RE: VL-IV (15): Ché For Children, pages 325/327

[Henry Musikar]

Ché is a bad-ass, but in no way interested in a revolution (check the
clothes and underthings).  Her name says more about her parents than it does
about her, except as another signifier of the cooptation and entropy of
'60's revolutionary sentiment, as given Ché's suburban upbringing, her
parents admired the idea of Guevara, but were either reformed/co-opted, or
were never revolutionaries themselves.

I have no claims of being any different.  I bought "Steal This Book," and
was mortified that I hadn't stolen it.  I may have lied to friends about it.
How many people bought, but never tried any of the "recipes" in "The
Anarchist's Cookbook," and wondered what was wrong with themselves?

Henry Mu
Check out Henry's new Amazon store: http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20


-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Landseadel

Ché mirrors DL as Prairie echos Frenesi. Familial ties and familial  
tics pervade this last chapter of homecomings, reunions and karmic  
payback. Confusion regarding "which side are you on, boy?"  
exponentially expands as fugitives, professional leftists and badasses  
hijack broadcasts off of cable lines then hang out to watch an episode  
of "Say Jim" on a portable TV. Like Hank Williams Jr. sez, it's a  
family tradition. While hanging with Ché looks a bit like Prairie's  
running with the wrong crowd, compared to Prairie's family, how bad is  
Ché, rilly?

The many layers of co-option in the zeitgeist generated by the Tube is  
on over-lit display at the new Noir Center:

	. . . yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at
	least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its
	cycle . . .

Interesting—ultra pomo—sidenote. Way back in 1990, the moment just  
before home computers became ubiquitous, who could have foreseen the  
absurd joke of Che Guevera becoming a pop fashion statement, a t-shirt  
image you alternate with your Bob Marley outerwear, an embedded  
element of reflexive pop culture, a Simpsons gag? The icon of Che is  
rendered by the schizophrenia of the marketplace into a shill—a brand— 
for Walmart & Target. It's like something out of Woody Allen's  
"Bananas" or "Young Kissinger."

Prairie's got some family history attached to the great underworld  
Hollywood fictions of the forties;

	She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black
	and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and
	she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash
	in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden
	days in this town, having heard enough stories from Hub and
	Sasha, and Dotty and Wade, to know better than most how
	corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if
	the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome
	pictures had left out.

. . . like Hubble & Sasha's run-ins with the anti-union HUAC.

These nested flashbacks into Prairie's halcyon days as a young,  
ruthless shoplifting punkette touch on the cultural legacy of "Steal  
This Book", how Radical Activism, contempt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPXV_Tm6iIw 

for soul-sucking corporations, contempt for "The Man" & "Smash the  
State" quickly got warped into a decades-long shoplifting spree. Real  
anarchism is much like being a vegan, it's something that you do every  
day that puts you deliberately out of whack with "the way things  
are."  Like freedom, anarchism is a constant struggle. And real  
anarchists have profound respect for real work, even if it means  
pulling minimum wage in a mall job. But way back in the late 60's &  
early 70's we children of the tube were programmed for and then sent  
out in a collective search for instant everything, the flash, the  
revolutionary moment when we would finally be free,  "The Big  
Payback," "Instant Karma."*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqP3wT5lpa4

LSD offered up instant spiritual enlightenment, so—as the Duke would  
say—why not?  The search for instant payback metastasizes into  
contempt for mall culture even as one is seduced and digested by mall  
culture. Bubble Indemnity, The Lounge Good Buy and The Mall Tease  
Flacon are all signs of desperation. In fact it would take another  
twenty-two years [2006] before this cycle of yuppification would hit a  
brick wall of financial limits.

On the other hand, the skills that Prairie develops in service to Ché  
ultimately serve her well. Like what transpired with  Geli Tripping &  
Cyprian Latewood, love has agendas the lover may be unaware of,  
leading the lover to an unforeseen higher purpose. There is a Buddhist  
element of service and commitment in Prairie, her default is to love  
anyway:

	Among the first mall rats into Fox Hills, aboriginal as well to the
	Sherman Oaks Galleria, Prairie and Ché had been known to
	hitchhike for days to get to malls that often turned out to be only
	folkloric, false cities of gold. But that was cool, because they got
	to be together.

Prairie waxes nostalgic for the "good old days" of malls:

	. . . where the fountains were real and the plants nonplastic and
	you could always find somebody your age working in the food
	courts and willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings,
	and there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was
	affordable, she could remember days with Ché, in those older
	malls, where all they did for hours was watch kids skate. . .

. . . 90% of the dialog coming from the mouths of Pynchon's characters  
demonstrate their countercultural skew. We are instantly made aware  
that Prairie & Ché are countercultural, the other, the unassimilated,  
the preterite:

	. . ."Is that white kid," Ché wondered, "or white kid?" All eyes
	and legs, like a fawn, she had for a while been flirting, skating
	up to Prairie and Ché, then turning, flipping her tiny skirt up over
	her ass and gliding away, elegant little nose in the air.

	"Yep," Prairie muttered, "perfect, ain't she?"

	"Makes you kinda want to mess her up a little, don't it?"

	"Ché, you're rilly evil?" It didn't help that inside, Prairie liked
to
	imagine herself as just such a figure of luck and grace, no
	matter what hair, zit, or weight problems might be accumulating
	in the nonfantasy world.

The hermetically sealed world of creatures that live in the Tube  
deliberately induce that sense of otherness:

	On the Tube she saw them all the time, these junior-high
	gymnasts in leotards, teenagers in sitcoms, girls in commercials
	learning from their moms about how to cook and dress and deal
	with their dads, all these remote and well-off little cookies going
	"Mm! this rilly is good!" or the ever-reliable "Thanks, Mom,"
	Prairie feeling each time this mixture of annoyance and
	familiarity, knowing like exiled royalty that that's who she was
	supposed to be, could even turn herself into through some
	piece of negligible magic she must've known once but in the
	difficult years marooned down on this out-of-the-way planet had
	come to have trouble remembering anymore.

*The "and we all shine on" hook has now been co-opted into a Chase  
banking services advertisement jingle for the Tube. Mind you, John  
Lennon was yet another creature of Tube culture. He did really  
believe, as he sang "Money", that material success would set him free.