IVIV (12): Straight is Hip

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Straight is Hip: 

1. Well, it's the flip of "It's Hip To Be Square" (Huey Lewis and the News) best described in American Psycho(2000) during the grisly ax-murder sequence:

"Their early work was a little too New Wave for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor. In '87, Huey released this, Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to Be Square," a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.

2. Also has a ring of the phrase "shoot straight from the hip" with its Wild West/Bigfoot/"bob-wire" sensibilities.

3. But posted there over the gate it's also reminiscent of that old concentration camp slogan "arbeit macht frei."  Pynchon doesn't like shrinks, dentists or Nazis, and often equates the first two with the last.  Kind of interesting that he also equates this mental institution with the local Ojai spiritual retreats.  Organized spirituality is the same as Establishment psychiatry.  He doesn't like the medical Establishment or any other establishment messing with people's heads.  Does any real therapy go on at Chryskylodon?  Is it all bull-shitty New Age psycho-babble?  Or sinister mind control? Or Gitmo-caliber forced detention?  We realize by this point that Chryskylodon is a mental institution/New Age retreat operated by Golden Fang, a dentist-owned drug-smuggling cartel.  A few pages later, Doc has this insight:

" ... if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and also sell them a program to help them kick?  Get them coming and going, twice as much revenue and no worries about new customers -- as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers."

So Chryskylodon is presumably doing something therapeutic i.e. it's marketing an actual "product" to its wealthy customers while extracting free labor (frei macht arbeit?) from its poorer clients.

Laura