Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, March 01, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Oscars 2003 meets The Oscars 2002! Boy, I don't want to be at work today.Given my druthers: Dentist's, getting my stitches removed; home, watching movies with Edi; Naz Super 8, watching an Indian flick; home again, some sort of perfect video game bliss thing going on. Instead, here: fighting to keep my tongue out of the hot, pig-iron pit in the corner of my mouth, doing trivial jobs and wishing I hadn't smoked a cigar at lunch. It was a pretty good cigar, and the sockets seemed to handle it fine, but now I'm worried about some sort of insta-mouth cancer. Because now my tongue smells faintly of cigar every time I painfully jam it into the stitches. Oh, and also? Girl scout cookies. I had ordered them from my friend Michelle a month or so ago and it seemed okay, but that was a month ago, back when I had willpower. Last week, I ate everything + pudding. This week, I'm managing not to eat everything as long as I keep the temptation out of my hands. Which is where the problem with "Hello, two boxes of tin mints" comes in. Gravity's Rainbow? Wow, Gravity's Rainbow. I think I'm on the dreaded Christmas carol sequence, where Roger Mexico and Jessica enter a church to hear servicemen sing Christmas carols and the prose just completely lights out for the territories. I could be wrong (I'm just starting the sequence) but that sequence knocked me on my ass so hard back in 1989, I remember staring at the chocolate shag carpet of the West Hollywood apartment in absolute befuddlement. Odd how those things get reversed--staring at the carpet and thinking about that sequence so fuckin' hard I knew it was the same sequence when a memory of that damn rug popped up while reading today. There were two interesting tidbits that I'm sure other Pynchon scholars have already nailed--one of the psychics at the "White Visitation" is named Ronald Cherrycoke (a character in Mason & Dixon shares the same name) and there's a sequence in which Jessica Swanlake strips off her blouse during a car ride with Roger Mexico that mirrors an anecdote in Jules Siegel's "Who is Thomas Pynchon..." article (don't think a truckload of ogling midgets showed up in Siegal's anecdote, however). Of course, Siegel wrote his article years after GR came out, and a guy with the last name of "Cherrycoke" is a good enough gag to re-use, but they kinda tweaked my brain, nonetheless... Speaking of West Hollywood, there should be a word (and maybe there is) to describe the odd feelings of nostalgia and loss when visiting a street you used to live in--but you're visiting that street in a video game. I rented True Crime: Streets of L.A. (or True Crime: Streets of LA, which sounds like either 'Streets of Louisiana' of the beginning of some Steven Sondheim lyric, depending on your mindset. In the game, a team of ambitious souls mapped out all of L.A. (all meaning as far north as the Hollywood Hills, as far West as the ocean, as far South as, um, Venice, and as far East as, I think, downtown). So, in the video game, I drove by the apartment where I used to live, then by where I used to work just off Sunset Blvd. and of course it's not a perfect one-to-one match (not by any means) but there was something eerie about remembering what streets to take to get from each to each and having it work, and having it all seem so different, somehow. Even if all they did was travel to L.A. and take bunches of photo reference, the references feel entirely dissimilar--West Hollywood was pretty grungy and tacky. All beaten-up strip malls instead of prettied-up enclosed malls, maybe, but still the little touches (a comic store just off Melrose in I think the same place as an actual one I occasionally shopped at, and the Saint James Club being right there on Sunset, a few other pieces although I confess, in the interest of continued Pynchon cross-referencing, I did not check to see if the game included the restaurant Genghis Cohen's that used to be on Fairfax...) made me--made me--made me what, dammit? Nostalgic? Heartsick? Superseded? I wish I could tell you. I don't have the language for it. It made me sad in the same way driving around L.A. and seeing all the stuff I liked gone would've made me feel, but it gave me an additional weird feeling. Mapstalgia, maybe, where your ability to get around in an imaginary setting (because of its real life analogue) gives one the uncomfortable feeling of dream-like omnipotence. It was creepy and addictive, and more powerful (for me) than the game itself was. Still no match, weirdness-wise, to being able to play Vice City or GTAIII and still know your way around from driving the streets so often. I think: It's the sort of thing a young Thomas Pynchon would be able to do justice to....and then I get too depressed to even finish the thought. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:16 PM | |
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