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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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From Karl Marx, Grundrisse-- The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to the greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a "political animal," not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of a society. Production by an isolated individual outside society -- a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness -- is as much of an absurdity as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. Tags: holiday, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Celestialis - Deepchord Presents: Echospace - The Coldest Season
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According to Skylar, this was our best Christmas ever. It certainly felt like our tiredest Christmas ever, which may be why she liked it so much. When you don't even bother to make dinner, much less get dressed, the relaxed vibe has a way of feeling like the residue of bliss. And there was plenty of that, too, as this clip amply attests: Kim was nearly as effusive over getting the monstrously long Béla Tarr film Sátántangó, which I ordered for her from the United Kingdom. And I was pretty pleased myself to get a book full of philosophy jokes and another full of maps. Sometimes less is more, though where American Girl products like Nikki are concerned, that "less" also costs more. Tags: daughter, family, holiday, home
Current Location: 85704
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Thing Two is a master of mischief, always seeming to complicate whatever task you wish to accomplish. But he pays you back by being extraordinarily pliant. Whereas trimming Thing One's claws requires wearing a falconer's attire, Little Guy just lies there placidly, as if to mock his brother's cowardice. He doesn't merely tolerate the play-acting of imaginative children, but actually seems to welcome their impositions. Last night, for example, Skylar and her friend decided he should don attire befitting the birthday celebration:  Not only did he permit multiple costume changes, he lay on the island with so little motion that I could photograph him despite the low light levels. Of course, he did have the satisfaction of keeping the Friday New York Times from being read during his tribulations. Still, he definitely went beyond the call of duty. Even when he was finally done dressing up, he made sure to stay around for a series of hugs that would have sent most cats to an inaccessible refuge under the sofa. This is why I will remember not to complain too much the next time he decides to occupy my desk chair the minute I rise to use the bathroom or parades in front of the computer monitor like B. Kliban's "transparent" feline. Three cheers for Two! Tags: holiday, home, humor, pets
Current Location: 85704
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