Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Inherent Vice

As I was reading Thomas Pynchon's most recent (and by far most accessible) new book Inherent Vice towards the end of the summer, this passage jumped out at me as being a fantastic representation of late '60s Los Angeles:

"Doc took the freeway out. The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses fully of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down the into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had really been going on up north."

No comments:

Post a Comment