Popular Music in Pynchon (IV)

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 1, 2009, at 5:14 AM, Henry Musikar wrote:

> Charles Manson's recordings of his songs (recording time paid for by  
> one of
> the Beach Boys [I think it was Denis Wilson])

It was Dennis Wilson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Wilson ,

[cue organ theme music]—And now it's time for us to play— us play "Six  
Degrees of Thomas Pynchon !" with your hosr Bob Barker—

Dennis Wilson is most Lebowskian is aspect, wouldn't you say?" His  
Wikipedia photo shows us a long-haired early seventies beach bum.   
Though we "know" all about OBA and a tent and Brian Wilson and the  
long silence and fire that followed the passing of the peace pipe, .  
But who would be the most likely intermediary for this co-joining of  
twins?? Surf City, here we come ! ! !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Wilson

The paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow is State of the Art, but did you  
ever wonder how it got that way?

L.A.P.D.'s always had race issues, particularly with Cop—On—Black  
violence. So taking a hazy gamble at "Sources of Paranoia in Pynchon:,  
vol 11, let us examine a tight little example from one of my favorite  
passages from Gravity's Rainbow,":

	"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his
	definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, "you know, he did love
	her, folks." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that
	Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes
	raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive
	biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips,
	lab people ... even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be
	eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100
	times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam .... And
	yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish
	proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem*-when everything
	has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even
	surprise us ... something will. So the permutations 'n'
	combinations of Pudding's Things That Can Happen in
	European Politics for 1931, the year of Godel's Theorem, don't
	give Hitler an outside chance. So, when laws of heredity are
	laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of
	hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating
	items like the "S-Gerat" Slothrop thinks he's chasing like a grail.
	And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down
	like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in
	the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running
	around inside Germany even now-the Schwarzkommando,
	whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate.

Knowing Charlie Manson's apocalyptic rantings of race war, take  
another look at Gravity's Rainbow. My Dad pulled all of us—nine total— 
out of Los Angeles and into Fresno. He was deeply involved in the  
Civil Rights movement AND had friends in the police department and  
ascertained from available data that the shit-hammer was about to  
fall. Within four months, both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy  
were assassinated. King's death sparked coast-to-coast riots—aka  
"insurrections." Pynchon's Schwarzkommando expresses a very Los  
Angeles Paranoid System, one fully operational as of the time Pynchon  
was writing Gravity's Rainbow.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems