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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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Last Friday Joel Schalit and I gave our presentation at the EMP pop conference. It went reasonably well, despite a technical complication that led to the musical bed we'd set up starting late and therefore getting out of sync with the words of our text. Earlier that afternoon, however, we'd made the short trip to Seattle's superb independent music station KEXP in order to speak about our topic for possible later use in one of the station's short audio documentaries. And then we got to go on air, where, with Kevin Cole, a wonderful DJ, at the controls, the bed worked perfectly. Later that weekend, our gracious host Vance Galloway found a way to distill the four-hour stream in the KEXP archives into a sound file comprising only our twenty-minute segment. Be advised, if you listen -- it's in Apple's AAC format, BTW -- that I'd had way too little sleep and way too much coffee -- I was in Seattle, after all -- that day, amping up my nervous energy to the point where I ended up sounding like I'd been making recreational use of a dentist's office. Joel, who was so tired that I feared he would start nodding off, revealed his radio experience by sounding calm and collected. Oh well. At least the content came through clearly enough. In closing, I must give a shout out to some folks whose words played a major role in the development of our presentation and whom time constraints prevented us from properly acknowledging at the EMP: K-Punk, Simon Reynolds, The Stranger's Charles Mudede, Steven Shaviro, Tomas Palermo, and, last but not least, our host Vance Galloway. Joel knows enough about dub to fill their footprints, but I feel like I'm wearing baby shoes in comparison. Tags: clips, conference, friends, media, music, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
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I don't normally post entries with photographs that one of me LJ friends has already shared. But in this case I have to make an exception. The fact that I spent several hours yesterday discussing life and politics with an articulate American soldier who explained, in detail, the injuries he suffered in Iraq already had me feeling the burden of history with special force. Seeing this remarkable photo tonight pushed me over the edge:  That's me on the right, one of my oldest and best friends -- and the person who inspired me to start blogging here -- ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cpratt in the middle, at his graduation from UC Berkeley back in May, 1992, and his then-partner Mark Bingham on the left, someone who I always got along famously with and with whom I would love to share my frustration at the officiating, not to mention bad luck, that plagued tonight's contest at Maples Pavilion. Mark was as true a Bear of the Cal variety as you could ever hope to find, someone who made me swell with pride for my alma mater even in defeat. Here's hoping that there are plenty of stupid tree mascots for you to defile in the next life, Mark. You deserve it. Tags: archive, autobiography, bay area, friends, history, nostalgia, photography
Current Location: 85704
Muse: the Cal fight song in quarter time
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The wonderful chrisglass drove all the way down from Phoenix yesterday afternoon to share dinner, art and dessert with us on the last day of his vacation. He was one of the first people we hadn't physically met whom we got to know on Live Journal and remains one of our favorite presences on the internet. But I have to warn you, should you be eager to invite him to visit your domiciles that he dabbles in voodoo:  Looking at the lumberjack he was skillfully fashioning from clay, you might think that he was using the dark arts to indulge in a little self therapy. But I think the external appearance of his golem was actually a ruse. Because the person who responded most vigorously to his visit was Skylar, who suddenly remembered that she had a camera of her own -- despite her constant art-making, she hasn't done much photography without prodding -- and has been wandering the house ever since composing intriguing abstract shots of household pets that would be ideally suited to Chris's famous "crop." So unless you want to risk being driven to extreme bouts of creativity, you'd better think twice about having him over. Oh, and I should add that I was myself inspired by his voodoo to break with my usual practice and use Photoshop on this photograph of him working. He gave me permission, for one thing. And there's also the fact that I was working with his lovely D-SLR and neglected to adjust the exposure to match the dimming light of our dining area. The pictures I took glow like the figures in a Rembrandt painting, shining out from the gloom. But this one definitely benefited from becoming brighter and less linseed oily. Tags: everyday, friends, home, photography
Current Location: 85704
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I still don't know what HBTY means. I'm sure it's deliciously kinky. What I do know is that steadfast LJer chefxh always makes sure to extend hearty wishes for happiness with that mysterious acronym to his friends on the date of their birth. Since he is having a really shitty week, I think it especially important to give him some of what he gives others. To wit: HBTY
HBTY
HBD chefxh
HBTY Oh, and you might send him a recipe or something to brighten his spirits. I'll offer my own here for my all-time favorite comfort food. Note the clever name: Hackflesh Surprise
• Make some rice, however you like to make rice, setting it aside when it's done
• Cut up some onions
• Toss them in a heated frying pan
• Add a bunch of ground beef of the leaner sort
• Cook on medium heat
• While the meat and onions are simmering, open a can of creamed corn. Or two, if you're in extra need of comfort
• Warm up the creamed corn -- gently, for it's a delicate dish -- in a pot
• When everything is ready, dump the meat and onions over the rice, then swirl in creamed corn to taste
• Don't eat too much
• Watch a comfort movie after dinner to extend the soothing vibe I'm serious. Whenever I feel low, this totally cheers me up. Perhaps it's just the memory of my father referring to the meat-and-onions as Hackfleisch, but I'll take comfort from any quarter. Anyway, have a good evening, chefxh. Your many loyal readers are keeping their members crossed on your behalf. Tags: blogging, friends
Current Location: 85704
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One of the highlights of last week's trip was finally getting to meet Jocelyn, the daughter of gpratt and tpratt and niece of danlmarmot and cpratt, whom we'd heard so much about. She's a real sweetie and obviously very, very smart. Also she reminds me of my grandmother somehow, at least in terms of her facial expressions, so that's neat. Here's a photo of Skylar holding her up to see the black panther, who was putting on quite a show for the tourists:  I wish we could have seen Jocelyn's older brother and their father, but it was great to see her and her mother. Now that her uncles are moving back to California, we should be able to see all of them in the near future. Hooray! Tags: daughter, friends, photography, travel
Current Location: 85704
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The Elders' new album just became available on iTunes, as Joel details in 