LISS/STEPVR Apple Ad

[Gary Webb]

Yes! And I think this is one of the many lessons of Vineland...  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 28, 2020, at 7:17 PM, Richard Romeo <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm on a Zillow commercial. A deep spiritual song. Sad
> 
> rich
> 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 28, 2020, at 1:15 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I didn't end up going to see Dylan last year. I did end up going to Ann
>> Arbor for the Holidays. The place I stayed had the best Clam Chowder I
>> think I've ever had
>> 
>>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 2:21 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> gary webb wrote:
>>> 
>>> and for no particular reason, I'm going to stick my thumb out, though will
>>> need to go more Claudette Colbert, to hitch a ride to this wagon... I'm
>>> kidding of course... Is it just me, or does it feel oddly necessary to
>>> watch the Apple 1984 commercial?
>>> 
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
>>> Â
>>> It's hard to say the PC world was anymore enlivening than the televisual
>>> world it purported to replace, and the same could be said of the mobile
>>> transformation 20 years later...Â
>>> About that televisual culture,
>>> 
>>> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/imagine-all-the-people
>>> 
>>> "That, of course, is not what happened. Modern technology has indeed
>>> consummated the televisual era, but with results quite opposite those the
>>> imagineers expected. Instead, a curious form of Hobbes’s war of all
>>> against all was unleashed. Online, each “netizen†produced more and more
>>> opinions, fantasies, dreams, interpretations, and criticism. Marshall
>>> McLuhan forecast the situation in his concept of the “global village
>>> <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226672980/?tag=thenewatl-20>†— not a
>>> boundaryless and harmonious Eden sought by the imaginative social engineers
>>> of the world elite, but rather a hot, crowded, fragmented, and fractious
>>> realm, one much like the “world†that social media, to the shock of the
>>> elite, became."Â
>>> 
>>> 
>>> In the MIT press version of McLuhan's Understanding Media the introduction
>>> coyly gives a post-60s update on the work's reputation (the MIT version was
>>> published in 1994):Â
>>> 
>>> "The alarms and excursions associated with Understanding Media didn't
>>> survive McLuhan's death  (on New Year's Eve 1980, at the age of 69), and
>>> perhaps was to be expected from artisans still working in a medium that the
>>> decedent had pronounced obsolete, the obituary notices were less than
>>> worshipful. Informed opinion had moved on to other things, and McLuhan's
>>> name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility
>>> (go-go boots, Sgt. Pepper, Woodstock, the Vietnam War) that embodied the
>>> failed hopes of a discredited decade."Â
>>> 
>>> Let's take it from the man himself (pg.16):Â
>>> 
>>> "Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
>>> industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the
>>> postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result
>>> of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns
>>> of information."Â
>>> 
>>> Televisual culture is ubiquitous for Zoyd & C., so much so that he is an
>>> active participant. And like Bigfoot, to whom he is compared, are staged TV
>>> moments, not real life random acts.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -------------a) Tom Wolfe, I think, did a sendup of McLuhan as English
>>> professor living the dream of having people actually listen to him. Still
>>> think McLuhan made some good points!
>>> 
>>> b) That net community in the quote, it is like Van Meter's commune behind
>>> the Cucumber Lounge: "bickering raised to the level of ceremony"
>>> 
>>> c) thanks for hopping in - 1984 ad was topical for VL, with the lady ninja
>>> throwing that projectile and stickin' it to The Man!
>>> 
>>> wow, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable!
>>> like Prairie "when she couldn't get her hands on a car, she'd hitch a ride
>>> and try to talk the driver into letting her take the wheel. She could get
>>> anywhere in Southern California as fast as wheels could move."
>>> 
>>> That's the beauty of the LISS/STEPVR - the president is also a member, the
>>> rider can be the driver, the topics are out there!
>>> 
>>> d) ish mailian made the good point that the new-car smell is still fresh
>>> on the radio play. I'm going to break out some 50 year old German skills to
>>> try to appreciate it. It's beyond funny how slow this will be.
>>> 
>>> peterhooper promised a new take after the 1st of 2021, suggesting LISVR as
>>> the new title: Love is Strange Vineland Read.
>>> ("Love is patient" as St Paul wrote)
>>> Seems right amount of elision: epizootic/pandemic by then should have
>>> abated, and most people can self-police the size and/or salinity of their
>>> topics.
>>> 
>>> e) did you ever get to the Bob Dylan concert in Ann Arbor last fall?
>>> Love to hear about it if you did!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l