A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

[Dave Monroe]

... much of the white culture that surrounds Watts--and, in a curious
way, besieges it-- looks like those jets: a little unreal, alittle
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.

Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by
contrast, a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever
allowed itself was to believe for a long time in the white version of
what a Negro was supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights
movements that went, too.

[...]

In Watts, apparently, where no one can afford the luxury of illusion,
there is little reason to believe that now will be any different, any
better than last time.

[...]

... All Easter week this year, in the spirit of the season, there was
a "Renaissance of the Arts," a kind of festival in memory of Simon
Rodia, held at Markham Junior High, in the heart of Watts.

Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also featured
a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely from found objects--found,
symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia tradition, among the
wreckage the rioting had left. Exploiting textures of charred wood,
twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths.

In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-ears
antenna on top; inside where its picture tube should have been, gazing
out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among its
crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was
"The Late, Late, Late Show."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html
http://acompulsivereader.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/a-journey-into-the-mind-of-pynchon/