EDITOR’S PAGE

Here’s one for all you trivia buffs who reached (he age of consent in the mid-Sixties. The following sentence, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kol-ored (Thphlihhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmm) . . .” is:

a line from a hit song by The Beach Boys.

the title of an article in a 1963 issue of Esquire.

the first words ever uttered in public by little Caroline Kennedy.

If you picked b, odd though it may seem, you are right. “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) . . .” was the title of the first magazine article ever written by author Tom (The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) Wolfe.

And what is the significance of this brief moment in magazine history? Just this: That Esquire piece and other odd-sounding articles written around the same time set the conventional view of journalism on its ear, ushering in what was appropriately dubbed The New Journalism.

Before The New Journalism, most features featured, for lack of a better description, relatively straight talk. In the good, gray pre-modern times, the unique voice of the journalistic narrator was, by choice, barely audible. In an anthology of new journalism published in 1973, Wolfe characterizes the ’”before” age as one of “understatement.” But. he writes, “… by the early 1960’s understatement had become an absolute pall. Readers were bored to tears without understanding why. When they came upon that pale beige tone it began to signal to them, unconsciously, that a well-known bore was here again, ’the journalist.’ “

The New Journalism was anything but boring. Indeed, some of the earliest “experiments” appear to be the works of men whose fingers had suddenly been set free to dance allegro across the typewriter. Others, by writers such as Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Rex Reed and George Plimpton, are joyous celebrations of literary devices previously found mostly in fiction-the use of scenes and dialogue, experiments in points of view, Joyccan streams of consciousness. Especially in Esquire and the now-dcfunct New York Herald Tribune, there appeared a new literary bravado that, if you accept Wolfe’s version, stomped the Age of the Novel into a shallow grave and changed the voice of the journalist from pale beige to firecracker red. At times, the intensity of detail, the graphic recall, was so jarring that it cast the reporter in a dubious light. Says Wolfe, characterizing the reaction of many journalists and literary intellectuals to the new style, “The bastards are making it up!”

What fascinates me about The New Journalism is how old it seems today, a meager two decades after the style took root. Readers regularly encounter novelistic techniques not only in magazines, but on the front pages of daily newspapers. We now expect to be immersed in description or led to the brink of a story’s climax, then left to dangle while a narrative builds. It’s part of our everyday encounter with the printed page-an expected counteraction, perhaps, to the stimuli of television.

But the stylistic freedom unleashed by The New Journalists is merely the visible half of the story, The new style ushered in new methods of feature reporting as well. The process of gathering enough material to feed a graphic journa-drama required time-time spent soaking up the scene, and time spent with the story’s major players absorbing dialogue, gestures and every perceptible quirk in a character’s personality. One celebrated example of time-intensive reporting occurred when George Plimpton signed up with the Detroit Lions as a reporterturned-rookie quarterback to write Paper Lion. Writes Wolfe: “Here came a breed of journalists who somehow had the nioxie to talk their way inside of any milieu, even closed societies, and hang on for dear life.”

The New Reporting, too, endures. Plimpton has left in his wake a cadre of hungry journalists equally eager to elbow their way onto foreign turf in search of a better, more vivid story. One of those writers is D Associate Editor Richard West, who has gone underground from San Antonio’s barrio to New York City’s afternightlife and lived to write the tale. For his story in this issue, “One Week in Winter” (page 96). West joined the “raggle-taggle army” of our city’s homeless in an effort to understand and convey what it is to live on the street. His method resembles that of his forerunners two decades ago: “I think it was Gay Talese who said that the point is to be there so much that you’re no longer noticed,” says West. “For the first week or so, I immerse myself in the scene-in this case, the phenomena of the stewpots downtown. Then I began to show up at dusk at the Austin Street Shelter with my own blankets and stay at the shelter for the night. Only after those experiences and many interviews with social workers and agency people did I approach the people on the street to get their stories.”

West finds that staying power in reporting has its own rewards. “People are very sensitive about being gaped at. They resent the hummingbird approach–five minutes in, five minutes out. But what usually wins them over is seeing that you’re willing to put the time in to tell the whole story.” It is a chilling one, as West found.

Other features in this month’s D bear the mark of participatory journalism, Contributing editor Mark Donald submitted his “imperfect body” to the cause of understanding the new wave of bodyworkers who have hit the local scene as a result of a new law easing restrictions on massage studios. Donald was Rolfed, Tragered, shiatsued and otherwise probed and pummeled in the process. His reaction: “1 almost didn’t get the story written because I fell asleep every night at 7 o’clock.”

Finally, our cover story on the most tabled food around these parts required herculean efforts at eating (and lamenting and eating some more) Tex-Mex. It was a dirty job (see page 85). but somebody had to do it.