VL-IV (15) Re: Inherent Vice page 345

Wed Mar 4 13:41:22 CST 2009

Yes, I'm getting ahead of myself, but it's  Bekah's fault, for it's  
her posting of Márk Kaposvári's "Vineland's America" that got those  
synapses snappin' . . .

	The whole novel is represented as a movie with one line of plot
	that is merely twisted chronologically, and never in the
	postmodernist manner, as Brian McHale articulates in his
	famous book, Postmodernist Fiction, ontologically. There is no
	collision of discourses and worlds in the novel but only one
	world with one discourse is what is presented. We are given a
	picture about the picture, that is, the author does not strives to
	give back (the chaotic, contingent and many times inscrutable)
	reality (as he tried earlier in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the Crying of
	Lot 49), but only to give back how American authorities stage
	reality. So the stylistic twist here, as it is already mentioned, is
	that Pynchon writes in terms of master-narratives in order to
	deconstruct their credulity.
	http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/american/americana/volIIno1/kaposvari.htm

On Mar 4, 2009, at 7:06 AM, rich wrote:

> Looking over Manson's rap sheet the man is a strikingly example or
> afflcted with some aspect of  inherent vice, no?

And very nearly a member of Pynchon's favorite band:

	From the mailbox:	

	"Did Charles Manson really write a song for the Beach Boys?"

	Answer: It wasn't written for the Beach Boys, but "Never Learn
	 Not To Love" (on the Beach Boys' 20/20 album) was indeed
	written by Charles Manson, and for a brief time in 1968, about a
	year before the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson and Beach
	Boys drummer Dennis Wilson were acquaintances.

http://www.lostinthegrooves.com/short-bits-2-charles-manson-and-the-beach-boys

I suppose that maybe Dennis & Charles weren't all that close—how close  
could anyone get to Charles Manson, anyway?—But close enough for  
Dennis to get frightened ex-post facto. Then again, there seems to be  
some weird Thomas Pynchon/Brian Wilson stuff going on already:

	When Siegel brought his friend Thomas Pynchon up to the
	house one night, the famous hipster novelist sat in stunned,
	unhappy silence while the nervous, stoned pop star — who had
	dragged him into his then-new Arabian tent to get high — kept
	kicking over the oil lamp he was trying to light. "Brian was kind
	of afraid of Pynchon, because he'd heard he was an Eastern
	intellectual establishment genius," Siegel recalls. "And Pynchon
	wasn't very articulate. He was gonna sit there and let you talk
	while he listened. So neither of them really said a word all night
	long. It was one of the strangest scenes I'd ever seen in my life."
	Peter Ames Carlin: Brian Wilson, Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall
	and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson (p.103-104).

http://www.hyperarts.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/extra/siegel.html

I recall from somewhere [probably Seigel, perhaps Weisenburger] that  
sometime in the mid-sixties, Pynchon said he preferred the Beach Boys  
over the Beatles. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The  
Beatles/Beach Boys dialog is very reminiscent of of the Beethoven/ 
Rossini dialog in Gravity's Rainbow.

On Mar 4, 2009, at 9:39 AM, rich wrote:

> back to watching Adam-12

Right on target for Vineland.

That collusion between the prison/police industry and entertainment/ 
propaganda [early "infotainment"] like "Dragnet"—and Dragnet's  
offspring—are pointed to directly in Vineland.

My Name's Friday, it was the day watch:

	 . . .The same month, Webb learned that he'd been praised
	before the House of Representatives by California
	Congressman (and future Mayor of Los Angeles) Sam Yorty, for
	his policy of distributing 16mm copies of Dragnet episodes free
	of charge to various public service organizations. Shows like
	"The Big Cop" were being used not only by city and state police
	departments across the country. The National Safety Council's
	distribution of "The Big Layout" was specifically cited. 	
	"Thousands of school principles have made it mandatory that
	students view [the episode] at least once," declared Yorty,
	whose speech concluded, "Mr Webb has done more than repay
	 his public for his loyalties. . . .He has done more than help
	abate crime and disaster and expose dishonesty. He deserves
	a great deal of credit for his splendid contribution to good
	citizenship."

http://tinyurl.com/cad5z8

"Just The Facts, Ma'am"

	The following pictures are from the personal collection of Raul
	Moreno,a long-time collector and friend of the Webb family. He
	has been a contributor to both "Just The Facts, Ma'am" by Dan
	Moyer and "My Name's Friday" by Michael Hayde. As a child,
	he worked as an extra on all of the Mark VII productions and
	saw Webb work on a first-hand basis. He is an LAPD historian
	working on movies like "LA Confidential" as a consultant and
	has been interviewed for the A&E series "City Confidential"
	episode on the unsolved William Desmond Taylor case.
	Anytime there is a project about Jack Webb, he gets the call.

http://www.badge714.com/dragraul.htm

	"All at once you lost your first name. You're a cop, a flatfoot, a
	bull, a dick, John Law. You're the fuzz, the heat; you're poison,
	you're trouble, you're bad news. They call you everything, but
	never a policeman.

http://www.badge714.com/dragquot.htm

	What sets the novel in a telling direction, or, in other words,
	erupts an immediate onrush of associations, is a direct
	reference to George Orwell’s 1984 at the beginning of the
	novel, for this is the year in which the enframing plot is set.
	There are many analogies between Orwell’s dystopic and
	Pynchon’s realistic world, and even if these analogies are
	exaggerated somewhat, still there is connection between them
	that points to an America that is absolutely inconsistent with its
	own notions of (ultimate) freedom. Like in 1984, where people
	are constantly under surveillance and observed through the so-
	called ‘telescreens’, in Vineland, besides such direct allusions
	as: “as if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and
	instead announce, ‘From now on, I’m watching you’” (Pynchon
	1991, 340), and “I knew someday this act would get bigger than
	me” (op. cit. 8) when the protagonist refers to his yearly
	‘televisual insanity act’ (the procession of which, including the
	place, time and manner of that, is dictated by the media instead
	of him); Pynchon indirectly represents a culture that is saturated
	to the bone with televisual culture. This culture is shown to be
	heavily domesticated and “Tubed out”, believing and living, or
	to put it this way, ‘be-lie-ving’ in a simplified film-like world, with
	the sham discourse of personal liberty constantly instilled into
	the devout lambs of America following its uniformed shepherds.

	http://primus.arts.u-szeged.hu/american/americana/volIIno1/kaposvari.htm

The Blue Boy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0zgIzqgxFU

The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been  
changed to protect the innocent.

	Dragnet began with the narration "The story you are about to
	see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the
	innocent." At the end of each show, the results of the trial of the
	suspect and severity of sentence were announced by Hal
	Gibney. Webb frequently re-created entire floors of buildings on
	soundstages, such as the police headquarters at Los Angeles
	City Hall for Dragnet and a floor of the Los Angeles Herald-
	Examiner Building for the 1954 film.

	In early 1967, Webb produced and starred in a new color
	version of Dragnet for NBC. This version co-starred Harry
	Morgan as Officer Bill Gannon. (Ben Alexander was
	unavailable, as he was co-starring in Felony Squad on ABC.)
	The show's pilot, originally produced as a made-for-TV movie in
	1966, did not air until 1969. The series itself ran through 1970.
	To distinguish it from the original series, the year of production
	was added to the title (Dragnet 1967, Dragnet 1968, etc.). The
	revival also emphasized crime prevention and outreach to the
	public. Its attempts to address the contemporary youth-drug
	culture (such as the Blue Boy episode voted 85th-best TV
	episode of all time by TV Guide and TV Land) have led certain
	episodes on the topic to achieve cult status due to their strained
	attempts to be "with-it", such as Friday grilling Blue Boy by
	asking him "You're pretty high and far out. What kind of kick are
	you on, son?".

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

		THE TUBE

	Oh … the … Tube!
	It’s poi-soning your brain!
	Oh, yes….
	It’s dri-ving you, insane!
	It’s shoot-ing rays, at you,
	Over ev’ry-thing ya do,
	It sees you in your bedroom,
	And – on th’ toi-let too!
	Tube….
	It knows, your ev’ry thought,
	Hey, Boob, you thought you would-
	T’n get caught –
	While you were sitting there, starin’ at “The
	Brady Bunch,”
	Big fat computer jus’
	Had you for lunch, now Th’
	Tube –
	It’s plugged right in, to you!
	Vineland, pages 336-37

Yet another aria from Hector Zuinga, turned duet with Frenesi's bel  
canto bouncing off the top of Zuinga's notes.

	"You're an honest soldier, Frenesi, and we been out on so
	many of the same type calls over the years .... " Here came
	some sentimental pitch, delivered deadpan - cop solidarity, his
	problems with racism in the Agency, her 59¢ on the male dollar,
	maybe a little "Hill Street Blues" thrown in, plus who knew what
	other licks from all that Tube, though she thought she
	recognized Raymond Burr's "Robert Ironside" character and a
	little of "The Captain" from "Mod Squad." It was disheartening to
	see how much he depended on these Tubal fantasies about his
	profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of
	cops-are-onlyhuman-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of
	government repression into sympathetic heroes. Nobody
	thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the routine
	violations of constitutional rights these characters performed
	week after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American
	expectations. Cop shows were in a genre right-wing weekly TV
	Guide called Crime Drama, and numbered among their zealous
	fans working cops like Hector who should have known better.
	And now he was asking her to direct, maybe write, basically yet
	another one? Her life "underground," with a heavy antidrug
	spiel. Wonderful.
	Vineland, page 345

====================================================

	Beginning in 1968, in concert with Robert A. Cinader, Webb
	produced NBC's popular Adam-12, which focused on
	uniformed LAPD officers Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) and Jim
	Reed (Kent McCord), which ran until 1975.

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