“At the height of his smuggling success, Perlowin lived in a $3 million mansion in Mendocino County. From 1974 to 1983, he ran a ring that used fishing boats, trucks and airplanes to ship marijuana from Colombia to the San Francisco Bay area. He sold a half-billion dollars worth of the drug. He even hired a research firm to study other drug dealers and find out what mistakes they made.”
This morning I went googling for reviews that claim there is an Acid Trip to be experienced in Pynchon’s movie, Inherent Vice. Like cranking the handle on a Jack-in-the-Box, I always get good results. This name popped out at me ‘Sparky’ in regards to Pynchon’s fictional computer, ARPAnet. I now own the Pynchon Franchise! Big fish eat little fish. Mr. Lucky Guess, has had his day. Allow me to introduce you to the real Sparky who was there at the wedding reception of Mary Ann Tharaldsen, the ex-wife of Thomas Pynchon. Sparky offered to be SECURITY, the guard at the gate. Sparky was a good friend of the beat poet Michael Maclure, and Jim Morrison, the other Acid-Rock Messiah. Oliver Stone’s people called Sparky to get his antidotes on Jim. Sparky did detective work for Bruce Perlowin who has a movie in the works.
With the discovery of ‘Sparky’ I am freed from the sanitarium my family, and my ex-friends have shut me it. I am now in the catbird seat. I am ready to lay low that East Coast writing crew that snubbed and censored me. The truth will set you free!
Sparky was good friends with all the brothers sitting on a bridge in Venice. Tim O’Connor looks like Doc. Tim used to play his guitar and sing on the Venice Boardwalk to make money. Tim can smoke anyone under the table. Buy one of his little books. Tim is a real starving artist. He sang at our wedding reception. Instead of buying a ticket to go see Inherent Vice, buy one of Tim’s books. Or, just send him money! Tim will do some soundtracks for my movie.
http://www.hitchhikingpoet.com/
“Truth is stranger that fiction.”
Come to Sparkytown, and free your mind from the One World Vortex!
Jon Presco
Copyright 2015
https://rosamondpress.com/2013/08/17/sparkytown-vs-one-world/
“How could ARPAnet really be any different? By the end of the book, Fritz is worried that the FBI is tracking his online activity, and also swearing that he’s poured too much time into the computer, and it’s taking away from his actual life and work—novel sentiments in the ’60s that are pretty much cliché now. Fritz tells Doc how when his new hire, Sparky, “gets on this ARPAnet trip…I swear it’s like acid, a whole ‘nother strange world – time, space, all that shit.”
With all the foresight of a character set in the ‘70s being written in the 2000’s, Doc asks:
“So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz?”
“What. Why would they do that?”
“Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?”
Therein lies the rub: just as Doc discovers that hippies often end up being informants and the cops realize corruption cuts both ways in IV, for all of its Whole Earth Catalog/Steve Jobs LSD tripping/saving the world rhetoric, ARPAnet becomes the internet becomes the NSA’s best resource. Jobs’s company goes from a garage to America’s biggest corporation.
And that crunchy save the world rhetoric? Well, old Mickey Wolfmann was a millionaire who said the same thing, and look what happened to him, Pynchon may be saying.
To paraphrase a book by its cover, the vice is, you bet, inherent.
I’ve never dropped acid, but I have a feeling that watching Inherent Vice is akin to attempting to sit through Chinatown while tripping major balls on LSD. One of the criticisms directed at Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is that the labyrinthine drugged-out noir plot is incredibly hard to follow or piece together, and might even be willfully incomprehensible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_fY2XToIxs
https://www.youtube.com/user/hitchhikingpoet
To those who think of this admittedly spot on and honestly quite obvious assessment as detraction from enjoying this groovy trip rather than the key reason for celebrating it, I offer you this experiment: Take a Raymond Chandler story, say, either the book or the film adaptation of The Big Sleep. Your task is to describe the plot, in detail, to a friend who’s never heard of Chandler, and in fact is convinced you’re still talking about the jokester from Friends even though you told them that Chandler died in 1959 (“Matthew Perry is a time traveling ghost?”, they ask). It’s already near impossible to make your way through the dense plot, isn’t it? Now try doing the same after smoking an eighth of weed, while balancing on a half-inflated beach ball on one foot and spinning a 12-piece dining set on bamboo sticks.
In the meantime, Doc is tasked with tracking down a wayward musician (Owen Wilson) who abandoned his family and faked his death. Everything’s connected and adds up to something, but never all at once. Those unfamiliar with the novel may find the details pretty hard to follow — but that’s fine. Doc’s never too far from his next joint, and we’re right there with him.
Like the book, “Inherent Vice” is enmeshed in Doc’s perpetual bewilderment. But Anderson trades the goofy energy of Pynchon’s prose for a sweeter vibe. Some of the book’s more outrageous moments, including an outlandish acid trip, have been dropped in favor of episodes that encapsulate Doc’s fractured relationship to the world. Anderson turns book passages into voiceover narration read by Joanna Newsom, who has a bit part as one of Doc’s regular female companions.
When we were on set, we took things very much to the extreme,” Josh Brolin rreveals about the making of “Inherent Vice” to Gold Derby editor Tom O’Neil (watch below). “I think [Paul Thomas Anderson]’s edit was a little tamed compared to what we did. It was more of an acid trip.”
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To read Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is to trip through a convoluted, psychedelic detective mystery, where one minute things seem clear and the next the facts have vanished in a foggy, pot-infused haze.
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Doc has an acid trip that Anderson, likely wisely, opted against putting on film. Somewhere in the adapting, though, IV: The Film loses IV: The Book‘s slight-but-sly critique of ARPAnet, the progenitor of the internet.
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In the course of looking for Wolfmann, Doc pays a visit to his old PI-partner, Fritz Drybeam. Business is booming for old Fritz, because he just got something that every other PI’s going to want:
“It was like being inside a science-fictional Christmas tree. Little red and green lights were going on and off everywhere. There were computer cabinets, consoles with lit-up video screens, and alphanumeric keyboards, and cables running all over the floor among unswept drifts of little bug-size rectangles punched out of IBM cards, and a couple of Gestetner copy machines in the corner, and towering over the scene all along the walls a number of Ampex tape reels busily twitching back and forth.
‘ARPAnet,’ Fritz announced.
‘Ah no, I better not, I’ve gotta drive and stuff, maybe just give me one for later—’
‘It’s a network of computers, Doc, all connected together by phone lines. UCLA, Isla Vista, Stanford. Say there’s a file they have up there and you don’t, they’ll send it right along at fifty thousand characters per second.’”
Fritz tells him that new computers are going online all the time, with more and more surprises and information, even where to find missing people. Naturally Doc asks is if it knows where he can score.
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ARPAnet comes up a couple more times, as Doc checks back in with Fritz who was using it for more pedestrian concerns—running license plate numbers and dock records—but even though he obviously understands what people would want to use the internet for (RIP Silk Road), Pynchon doesn’t really lay into the internet until his next book, 2013’s Bleeding Edge, another detective story that subs late dot-com bubble-era New York in place of 70s LA.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inherent-vice-the-movie-leaves-out-the-books-vintage-web-paranoia
Rosamond Press 
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