How many thought me insane when I predicted ‘Inherent Vice’ would be a disaster movie? Boris and his buddies concluded I was a Nobody Acidhead glomming on to the fact Pynchon and I were married to the same woman. How did he find out? Did he use google to find this blog? Is there a copyright issue? Chris Mudd came to save Inherent Vice, and not bury it like I and other critics have, because, it stinks!

“What “Vice” excelled in was mood and a consistent tone. The dream-like quality of the film left me not quite sure what I watched, and that was the whole point. If an LSD trip became a movie, it would be this one. While the trailers for the film marketed it as a detective story, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc investigates the disappearance of a former girlfriend, the actual plot took a complete backseat to the aesthetics of the film. The entirety of which felt somehow foggy and disconnected, leaving me uninvested.”

If anything associated with Pynchon is chock full of psychedelic fog, it’s my review. I turn Pynchon’s dreamy state into an old Lil Abner movie that has been removed from Youtube.

https://rosamondpress.com/2015/01/14/marijuana-road-lil-hippie/

Today I found an interview with Chrissie Siegel who says what I said about Pynchon in this blog, and, back up my crazy review.

“I stayed with Jules because he was the poet and the hippie. We actually
lived in a commune. We weren’t pretending. We were the real thing. Tom
didn’t stick his neck out and live the way he wrote. He was a classic
master artist who stayed home with his 400 coffee cans and wrote.”

The idea that LSD was distributed to the public so writers can expand their awareness and author trippy fictional novels is farfetched. Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ is the primary Acid Book that takes a look behind the curtain of Acid Oz. Chrissie exposes Pynchon’s Wizardry, thus;

“He’s very conventional and old-fashioned and has the values of his
generation of the Fifties from upper class Oyster Bay. He never met a
person who said “dig” or “man” or “it’s not my bag.” It’s only in his
imagination. He’d like to be one of his characters and wear a black
leather jacket and stand on the corner spit. Or he’d like to be one of
those surfers that he studied like a sociologist in Manhattan Beach.
He’s really a professional sociologist, studying people.”

Wasn’t Timothy Leary a sociologist – and Richard Alpert?  I don’t think Pynchon got close to too many people in order to study them, thus, Mary Ann might have a great influence.

When I suggested there is a Lucy in the sky with diamonds connection  on Charles J. Shield’s Facebook, he laughed and mocked me in front of Boris Kachka, who wrote the piece about Mary Ann and Pynchon for the New York Magazine. I have Artaud and Lucy meet at the Moulin Rouge. Consider the new movie Get Down.

Greg Presco: Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem from her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Fillmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!”

https://rosamondpress.com/2014/12/20/lucy-in-the-sky-with-starship-2/

You just read a truly psychedelic blog where Kurt Vonnegut was drafted into the Acid Army in order to take over the world and the universe, and, he barely got out of that board meeting with his life, so thick was the marijuana smoke.

Back to Reality

“ If an LSD trip became a movie, it would be this one.”

Christine Rosamond’s autobiography was disappeared. My sister took numerous LSD trips. There is a movie in the works, pushed by outsiders who are hostile towards the surviving family artist. My ex-wife is an artist.

My mother met her daughter-in-law at her sons’ house. Mark had bought a lot of Champaign. He was surprised to learn I quit drinking. Christine was there, and her husband, Rick Partlow. We have Pynchon in our family tree that includes Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, and the Hollywood folk she married, and, we are kin to Reese Witherspoon.

The point is, there are a legion of Hip Articles out there, written by hip writers, who hitched a ride on Pynchon’s Acid Soaked lollipop, and are now shipwrecked on that wicked coral reef off the coast of Venice California, being eaten by common cannibals.  Beatdom has been thrown in a big black pot and served up to the masses when Pynchon allowed a movie to be made from his book. Like the Day of the Locusts, something went terribly wrong – as I predicted it would!

Now, here come Chris Mudd, the Total Copout to the disaster scene, it looking like D-Day on Omaha Beach. Pynchon’s trusty Writing Crew lie bleeding. One brave author picks up his severed writing arm, and wanders around, lost.

“What the hell happened?”

One has to ask if Mudd was given a wad of cash to lie his ass off, and ask, if he ever took a LSD trip. Where ise proof in getting to the bottom of this? Should he be locked in a room with some old LPS and a Lava Lamp, then dosed while a video camera records just how similar his trip is to a failed movie?

There has to be REAL PEOPLE, somewhere! Once Pynchon allowed his fake real people to be taken to Hollywood, and subjected to HOLLYWOOD ILLUSION, it was curtains!

Above is a photo of Mary Ann Tharaldsen having a show-down with my Mexican neighbor, who deliberately picked up a big slab of concrete and dropped it on his foot. He has a lawyer and is suing his ex-boss. He is a hero to the kids in the hood, because he is about to get  settlement and beat the system.

Mary Ann is having her Fountainhead moment. My neighbor, Roberto, is a old Mexican with three sons. We used to get drunk together. We both shared a zany sense of humor. He shot a dude who was messen with his ex-wife. My dog loved Roberto, and would knock him on his ass when he came home drunk.

One day, Roberto tells me he was mowing his clients lawn, when this good-looking woman asked him if he could plant a vegetable garden for her. Being a descendant of Pancho Villa, Roberta did not stoop for no vegetables. He gave me Mary Ann’s number. When she came over to get me, she wanted to see inside my shack in the back of the main house. When she saw my drafting board and drawings of Atlantis, she went ape-shit. Then she learned my sister was a word famous artist. Now, she wants me to take a I.Q. test and join Mensa. In Boris’ article in New York magazine, my ex claims Thomas has a I.Q. of 190.

Well, this number may be wrong, because Pynchon failed to see it coming, his ACID TEST.

Above is a pic of my of my other bad-ass Chicano friends. Tony’s people tried to assassinated President Truman, he born and raised in the Peurto Rican hood of NY. Joe was the caretaker of Railroad Park in Oakland and lived on a Presidential car. There was another Tony, who did not like me because I was the only gringo in the group, and, my people took California from his Mexican ancestors. Then, Paul Drake joined the brotherhood. At the suggesting of Mary Ann, Paul took up acting, and got a role in Sudden Impact, he playing the bad-ass villain, Mick!

Then, Mary Ann’s other ex-husband, started a child custody suit, that was fucking unreal!

The Day of the Locust employed the LSD flash-back back in 1975. Mudd claims Pynchon’s film crew snuck up on this old Hollywood trick forty years later is the LSD slipped in the National Kool-aid of the common movie goer, who are trying to be tricked into going back for some more, in order to pay for this movie that should never have been made. I feel obligated to protect the Real World of Psychedelia from the imposters! I am the Touchstone!

Above is a pic of Rosemary with doves. She  gave birth to four hippie children who all took LSD. She is the first, and a real, Hippie Mother, who smoked a lot of dope with her husband, a Vietnam Vet six months young then me. Robert Miles also met Pynchon’s ex-wife, and was Mary Ann’s father-in-law?

The four dudes on a real bridge in Venice California, did a lot of LSD, and were at Mary Ann’s wedding reception in Oakland. All four of us had dealt with Max, a real Mafioso,who committed real acts of vice and mayhem. Robbie killed real people in Vietnam. Now that I have established real reality, we might be able to repair the damage Pynchon and his Hollywood Tricksters did to our real Bohemian Reality.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2015

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqwoE2u1c88

“Inherent Vice”: An LSD trip on film

By Chris Mudd, Staff Writer

February 9, 2015Filed under Eagle Life

“Inherent Vice” was a two-and-a-half-hour trip through the hippie generation through the eyes of Joaquin Phoenix. Adapted from the book of the same name by Thomas Pynchon, “Vice” is the latest from writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson, best known for films such as “The Master” and “There Will be Blood.” Both of which blow “Vice” out of the water in both the story and cinematography fields. What “Vice” excelled in was mood and a consistent tone. The dream-like quality of the film left me not quite sure what I watched, and that was the whole point. If an LSD trip became a movie, it would be this one. While the trailers for the film marketed it as a detective story, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc investigates the disappearance of a former girlfriend, the actual plot took a complete backseat to the aesthetics of the film. The entirety of which felt somehow foggy and disconnected, leaving me uninvested. And that was the crux of the story of “Inherent Vice.” At the end of the day, nothing really happened. Doc experiences little, if any, change. Anderson blazed a trail through cinema similar to the works of the Coen Brothers. “The Big Lebowski” being the most obvious parallel. The Dude from “Lebowski” and Doc seem to be cut from the same cloth, as two weary souls actively seeking to stay out of trouble, but always finding themselves in some. The soundtrack of the film was a perfect slice of 1970, complete with pieces from Neil Young and Sam Cook. Of all the soundtracks from films this year, this has been the best I’ve heard. “Vice did to 70’s music what “Guardians of the Galaxy” did for the 80s. The film also featured several prominent actors beyond Phoenix, including Josh Brolin as the seemingly hard-edge Detective “Bigfoot” and Owen Wilson as Coy Harlingen. Reese Witherspoon also made a brief appearance, although her presence in the film could have been more substantial. “Inherent Vice” was a particularly polarizing film. Praise for the film is certainly justified, but it’s a very specific crowd who will truly enjoy it, myself included. It warrants multiple watches, but don’t expect your average movie experience. In fact, don’t expect anything. If the viewer truly allows themselves to abandon their preconceptions, “Inherent Vice” is a magnificent piece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test

The late writer Jules Siegel had enjoyed a particularly close relationship to the reclusive Thomas Pynchon, and much of what is thought to be known about the latter comes from the former’s interview with and observations of the author of Gravity’s Rainbow.  How much, or how little influence drugs, particularly hallucigenic drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, had on Pynchon’s narrative is unknown.  If Siegel, however, is to be believed, and he should be despite any resentment he felt regarding Pynchon’s affair with his wife, then the writing of Gravity’s Rainbow was heavily influenced by drugs.  In Pynchon’s most famous quote regarding this particular novel, which is notoriously difficult to interpret, he is alleged to have told Siegel,

“I was so fucked up while I was writing it . . . than now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant.”

A 2003 article in the British newspaper The Guardian titled “Have You Seen This Man” about a documentary on the reclusive author noted the following:

“One writer, Jules Siegel, tells how his wife ran off with Pynchon in the 1960s, and alleges, bizarrely, that Pynchon was involved with the US government’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Others tell anecdotes of Pynchon haunting bookshops in disguise, or turning up incognito at Pynchon-lookalike parties. The man himself, of course, is nowhere to be seen.” http://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/may/05/artsfeatures.fiction

That it has become a given that Pynchon indulged from time to time in hallucinogenic drugs is evident in the popular mythology that has grown up around the author, who is still alive.  A 1994 article by Andrew Gordon had this to say about the times in which Pynchon was most active and about the pervasive influence of drugs:

“I returned to a different country than the one I had left four months earlier. The first teach-in on the War had been held at Rutgers that spring. The number-one tune was no longer the Beatles’ sweet chant, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; now people were listening instead to the angry, insistent lament of the Rolling Stones, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” A chemistry major told me about his experiences with a new wonder drug called LSD. He said he had found nirvana and met God. I thought, if it could do that for this schnook, then what could it do for me? I ingested 250 micrograms and wound up in the hospital.” [“Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir,” http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm]

Gravity’s Rainbow is about the search during the final days of World War II and in the immediate post-war period by American, British and Russian agents for the German scientists behind the development of that country’s sophisticated and exceedingly threatening ballistic missile program.  Such searches did, in fact, occur, with the rush by the “Allies” to locate and appropriate as much of the German rocket program and the scientists behind it as humanly possible.  Whether this missions was surrealistic or not, one can be forgiven for suggesting that Pynchon’s interpretation of it was heavily influenced by drugs.  Read the following passage and, in the context of the novel’s plot, determine for oneself whether the author was experimenting with LSD or with any other mind-altering substances:

“Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .”

At the end of the day, the best evidence that drugs played a role in Pynchon’s vision comes from the quote above recorded by Jules Siegel.  Personally, I’ll take Siegel at his word that the quote was fairly and accurately reported.