AW: VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Otto schrieb:

> ... movement. And don't underestimate the importance and influence of 
> the Blues  (one thing I really miss in Vineland). The music of the 
> movement, a basic  element, was grounded on and cannot be separated 
> from the knowledge under which social circumstances this culture had
> developed. LeRoi Jones' "Blues People" (1963) was a book that had 
> been read ...


+ Didn't like The Residents when they were hot (big sister of my school
buddy played the vinyls all day long), do not like them now. What does
Pynchon love about them?

Taken the fact that V is searching for the holy Post-BeBop-Grail, 
I wonder why Pynchon lost interest in Afro-American music. 
(OK, somewhere in Vineland a 'Best of Sam Cooke' record appears,
but this isn't much, is it?). Something happened at the time of 
the Watts essay. Probably because of the political escalations 
Pynchon could, I guess, from a certain point on see only apokalyptical
implications. "A journey ..." ends with "The Late-Late-Late-Show". 
Perhaps Pynchon, like many others, didn't get what Miles was doing
with Bitches Brew. And the P in P-funk does not stand for our man.
That his musical instincts are still somehow intact one recognizes - 
"Made a long journey from Milan to Minsk/Rochelle, Rochelle ..." -
when Pynchon is dissing the Broadway Show (here we say 'Musical': Cats,
King of Lions and all that crap) pestilence of our time (cf. VL, p. 167).   

" ... They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual
and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception,
they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives./ Since the soul of Charlie
Parker had dissolved away into hostile march wind nearly a year before, 
a great deal of nonsense had been written about him. Much more was to 
come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the
postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will - a reluctance
and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact - possessed the lunatic 
fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the 
denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were,
at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word,
and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation ..." (V, p. 60)    


Gott sei Dank gibt es Jazz!, as Kirsten recently said -


"If super cool is your pleasure
And you wanna find somethin' better
You got to get down
Down, Down -- " 


Seid Ihr unten? Kai *