IVIV (1) Velvet Painting

[Dave Monroe]

   "Back at his place, Doc stood for a while gazing at a velvet
painting ..." (IV, Ch. 1, p. 6)


velvet painting

http://velveteria.com/
http://www.scn.org/villavelour/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_painting


"from one of the Mexican families"

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico was a center of velvet painting in the 1970s. A
displaced Georgia farmboy, Doyle Harden, was the pioneer who created
an enormous factory, where velvets were turned out by the thousands by
artists sitting in studios.[citation needed] One artist would paint
one piece of the picture, then slide the velvet along to the next
artist, who would add something else. That way velvet paintings were
mass produced by hand, fueling the boom in velvet paintings in the
1970s in the United States. Edgar Leeteg has been called "the father
of American black velvet kitsch."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_painting#Modern_history

Faced with continuing to struggle amongst featherbedders and a paltry
paycheck in the U.S., Leeteg discussed his options with his mother,
Bertha. Late in 1932, he stole some brushes from work and filled
several empty mayonnaise jars with paint. With only his aged mother, a
portable record player and his pilfered art supplies, he tossed his
job to the wolves and left the U.S., bound for Tahiti, "where all the
happy failures go."

Leeteg had found a niche for himself by revitalizing and
revolutionizing velvet painting, but there was still no market for his
work, and certainly no critical acceptance of the medium. He
occasionally sold a few paintings, but it was mainly to sailors for a
few dollars. He would oftentimes trade a painting to a bartender for a
bottle of whiskey.

A turning point in Leeteg's career came when a jeweler named Wayne
Decker visited Tahiti on a vacation cruise. He happened upon several
of Leeteg's velvets in a shop full of junk....

http://www.barracudamagazine.com/leeteg.htm

Like any card carrying hipster will tell you, velvet is classy stuff.
And accordingly, velvet painting, Mexico’s chief contribution to
twentieth century art — fans of Diego Rivera stop reading here — has
got other forms of art beat from the get go.  Where a crying clown on
canvas just doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, the same clown on
delicious black velvet becomes the centerpiece of any modern living
room.  Consider if you will that while other mediums will accept neon
paint, velvet thrives on it, and while canvas may be content to sit
there and be looked at, velvet cries out “Touch  me you artless
bastard, I’m made out of fucking velvet!”

Although Mexicans didn’t come up with the idea of painting on velvet —
that dubious distinction rests on Victorian shoulders — they made it
the celebrated institution we know today.  Interest-ingly, Victorian
textile workers were often driven insane by repeated exposure to
mercury in the velvet-making process, foreshadowing the complete lack
of common sense that would pave the way for the velvet renaissance
decades down the road.  The modern era of velvet opulence began in the
1950s, as a post-war generation of Americans found themselves with too
much money in their pockets and not enough sense in their heads.
Mexico, conveniently located just to the south, responded by producing
tourist items that took advantage of the fact that, if you were an
American in Mexico, you were probably too drunk to see.  In
retrospect, painted velvet seems like a natural response to what most
Americans want most: something in neon colors that’s pleasing to the
touch, and that you can show off to the neighbors....

http://www.scrammagazine.com/blackvelvet


Gordita

This fictional Los Angeles beach town where Doc lives and works is,
according to the article "Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay" Pynchon's
fictionalized Manhattan Beach where he lived in 1967-1971—/CW/ at 217
33rd Street—while working on Gravity's Rainbow And in Vineland,
Gordita Beach is where Zoyd Wheeler lived "shortly after Reagan was
elected governor of California" (on Jan 3, 1967):

Zoyd was living down south then, sharing a house in Gordita Beach with
elements of a surf band he’d been playing keyboard in since junior
high, the Corvairs, along with friends more and less transient. The
house was so old that all of its termite clauses and code violations
had been waived, on the theory that the next moderate act of nature
would finish it off. But having been put up back during an era of
overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked, with its old
stucco eaten at to reveal generations of paint jobs in different beach
town pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in
the summers onshore up the sand slopes, on up past Sepulveda, often
across the then undeveloped fields, to wrap the San Diego Freeway too.
(p. 22)

Pynchon owned a '65 Corvair. the car was so light that one he did a
wheelie on the freeway for which the cure was putting a 50 pound bag
of cement in the truck which was in the front of this rear wheel drive
car-CW?

The Corvairs surf band figures in Inherent Vice, as well.

MAD Magazine-style substitution pun in the name, Gordita Beach: from
the Manhattan, an open-faced hot sandwich made with meat and gravy, to
the Gordita, a thick tortilla stuffed with meat stew.

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_1#Page_6


"a southern California Beach that never was"

E.g., Gordita Beach.  Also (?) ...

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=File:IVcoverdraftnearfinal.jpg

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Inherent_Vice_cover_analysis#Cover_Art


"a window to look out of"

Cf. ...

Prospettografi descritti dal Dürer. Sportello

http://www.museo.unimo.it/theatrum/macchine/090aogg.htm

>From Filippo Camerota, "Renaissance Descriptive Geometry: The
Codification of Drawing Methods," Picturing Machines 1400-1700, ed.by
Wolfgang Lefevre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 175-208:

"If the grid of Leon Battista Alberti derives from the method of
quadrettatura mployed by painters to enlarge their drawings, the
so-called 'sportello,' or window, of Albrecht Durer seems to show a
more direct link with the cartographers' grid....  The 'sportello' ...
represents a constant reference point in the literature on perspective
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (p. 180)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10363
http://books.google.com/books?id=7Pd0qRQB18kC


"the contrast knob of Creation"

Cf.  ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WvPRKvIJrk

The teevee tropes have begun here in earnest, by the way ...


"an underglow, a luminous edge"

A la (?) ...

http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=G#greenmagenta
http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Magenta_and_Green


"promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow"

Repeat after me: foreshadowing ...