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[Michael Bailey]

 John Bailey wrote:
>
> What isn't given that much shrift is Glen's death itself. The coldness
> of the image seems really important here - it isn't a "movie death".
> But the narrative doesn't make a melodramatic tragedy of the murder
> itself. The way that film and video leech reality of its affect seems
> to be the saddest thing about this sequence. There's even a reference
> to this viewing as pornography - Glen's murder is "the money shot".

I lead a sheltered life, didn't know that.
I have heard of snuff films, which depending on the character
of those friends of Doc's this might end up as...
but it's just as likely not to, the author doesn't point in
that direction, unless "money shot" is meant to?
I'm not in favor of that reading.  Certainly there is no
prurience suggested here in Doc's viewing.

>
> I have one of those B&H cameras. Pynchon gives too much information in
> this scene imho. If another writer had bothered to describe the film
> capacity and number of rotating lenses, I would have considered it
> padding at best, boasting about research at worst. What's the point of
> explaining the mechanics of the camera?
>

I didn't barf on the detail, it wasn't all that much.
One of the things I like, in fact, is when this author -
and others - put some technical stuff in to play with...

the effect here is to emphasize how this is not a professional
production, that Doc isn't - at this point in his career, anyway -
much of a professional.  He has the weird feeling that this is a movie
that involves him personally (remember in Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, how one of the trips of the Merry Pranksters was
"making life your own movie")
In fact, his own choppy attention span might be what the
camera's capacities are the objective correlative of?
Emblematically, I could run with that, say the three different
lenses would represent different states of mind (buzzed,
sleeping and tripping?)

If a person has read some of the Indymedia sites, for instance,
they suffer from the same sort of choppiness...
and, less specifically, I often get a weird feeling like Doc when
reading about events that took place in my youth but
I was relatively unaware of...




-- 
--- "Can't say it often enough -
change your hair, change your life."
- Sortilege