A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
Anyone who’s been to Manhattan Beach anytime in the last 20 years or so will likely find little in common with Gordita Beach — the fictional locale of Thomas Pynchon’s universe, thought to be based on the beachfront community south of Los Angeles — but the few landmarks that remain are helpfully pointed out in these two pieces below.
Gordita Beach is the setting of Pynchon’s new stoner-noir, Inherent Vice, and also makes a brief appearance in Vineland, his 1990 novel set amidst the schizophrenics, hippies and rednecks of the Northern California redwoods. Though his whereabouts have usually been unknown over the course of his career, the famously reclusive writer lived in Manhattan Beach in 1969-70 while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, and in keeping with his near invisibility beyond the bookshelf, there’s little trace left of his presence, or the enclave of “paranoid dope-smokers, surfers and ‘stewardii'” of Inherent Vice.
The Daily Breeze did a compare and contrast piece on modern-day Manhattan and Gordita Beaches in its August 8, 2009 edition: Surprise! Most of the good bookstores are gone, it’s all overrun with horrible lawyers, the landmarks have been plastered over with Oliver Garden-inspired facades and hardly anybody remembers that one of the most significant literary works of the late 20th Century was written there:
But around the South Bay, the response has been more muted. Over the past few years the beach cities have lost their best independent bookstores – such as Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach, where Pynchon was alleged to be a customer – and Manhattan Beach has been slow to claim Pynchon as a local author.
“Manhattan Beach has a way of shoveling under that kind of countercultural history,” said Frost, whose extensive report on Pynchon’s local ties can be found at http://www.tinyurl.com/macb29. “He occupied a time in history that doesn’t get recorded very well in the South Bay.”
You can read the Breeze piece by clicking here or keep scrolling down to the bottom of our post.
For a more in-depth look at Pynchon’s South Bay years, we’ll refer you to the Garrison Frost history that The Breeze is talking about, originally published in 1999 in his journal of South Bay ephemera, The Aesthetic. Several amusing tidbits:
First and foremost, though, Pynchon was a writer, according to Hall. He was known to lock himself up in his apartment for days and weeks at a time while writing “Gravity’s Rainbow,” often going so far as to block out the windows with towels.
Guy recalled that, while doing research for the book, Pynchon translated an entire book of Russian history using only an English/Russian dictionary.
Perhaps the most interesting tale that Hall has regarding Pynchon is of their last meeting. It was around 1975 and he hadn’t seen the author since the two chatted at the counter at El Tarasco a couple of years earlier. By chance, Hall found himself back in Manhattan Beach and met Pynchon on the sidewalk near the Fractured Cow.
“I was walking down the street and he was walking toward me,” Hall said. “Our paths crossed right in front of a pay phone, our eyes met and we recognized each other. I asked how he was and at that moment the telephone rang. He looked at me and looked at the phone, then turned around and ran down the street, and I never saw him again.”
Click here to keep reading “Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay” at The Aesthetic’s website. And if you haven’t gotten a copy of Inherent Vice yet, Amazon’s currently offering a free download of the first chapter as PDF.
Read “Fictionalized Manhattan Beach comes to life in Pynchon novel” from The Daily Breeze after the jump …
NORML is a nonprofit lobbying organization working to end marijuana prohibition and stop arrests of smokers. The NORML Foundation sponsors educational, research, and legal programs about the costs of marijuana prohibition and alternatives.
So far as Obama and co. is concerned, for now his “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, peddles the same undeviating line as his predecessors: “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary, and it’s not in mine.”
Ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, brother of the late great Terence, will be doing a rare live interview/conversation today on Erik Davis’s new weekly commercial-free online radio program, EXPANDING MIND—the perfect name with the perfect host and perfect guest, really, as the McKennas’ work in the ’80s and ’90s really expanded the cultural dialogue about what altered consciousness was telling us, (or, for Terence, what the Plants are telling us), what the historical record and scientific studies could tell us about entheogen (or: psychoactive substance) use, and so on…and on…and on… Should be interesting to hear what Dennis is up to, and his current thoughts on all things entheogenic. The show is on at 2pmEDT/11amPDT TODAY (Thursday, August 6) at Progressive Radio Network, and then will be archived. Here’s the link: http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com
In other Erik Davis news, he sez: “I will be giving a presentation on Aleister Crowley and the movies at the Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave in Capital Hill. That particular rite will go down on Thursday, Aug 13, at 9pm.”
Here’s the description for the night:
“Though he died in obscurity in 1947, the renegade magician Aleister Crowley has come to exert an enormous influence on popular and sub-culture alike. Join Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and the 33 1/3 volume on Led Zeppelin IV, for a clip-heavy “performance lecture” on occult film.
“Sampling rare footage, experimental shorts and documentary clips, Davis will use cinema to trace the development of postwar magick and Crowley’s apocalyptic religion of Thelema, with special attention given to the work of Kenneth Anger and the rise of magic in the 1960s and 70s. Numerous obscurities will be sampled, including Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star, Rex Ingram’s The Magician and the Jimmy Page version of Anger’s Lucifer Rising. Also included are excerpts from Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster, Joe Schimmel’s Christian expose Rock ‘n’ Roll Sorcerers and cut-up wizard Craig Baldwin’s recent Mock Up On Mu.”
We get email. This one’s from our friend Stephanie at EcoShack…
Ever read the classic 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia? People in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest break from the US to form their own country. We love the book because in Ecotopia, everybody lives in a commune!
With Ecotopia as inspiration we’re visiting as many ‘communal hotspots’ as possible in an 8-day period: Ojai, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Bolinas, Sonoma County and beyond… from Aug 12 – 20, or so.
Know of any must-sees? Should we visit you? Post your ideas (and invites) to the ‘Wanna Start a Commune?’ Facebook wall at http://tinyurl.com/my3dfn.
We’re gonna honor what’s old, experience what’s new, and spread the word about what we’re up to with WeCommune. We’ll Tweet from the road. Follow us at: http://twitter.com/WeCommune.
Check out the WeCommune site at http://wecommune.com (be sure to click on ‘visit our commune’ to get a feel for how the system works).
Arthur is proud to present scans of essential documents produced by and about the San Francisco Diggers, who were in many ways the epicentral actors in the Haight-Ashbury during the epic, wildly imaginative period from late ’66 through ’67. The Diggers’ ideas and activities are essential counter-cultural history, sure, but they are also especially relevant to the current era, for reasons that should be obvious to the gentle Arthur reader.
Most of the documents that we are presenting are broadsides originally published on a Gestetner machine owned and operated in the Haight by the novelist/poet Chester Anderson and his protege/sidekick Claude Hayward, who used the name “Communication Company,” or more commonly, “Com/Co.” According to Claude, these broadsides were then “handed out on the street, page by page, super hot media, because the reader trusted the source, which was another freaky looking hippie who had handed it to him/her.”
Here are two posterish images—the black and white one is an early poster by Victor Moscoso—plus two flyers to do with the Invisible Circus, a “community” that was supposed to last for 72 hours at the Glide Memorial Church one weekend in late February, 1967. More on what happened at the Invisible Circus in our next installment of The Diggers Papers…
There are few more appropriate sounds than these for that part of the night when you’ve been working the old beer/greens combo and the couch seems like a great place to go visit.
Buy this whole goddamn record (called Lunes) from these guys here. This record was made possible by No Quarter Records of New York City, home of Endless Boogie, The Psychic Paramount, Circle and Doug Paisley.
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