Single-Storied America
Posted in Reviews on Fri Oct 13, 06 by Kyle under Books and Photography.
People joke about the four remaining ostensibly communist countries of the world, North Korea, China, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of Berkeley mistaking the distinctly un-blue collar but earnestly organic, macrobiotic, imported French blue-cheesed, “animal companion”ed, more terroir, not war on terror sensibility of Bay Areans for communist ideology.
After all vegans nearly starve themselves for a smug sense of superiority on the world dietary stage much like North Korea starves its people to fund a weapons program to give their leaders a smug sense of superiority on the world political stage. Cubans and nearly-elderly acid heads alike expend enormous amounts of energy and resourcefulness to maintain a fleet of decrepit, rusted, flamboyantly psychedelically colored, hopelessly out of date cars that have been strained by use for almost half a century. Of course, it must be noted that the hippies got their cars and vans from Germany, and the Cubans got theirs from the United States and the old Soviet Union, but that is but a minor point of contention. Like the new market fixated People’s Republic of China certain intrepid BoHo’s have become adept at selling the accouterments of the spiritual culture of Tibet to our craven capitalist souls and heading straight to Banana Republic, the Farmer’s Market, the new subdivision, and the luxury high-rise with the resulting profits.
Taken individually one could easily dismiss these similarities as happenstance or mere conspiratorial talk radio fodder. That is until one comes across a little red book, well, actually a medium red and grey book entitled Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers. This book with its expository title, originally published as Single-Storied America in the Soviet Union is the travelogue of two satirical Soviet journalists as they drive across America in from New York City to San Francisco and back taking sharp, witty verbal and photographic snapshots the entire way.
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