review 'o P doc

[P. Chevalier]

Has this "Residents-Pynchon" connection yet been explored?


At 06:47 28/04/2003 -0700, pynchonoid wrote:
><http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,942894,00.html>
>
>Diary
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Missing person
>
>Saturday April 26, 2003
>The Guardian
>
>· At the launch of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel,
>Mason & Dixon (1997), his publisher staged an unlikely
>Thomas Pynchon look-alike contest in New York.
>Unlikely because nobody knows what the reclusive
>novelist looks like (he was last photographed about 40
>years ago). Was he the mysterious, white-suited man
>who watched the contest from the back of the room and
>spoke in an unconvincing French accent? Or is he the
>ageing hipster caught on camera by a CNN reporter?
>These questions and more are mulled over by an
>assortment of Pynchon's fans, critics and
>acquaintances in Thomas Pynchon - a Journey into the
>Mind of [P.], a German documentary that opens at the
>ICA in London on Friday.
>
>Directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini, it's a
>thoughtful and disturbing portrait of America at its
>most paranoid: the assassination of JFK (did Pynchon
>meet Lee Harvey Oswald on a train and was Oswald part
>of a government mind-control experiment?), Timothy
>"turn-on, tune-in, drop-out" Leary (was he a CIA
>stooge?), Operation Paperclip (when the US military
>rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to
>America), the Vietnam war, the Cuban missile crisis,
>and so on. There is even some unpleasant footage of a
>ginger cat on LSD.
>
>Pynchon's counter-culture credentials are at odds with
>his past. He served in the US Navy and worked at
>Boeing during the era of the Minuteman
>intercontinental ballistic missile programme. Is
>Gravity's Rainbow (1973) a confession, an attempt to
>expiate some past sin? What exactly are his reasons
>for staying out of the public eye? Is he just
>exceptionally shy or does he have something to hide?
>(When Gravity's Rainbow won the National Book Award,
>his publisher sent an actor to accept the prize.)
>
>In the course of the documentary (which has an
>excellent soundtrack by The Residents) we discover
>that Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (born May 8, 1937) is 6'2"
>tall, has blue or maybe green eyes and unusually pale
>skin that never tans; he occasionally goes shopping in
>drag to evade detection and wrote Gravity's Rainbow
>late at night, in long hand. At one point an
>ex-girlfriend even hunts down his old flat on
>Manhattan Beach, California. "Do you realise how
>important this is?" she says as they squeeze inside
>the cramped interior. "This is a historical moment."IP
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
>http://search.yahoo.com