the trip now, clodes the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag” (Wolfe, 1971, p.289).

Friday 21 May 2010


A very bold and brash looking book.


The look certainly fits the content. Bullmore argues that fame is of value for brands, without giving a precise explanation. The best explanation I can come up with from ‘More Bull More’, is that being famous beyond the target group allows a brand to become social currency everyone can relate to and that everyone understands.


“Being around, being well known, being salient, being contemporary – in any market – are vital preconditions for sustained competitive success.”


Moreover Bullmore gives the best explanation why just boasting about a brand is not enough:

“And since my informant (...) has been relentlessly laudatory about Giles, my only available contribution is one of challenge and rejection.”

Sunday 16 May 2010

and the hippos were boiled in their tanks - Burroughs and Kerouac


Two writers' perspective on one event. And the book luckily does not try to make the usual attempt of opposing those perspectives or make them contradict.

"And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say "I don't take any shit!" and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him."