VLVL PR3 and "the Movement"

[Terrance]

> 
> I agree that the earlier scene where DL and Frenesi meet (116-8) is a
> protest march near Berkeley which takes place in early 1967. The text does
> not indicate what this demonstration is about. 


Yes, we know it is at Berkeley, that's where Frenesi studied film. After
either graduating or dropping out, she hung around and set up shop
making films. 24fps is still based around UC Berkeley when they roll
into the  College of the Surf. Frenesi meets DL when she is stranded out
on Telegraph Avenue. 

We know that it can not be anytime prior to April of 1967, since the
music they are listening to, all popular in the summer of love, is
released in the first 4  months of 1967. The fact that Pynchon lists the
rock and roll albums released in Jan, Feb, March, April, of 1967,
indicates that we are looking at an event that took place around April
1967. 

It's fairly obvious that Frenesi is filming students  protesting the War
in Vietnam and matters related to the military industrial complex. 


At the SDS National Council that met at UC Berkeley,  on December the
28th,  SDS  passed a resolution on the Draft. This Resolution is one of
the reasons that the College of the Surf uprising is not much by
Berkeley or Columbia standards. The Resolution is distributed and
becomes policy. As a pamphlet it is widely disseminated and is titled,
_SDS and the Draft, From Protest to Resistance.  

A Berkeley SDS Anti-Draft Union was active in April and May 1867 with
forums and rallies advising draft-eligible-youth on forms of draft
resistance, picketing of army and navy recruiters on the University of
California campus as well as nearby induction center, and helping to
form an anti-Draft Union at a nearby High School. Union spokesmen
indicated that its activity was designed to show that the draft was only
indicative of an alleged sickness in American society at large.  (_Daily
Californian_  May 22, 1967)

The major Leftist activity for 1967 was Vietnam Week (April 8-15). 

Follow the Money. It's the Communists against the Anti-Communists all
over again. 

In the Spring of 1967 SDS employed 9 Traveling Organizers who were paid 
from $10-$30 per week. The National office staff, paid at the same
scale, employed 10 people. Because of SDS's increased radicalism and
violence and its explicit attacks on so-called Left-liberalism, "liberal
conscience" money no longer made its way into SDS coffers. In 1967 its
budget was around $80K and SDS was broke. (_National Guardian_ April 15,
1967)


So who is gonna pay them Mobil Organizers, hmmm? Fascists? Communists?
The Students for a What? Democratic? Not any more. 

Say, what happened to the National Student Strike, and one million
marching? Vietnam Week fails. The students Frenesi is filming are
getting their asses kicked because, like Frenesi, they are caught in a
trap, between the Communists and the anti-Communists. Hey, same trap as
those labor guys. If only they could get together. And they try. And
they have some successes, but Labor has been there and done that when it
comes to Communists and SDS is just falling red over heels for that lady
in red. 

But, Frenesi has a different problem. She's IWW and Studio Light. She
doesn't have much interest in the May Events in France. No, she's in too
in love with saving America.