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

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Che (my e-mail program doesn't provide for the accent)seems more of a teen-chic, faux-rebel adopted name than one given to her by her seemingly apolitical/trailer-trash mom.  The description of Che and her shoplifting/hooking exploits is kind of disturbing.  It's one of the many dead ends rebellion against THEM can take, if it isn't informed by a political perspective or a lefty tradition.  The difference between Prairie and Che is that Prairie's a Traverse.  One could argue, of course, that Frenesi has more in common with Che than she does with the Traverse family.  It's a sign that even red diaper babies aren't immune to the temptations that are second nature for Che.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Henry Musikar <scuffling at gmail.com>

>
>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.
>
>