A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

[Mark Kohut]

Watts...where no one can afford the luxury of illusion,

Tariq cannot yet Doc can?  

Doc has the luxury of all that woo-woo stuff? 


--- On Sun, 8/30/09, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: A Journey Into The Mind of Watts
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, August 30, 2009, 7:57 PM
> ... 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/
>