Word: chet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THERE IS desperation in this compact novel, and madness too. Tom McGuane is 38 years old now--Panama lunges and spouts like Hero's engine and reads as if the author does not intend to see 40. Chester (Chet) Hunnicut Pomeroy is the scion of an old Key West shipbuilding family, but Chet has rejected all that for fleeting fame in the three-chord world of rock and roll. Or something larger than that: A Mick Jagger-like figure with an equal part of Maharaji Ji and Keith Richard's bad teeth thrown in, he somehow got elevated into...
...doesn't give a fig for the shipyard. "I don't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over." In cocaine, of course--Chet is what Raymond Chandler used to call a cokey, and Panama's prose comes to you through the paranoid fog of a rolled Benjamin Franklin...
...keep rearranging his caps--but to join his sweetheart Catherine, a woman he may or may not be married to. Stay away, she warns: "You called me deep-dish Southern plastic in a national publication!" She is a lesbian now, she maintains, having taken up with the bisexual Marcelline. Chet considers this only vaguely through a menthol cocaine haze. Then he nails his hand to her door...
ABOUT A MONTH AGO Chet Flippo wrote in Rolling Stone that since Waylon Jennings was a recluse up in the hills and Willie Nelson had moved to California, the only thing that was left in Austin was the best of the country swing bands. Then he dumped some more on Waylon and Willie. So imagine my surprise when the Waylon and Willie album came out a couple weeks after that with effusive liner notes by--you guessed it, Chet Flippo--some of which bear quoting: "I humbly submit that the world needs a lot more Willie and Waylon right...
...best example of this journalistic onamism is appropriately enough, the opening feature article, a paean to the glories of Rolling Stone bearing the byline of--to use Wenner's own words--"critic emeritus" Chet Flippo. The title of the piece sets the tone for the rest of the article, (not to mention the issue), "A Style is Born: The Rock & Roll Way of Knowledge." Flippo's article begins by tracing the author's infatuation with his employer back to his days on a U.S. Navy destroyer when he read the first issue of the magazine, which featured an interview...