Zapping Krap TV & Tunes in IV

[John Carvill]

>  Why is
> film better? Lots of reasons that McHale hints at including that Film
> was useful to the Labor Movement, SDS, Revolutionaries trying to
> expose Nixon/Reagan Fascism. But there are other reasons too, like how
> TV is Crap by design.

Aye, lots of truth in that, and it's interesting to compare the
balance between film/TV in Vineland/IV. What's your take on what all
those old movies are doing in there? How does Pynchon's treatmemt of
the 'hidden politics' of Hollywood differ between VL & IV?


>Kinda like what happened to Music, as I
> suggested in the Beatles and Liverpool stuff. The Beatles played to
> working class kids in de-industrialized Liverpool. They were picking
> up American music, black music, and they were laying in the
> undergrounds where American Jazz played. There were not BIG American
> media in Liverpool to market Boy Bands. It was Live! Not Plastic,
> Live.

This seems to be one of Pynchon's bugbears in IV - the transition from
live music, which fosters communality and is (or can be) free, to
records which pull in big business and seem to isolate people,
evereybody in their own little booth (literally or figuratively)
listening to their own, physical, propietorial copy of the music.
Another Pynchonian 'cusp' point, this one within popular music?

Of course, it's hard to find live Beatles stuff worth hearing, because
of all the screaming. And when they stopped playing live, and focused
on records instead, you (and surely not Pynchon) cannot argue that the
results were all negative: not having to play live meant greater
freedom to experiment in the studio, leading to all those 'impossible'
sounds on Revolver, through Pepper, the White Album, etc.

Cheers
J