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Monday, the doctoral student I advise passed his qualifying exam with the proverbial flying colors, using the techniques I imparted to him to excellent effect. Tuesday, another advisee passed her M.A. exam. She also made good use of my advice on how to handle the pressure of the event. Wednesday, I spent the five hours before teaching meeting with a series of students I mentor, all of whom had produced better thinking than I would have expected when I first encountered them. Thursday, I held office hours all day after getting up at 5am, managing not to lose the thread of my ritual advice-giving. And today, Friday, the two students whose Honors theses I directed this semester presented their work at the Department's end-of-year reception to much acclaim while a third student, who had delayed turning in her thesis from last spring, came to see me, pleased that I'd continued to work with her during a difficult time and relieved to have finally completed the requirements for her degree. I'm exhausted, but also proud of the work my students have done and, a rarity for me, of the work I did helping them to realize their potential. Tags: autobiography, everyday, work
Current Location: 85704
Muse: "It takes strength to be gentle and kind. . ."
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After a week of notable birthdays, including Marx, Freud, Orson Welles, Willie Mays, myself and also my great friend Annalee Newitz, who celebrated the twentieth cumpleaños of our acquaintance yesterday, it is now Thomas Pynchon's fête. The author of my all-time favorite book The Crying of Lot 49, as well as close runner-up Vineland and the awesome Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon also wrote a trenchant piece on Los Angeles in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots that serves as the perfect counterpoint to the Southern California presented in his fiction: Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, to an anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer. Yet in the daytime's brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it real, no plastic faces, no transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfied landscaping or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, like the police substation, one command post for the white forces last August, pigeons now thick and cooing up on its red-tiled roof. Or, on down the street, vacant lots, still looking charred around the edges, winking with emptied Tokay, port and sherry pints, some of the bottles peeking out of paper bags, others busted.
A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass--not that you'd ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It's part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste. Traditionally Watts. An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a little piece of the neighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the street rails. But Simon Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates.
A few blocks away, other kids are out playing on the hot blacktop of the school playground. Brothers and sisters too young yet for school have it better--wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not the crowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the rest of L.A., giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you don't especially feel like being inside.
In the business part of town there is a different idea of refuge. Pool halls and bars, warm and dark inside, are crowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to a ball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildings--low, faded stucco boxes that remind you, oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. it is easy to see how crowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For the moment, it all only waits in the sun.
Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.
From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts--and, in a curious way, besieges it-- looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town. That bit about the "ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes" gets me every time. Someday soon, I need to make a pilgrimage to the Watts Towers and tilt my head skyward as the cone of sound engulfs me. Tags: autobiography, friends, holiday, literature
Current Location: 85704
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As I prepared to clean the kitchen floor and both bathroom floors by doing the dishes, I listened to The Smiths' "This Charming Man" and then about half of The World Won't Listen. Reading the Mojo magazine feature on them from a few months back has me thinking again, as I have with increasing frequency this decade, about just how unique they were. And yet, they were also products of the same Manchester post-punk scene as New Order, a fact which got me inspired to hear some of the latter. Before I could do that, though, I had the urge to revisit Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks' latest, Real Emotional Trash. I liked the record on first hearing. Somehow, though, the fact that I'd been listening to most of the songs in live versions recorded at their January 9th, 2007 concert here in Tucson made me less excited than I wanted to be. Interestingly, though, after hearing them performed again live on Thursday, also at Plush, I felt my desire to memorize the album, something I've done with all of Malkmus's work in Pavement and as a solo artist, suddenly activated. Maybe it was the Jicks' new drummer Janet Weiss -- she of Sleater Kinney and Quasi fame -- saying "Hi!" to me at the merch table that sealed the deal. Whatever the reason, though, I found myself completely captivated on today's hearing. It lessened the burden of all that floor scrubbing. Real Emotional Trash is a great rock album that is not ashamed to summon the ghostly spirits of album rock's heyday. I guess "Fillmore Jive" closed Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain for a reason. After so much guitar, I felt the need to hear something without it, so I put on Carl Craig's More Songs About Revolutionary Food & Art. Generally speaking, the world of dance-electronica-techno has been oriented more towards the 12" aesthetic, with its emphasis on remixing a few strong songs, than albums, but Craig's masterwork, which I've been rediscovering after finally obtaining it for myself on CD, is emphatically meant to be listened to as an album, as its title suggests. Once I'd had my fill of Craig, I returned to the idea of listening to New Order. Only now I wanted to listen to some of their "dancier" synth-and-beats tracks, the sort I generally had the urge to skip through in my guitar-centric past. When I went to pick out an album, though, I was reminded of how much I'd liked their last record Waiting For the Sirens Call and opted to listen to that first. I made it through four-and-a-half songs before it started to skip. Luckily, my favorite songs on the album are the ones that open it. And track four, the single "Krafty," may just be the best distillation ever of their melancholy pop sensibility, with its "Love Will Tear Us Apart"-style fusion of rock and dance music cultures. For that one I felt obligated to dance, watching my legs reflected dimly in the television screen. Then it was on to Republic, the album with the highest percentage of the "dancier" songs I used to find uninspiring. I still think that one is their weakest pre-hiatus album, but it did sound better after listening to Carl Craig. Part of the problem is that the first song "Regret," which rivals "Krafty" and "Age of Consent" for the crown as catchiest New Order song, is so good that it makes everything after it seem sort of tepid. The effect is especially pronounced in my case, since "Regret" has great personal meaning for me, since I purchased the pre-album release CD single on one of the most complicated days of my life and one, fittingly, that flooded me a great deal of regret. Tags: autobiography, everyday, music
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a memory of the "space" in the middle of the song "Real Emotional Trash"
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