VL-IV (15) A Fairly Easy Level Of Play, pages 327/331

[Robin Landseadel]

	A teacher had told Prairie's class once to write a paragraph on
	what sports figure they wished they could be. Most girls said
	something like Chris Evert. Prairie said Brent Musberger.

The nested flashbacks continue with the "Great South Coast Plaza  
Eyeshadow Raid", another sequence with fugal implications. Back a  
paragraph or two we watch Prairie & Ché  gazing on the ice-skating  
elect, these perfectly White, perfectly middle-class girls—the type of  
girl most likely to spit on Prairie and Ché—girls who live in an  
entirely different bubble than these two daughters of the road. This  
"Good Girl" ice skating theme is repeated, modulated onto a "Bad Girl"  
roller derby theme and then karmically flipped into this grand heist:

	Each time they got together, it suited her to be the one to frame
	and comment on Ché's roughhouse engagements with the
	world, though more than once she'd been called on for muscle,
	notably during the Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid,
	still being talked about in tones of wounded bewilderment at
	security seminars nationwide, in which two dozen girls, in black
	T-shirts and jeans, carrying empty backpacks and riding on
	roller skates, perfectly acquainted with every inch of the terrain,
	 had come precision whirring and ticking into the giant Plaza
	just before closing time and departed only moments later with
	the packs stuffed full of eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks,
	earrings, barrettes, bracelets, pantyhose, and fashion shades,
	all of which they had turned immediately for cash from an older
	person named Otis, with a panel truck headed for a swap meet
	far away.

Zoyd & Frenesi are exemplars of the baby boom generation, the first  
generation to be immersed into television culture. By the time little  
Prairie [who ought to be about 40 by now] rolls onto the scene, hardly  
anyone can remember a time before "The Tube." Prairie's a bit ahead of  
the curve. She sees "Brent Musberger's" [sic] central role in the  
television mediation of reality.

"Brent Musberger" is a rare typo for OBA—it should read as "Musburger"  
Here is an example of Brent back in 1981, probably about the same time  
Prairie wrote that paragraph for her teacher. The video opens with  
some classic mall culture advertisements of the early '80's:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttRQdB0XQ6o

This excerpt from "It Was Twenty Years Ago Today" includes some very  
pertinent talking points from Dr. Timothy Leary, about two and a half  
minutes in. Here he speaks at of the first  big Be-In in San  
Francisco, 1967:

	"The importance about that to me that it was, uh, a
	demonstration of the power of the Baby Boom generation of
	their numbers, of their strength, of their clout, of their power
	which is their straight quantity, their numbers. There were 76
	million Americans born between the years '46 and '64. They
	were trained by Dr. Spock to be demand fed. They were the first
	consumer species, they were the first electronic species. The
	fact that you were American and young meant that you
	deserved the world. . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WBgSCCdGgg

Zoyd may have been raised in a home without Television [we really get  
nothing on Zoyd's direct ancestors, they never enter the frame] but  
Prairie Wheeler was soaking in the stuff right from the start.  
Television frames her reality and this vignette in the Noir Center  
Pynchon establishes just how Tubal Prairie's world is, a demonstration  
of the first generation to have never known a time without television:

	. . .It felt like being bionically speeded up, like Jaime Sommers,
	barreling through a field of slo-mo opposition, while all through
	this the background shopping music continued, perky and up-
	tempo, originally rock and roll but here reformatted into
	unthreatening wimped-out effluent, tranquilizing onlookers into
	thinking the juvenile snatch-and-grab mission couldn't have
	been what it looked like, so it must be all right to return to
	closing time, what a relief. The tune coming out of the speakers
	as the girls all dispersed into the evening happened to be a
	sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry's
	"Maybellene. . ."

====================================================

	. . . Meantime, with a special tool swiped from another store, 	
	Ché was deftly unclipping the little plastic alarm devices on the
	garments and hiding them deep in the other merchandise— all
	 at a fairly easy what Brent Musberger might've called level of
	play, a routine long perfected and usually just for getting
	warmed up with . . .
	
Prairie is one of the generation that now frames reality in the easier  
to assimilate frame of television, always looking forward to that next  
commercial break to get a snack or take a leak, a chance to drop  
character for a couple of minutes.