Readings: Behind the Curtain, Part 4

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ARPAnet 1969

Following is the final installment of my reflections on Thomas Pynchon's novel, Inherent Vice. The denoument is summed up in one sentence:

“It’s all data. One and zeros. All recoverable. Eternally present.”

So sez Sparky, a kind of keyboarding lab rat, deputy to Fritz, the ur-Nerd, surrounded by monitors, all patched into the ARPAnet, first ancestor of today’s internet. Working on a case, Doc is wont to go to these primitive hackers for information. And so, the birth of the Cyber-Information Age, the realization of a kind of “eternal life,” perhaps infernal--also in 1969, btw—is the final thematic thread running through Inherent Vice and adding its portion to our grasp of the gist of the novel’s title. It brings us right up to the point where we sit together now at our collective keyboards, bathed in the glow of our mutual monitors.

Inherent Vice is a worthwhile read: I recommend it.

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Part 3 is here.
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Readings: Behind the Curtain, Part 3

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In another example of the kind of synchronicity of which I’ve written before, during the work hours of the same day on which I read the following passage from Inherent Vice after dinner, I’d had a conversation about the film The Wizard of Oz with a colleague in the office. This guy is a film buff and talks about “the cinema” often. On this occasion, my colleague had told me of having experienced exactly the same eye-opener related to Doc Sportello by his colleague, Sauncho in Inherent Vice—i.e. seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time on a color TV and discovering that Kansas is in black-and-white, while Oz is in living color.

Although I am nearly a decade older than this guy, and can well remember those days of yore when all “television sets” were black-and-white, I never had this particular experience. I had seen The Wizard of Oz in the theater, multiple times, as a child. The film was shown every year—I think during the Christmas season—at a theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan, near where my maternal grandparents lived. This theater was in the shopping district of a neighborhood called Burton Heights, a short walk from my grandparents’ house. Under the supervision of the oldest cousin, we gathered kids would excitedly make that annual walk, eager to immerse ourselves in the mind-blowing wonders of Oz. It was a family tradition.

Here, now, is Inherent Vice:

On the way back to the beach, Doc looked in at the offices of Hardy, Gridley & Chatfield. Sauncho was there, but mentally for the moment not available, having the other night happened to watch The Wizard of Oz (1939) for the first time on a color TV set.
xxx“Did you know it starts off in black and white,” he informed Doc with some anxiety, “but it changes to color! Do you realize what that means?”
xxx“Saunch…”
xxxNo use. “—the world we see Dorothy living in at the beginning of the picture is black, actually brown, and white, only she thinks she’s seeing it all in color—the same normal everyday color we see our lives in. Then the cyclone picks her up, dumps her in Munchkin Land, and she walks out the door, and suddenly we see the brown and white shift into Technicolor. But if that’s what we see, what’s happening with Dorothy? What’s her ‘normal’ Kansas color changing into? Huh? What very weird hypercolor? as far beyond our everyday color as Technicolor is beyond black and white—“ and so on.

I use the term “mind-blowing” above, which usage is, of course, anachronistic. That term came into common parlance in the psychedelic ‘sixties. The glimpsed perception of those alternate realties—those states of awareness just behind, below, above, or beyond, the workaday reality of the ego—offered by the use of psychotropic drugs, is mirrored here in this talk of Oz and “hypercolor.” But you can’t describe it. You have to have been there.

And Oz, of course, like, say…LSD…was not all sweetness and light. In Oz you had your witches and your flying monkeys. Bad trips, those.

Nonetheless, The Wizard of Oz has always been my favorite movie.
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Part 2 of this series is here.
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Readings: Behind the Curtain, Part 2

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Do I have your attention? Okay, then...

Doc Sportello’s primary antagonist in Inherent Vice is a cop whose handle is Bigfoot. Bigfoot is that rare officer of the law who uses a large vocabulary fluently. The two men seem to be opposite numbers. Yet it is almost as if the existences of Sportello and Bigfoot are each necessary conditions for the existence of the other. Here, Bigfoot and Doc wax Gnostic on the topic of Charles Manson:

xxx“It’s like,” Bigfoot had continued, “there’s this evil subgod who rules over Southern California? who off and on will wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that are always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth?”
xxx“Wow, and…and you’ve…seen him? This ‘evil subgod,’ maybe he…he talks to you?”
xxx“Yes and he looks just like a hippie pothead freak! Something, huh?”

xxxWondering what this was about, Doc, trying to be helpful, said, “Well, what I’ve been noticing since Charlie Manson got popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world. You folks all used to be like a crowd at the zoo—‘Oh, look, the male one is carrying the baby and the female one is paying for the groceries,’ sorta thing, but now it’s like, ‘Pretend they’re not even there, ‘cause maybe they’ll mass murder our ass.’”

The year 1969 was a dark one in many ways: Nixon took office; the secret bombing of Cambodia commenced; Weatherman seized control of SDS; the Stonewall riot took place in NYC; the My Lai massacre became public knowledge; Black Panther, Fred Hampton, was murdered in his bed by Chicago cops; following the peak draft year of 1968, the Selective Service Lottery was introduced; demonstrations and riots against the war grew in size and frequency; the Walrus was Paul... But two 1969 events—the Manson Family killings, and the violent deaths at the Altamont Free Concert—served to permanently freak out the counter-culture. There was never a complete recovery. Things were never the same. It was the end of any real belief in “the Woodstock Nation”—among its former inhabitants, anyway. It was the Fall. It was the expulsion from Eden. The Man Behind the Curtain cranking the wheels was not the blustery, mischievous Wiz: the Man was Charles Manson.

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If you missed Part 1, it is here.

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Readings: Behind the Curtain, Part 1

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Lest anyone think that I’ve been doing nothing but rummaging around in old boxes in recent times, I will now endeavor to write a few words about, and provide a few excerpts from, a witty and entertaining novel that I yesterday finished reading: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

The protagonist of Inherent Vice is a dope-addled hippie/beach boy/private investigator named Larry “Doc” Sportello. The novel is set in Los Angeles and vicinity, in the recent aftermath of the Charles Manson murders, the occurrence of which provides the book with one of its several noirish refrains.

It would be easy to read this book as a humorous blend of satire, parody and nostalgia; it is more than that. As with all of Pynchon’s novels, the subsurface preoccupation is with the mysterious, sometimes dark, sometimes benevolent, forces inhabiting our world and operating just behind the skrim of “reality” which ordinarily prevents them from manifesting at our conscious level. Pynchon, in this book, remains very much the postmodern Gnostic.

It will take me three or four posts to present, and say a few words about, each of the excerpts I have chosen as essential introductions to Inherent Vice. The first of these made me laugh out loud when I read it. The novel is replete with allusions to song lyrics and other pop-cultural markers of the early ‘seventies. In the excerpt that follows, Pynchon pokes fun at the emergent blaxploitation genre, which was one such marker:

East of Sepulveda the moon was out, and Doc made pretty good time. He peeled off the freeway at La Cienega, took the Stocker shortcut over to La Brea. Programming on the radio, appropriate to the hour, included one of the few known attempts at black surf music, “Soul Gidget,” by Meatball Flag—

Who’s that strollin down the street,
Hi-heel flip-flops on her feet,
Always got a great big smile,
Never gets popped by Juv-o-nile—
Who is it? [Minor-seventh guitar fill]
Soul Gidget!

Who never worries about her karma?
Who be that signifying on your mamma?
Out there lookin so bad and big,
Like Sandra Dee in some Afro wig—
Who is it?
Soul Gidget!

Surf’s up, Soul Gidget’s there,
Got that patchouli all in her hair,
Down in Hermosa she’s runnin wild,
Back in South Central she just a child—
Uh who is it?
Soul Gidget!

That's nearly perfect. The subject of the next excerpt will be (gasp!) Charles Manson himself.

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