Lotion (Re-View: In which Pencil looks for Mr. Pynchon)

[ckaratnytsky at nypl.org]

          Come to Nueva York, daddio, where the young adventurer Chrissie 
     Pencil finds herself waaaaay downtown in half-deserted streets.  
     Pencil wanders amid the looming towers of municipal bureaucracy and        
     eventually stumbles into the Knitting Factory.  What was Pencil,
     intrepid searcher, doing here, with nary a Pynchie in sight?  Would she    
     know it if she saw one?  Do they carry badges, buttons, dog-eared copies
     of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, wear ALLIGATOR PATROL armbands?  No time to worry    
     about this, though, there was music to be listened to -- and something     
     else.
     
          If you ask her, she'll admit she had been randomly scanning 
     faces all evening, ostensibly looking for the Pynchies she never 
     found, but, when Lotion began their set-up, Pencil peered into the 
     crowd in earnest.  Was *he* there?  For it was V., I mean *T.* she 
     hunted.  Enigmatic T., source of all mysteries -- was he hiding 
     out, knowing she'd be looking?  Finding him:  what then?  Kvetch about 
     her his our collective fate, our cosmic sadness?  That's what this was 
     all about, wasn't it, this gig, this chase?  T's NOBODY'S FOOL liner
     notes had suddenly acquired a light of their own, a world behind and
     inside the band called Lotion.  She, Pencil, world traveler, had skipped   
     down the yellow bricks that led right to the great and powerful Oz of
     some demented Pynchie's dream.  Was it hers?
          
          "A-ah, that entropy sure is a bitch, innit, Mr. Pyn-chon?"
          
          "Rilly."
          
          Nah.  She tried not to think about the end to any search.  She 
     was there to hear the music, the rest of that stuff was 
     window-dressing.  Lotion came out shooting for arena stardom from the 
     hip.  The crowd, tickled by the dense gee-tar groove, began to bounce. 
     Short-haired girls in baby barrettes and tight tricot sweaters 
     bounced alongside their nose-ringed boyfriends in bell-bottoms and 
     Converse All-Stars.  Leather-jacketed hipsters and their high 
     maintenance chicks bounced with, gah, what looked like the terminally 
     cool staff of Esquire Magazine.  (Pencil had heard that one of the band 
     members was once on the Esquire payroll.)  Pencil bounced, too.
          
          Born in 1960, Pencil was in time to be the Baby Boom's child.  
     Raised nostalgialess, she was primed, presumably, to slurp the Tang 
     from Lotion's magic retro Dixie Cup.  Yet, for some reason, anything
     that dripped TV-land pop culturisms like so much melted Velveeta gave
     her the willies.  Pencil, nobody's fool, would've called self-conscious    
     kitsch what T. had described as "attentive nostalgia."  Yes, these guys
     definitely knew more than she wished they did, but who was she to argue?   
     Never having heard the music before and unable to understand to any        
     great degree the lyrics to the songs, adventurous Pencil was content to
     let the sound pour all over her, unguent, emollient, salve.  Lotion
     played well in a late Beatles jam-y kind of way -- and one of the songs    
     even nodded to this pedigree by morphing into the chorus of "Hey Jude."
     T. called this "continuity."  It made Pencil smile and laugh.  Heck,
     she's not *that* much of a purist.  She didn't cringe until the second
     encore when the band covered a Hall and Oates weeper from the lost years
     called "Baby Come Back."  Yeesh.  The music juiced, Pencil just wished     
     they'd cut the crap.
     
          Later, she slipped into a sewer and didn't climb out till up up up 
     in the magic air on Broadway she heard the bop at Birdland.  Pencil,
     home, staring into the late blue glow of the windows in her apartment      
     building, had forgotten all about T.  The television was on.