Watts Towers

I actually went out into the real world with real people. What’s sad is as I watched The Wolfpack documentary1 the other day, I was starting to find myself identify with them. I’m really starting to feel like that agoraphobic old man horder who will die in a fire sparked by a decade old issue of Sports Illustrated, cat hair and friction.

So out with Abbey and Elliott we went first to the Watts Towers and then to the best burgers in Los Angeles: Hawkins Burgers. We blah blah blahed and all of that good fun stuff and even told Abbey, a NorCal transplant, the history of Watts and Compton and South Central LA and how everything is so much nicer now than it was in 1992.

I have to say that as underwhelming as the Towers are when you first encounter them, they do grow on you. I am always happy after I visit them.

Watts Towers

I also think it is nice that some of the houses nearby also take its cue from the Towers.

Colorful House in Watts

All in all it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours with folks I very rarely get to see. It also broke the sort of monotony of trying to listen to the best of 2015 music and reading alternately Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov and Gay Berlin.

1 The documentary features the six Angulo brothers and one sister whose parents raised them in an apartment in the Lower East Side and didn’t allow them to leave the house at all. They were raised to shun the outside world and all of its seeming evils and perversity. Their only connection with the outside world was the movies their father would get for them. And they recreated the movies line for line building and creating elaborate sets and costumes.