White Sands Page 14
Something was happening to me here in L.A., something new or at least something that had been sneaking up on me that I’d only recently become conscious of. Things from my late twenties that had meant a lot to me—films I’d seen, books I’d read or music I’d listened to—kept coming back to me with a force that had been dormant for much of the intervening thirty years. Cherry had been a constant presence—because he had mutated and evolved beyond jazz into other kinds of music that I became interested in—but Ornette, Miles and some Coltrane were re-claiming me in a way that was also touched with loss: the thoroughness of their claim was somehow related to a diminution of feeling of which I had hitherto been largely unaware. There was something deathly about it.
And Mingus had meant so much to me, even though he was dead before I knew anything about him, unlike Cherry, Haden and Pharoah, whom I saw play several times, all of whom I spoke to, albeit only briefly. There were plenty of pictures of Mingus in the center named after him, some album covers and CD cases on display and an exhibition of artworks, but ten minutes was plenty long enough to take everything in. We walked outside again, joined the other people on our tour: ten of us, mainly Europeans, gathered in a semi-circle. Our guide, a smiling African American woman, asked what the most important rule of the visit was going to be.
‘Enjoy yourself,’ said a man in an already-enjoying-himself Hawaiian shirt.
‘Have fun,’ said Jessica, tuning in quickly to the spirit of the place. But no, the main rule was ‘Do not climb on the towers.’ Fair enough—you can’t have people clambering all over the towers as if they’re part of an adventure playground—but it was a bit of a downer in the way that prohibitions always are.
We were admitted to the towers through a locked gate so that the guide became a warder, a turnkey, a screw. In the future an invisible force field might prevent people from entering except at designated times.
In among the tendrils and arches of the towers, we listened to the story of their creator’s life. The story was consistent in broad outline with the versions of Rodia’s life online, though there is considerable variation as to some of the details, including his name. Sabato Rodia—who for much of his life went by the nickname Sam, whose last name is sometimes given as Rodilo—was born in 1879 or 1880 in Rivatoli, Italy, and immigrated to the States in the 1890s. He settled in Pennsylvania, where Sabato and his brother worked in the coal mines. The brother died in an accident in the mine. Sabato moved to the West Coast, married Lucia Ucci in 1902. They had three children, lived in Seattle, Oakland and Martinez before the marriage collapsed in 1912. He then worked as a labourer in rock quarries and as a construction tiler, and lived with another woman, named Benita.
In 1921 he bought a triangular-shaped lot here at 1765 East 107th Street in Watts. The lot measured 151 by 69 by 137 feet, and Rodia, at the age of forty-two, began to transform it into his home and his lasting monument. According to some accounts, he started work on the towers to give him something to do after he quit drinking (though Mingus remembers him ‘drinking that good red wine from a bottle’ as he worked). He lived with a woman named Carmen, who left him in 1927. From then on he lived alone, building the towers until 1954, when he gave the property to a neighbour and moved to Martinez to live near his sister. He was seventy-five. The following year, the neighbour sold the property to a man named Joseph Montoya, who intended to open what would have been the world’s most spectacularly located taco stand. These plans came to nothing, and he in turn sold the property to two film people, Nicholas King (an actor) and William Cartwright (then a student at USC, later an editor), who began the long process of ensuring the survival of the towers.
As the talk about Rodia and his work continued, we shuffled through the site, sometimes on the edges, near the boundary walls, sometimes right by the towers, with the glinting and shining bits of glass and imprints either of the tools he’d used to make them or of anything else that came to hand: cornbread moulds, rug beaters, faucet handles. Rodia salvaged and scavenged what he could—rebar, glass, crockery, bottle bottoms (green for 7UP or Canada Dry, blue for milk of magnesia), junk that might be left over when everything else of apparent value had already been taken and used. That is the essential contrast: the scale of the undertaking and the modest means of its construction and materials. Klara, in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, is struck by exactly this. ‘She didn’t know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality.’
The towers soared overhead, sturdy, intricate, graceful: science-fictiony, daft and Gaudi-esque all at once. They were like a forest of trees, linked by concrete creepers but without any umbrella or canopy of leaves. But they were also like inverted and bejewelled corkscrews. Or like . . . The power of the place comes, in part, from how impossible it is to put your finger on quite what the towers are or look like. To Klara in Underworld it seems like ‘an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn’t know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe.’ Whatever we come up with, a crucial part of the experience resides in that ‘what else’: a suggestion of skyrocket, the masts of a triangular ship heading east but becalmed forever in the doldrums of Watts with only wave patterns in the perimeter walls to serve as the sea. Our guide took these nautical references as evidence that Rodia’s heart and course were set on Italy, the land he had come from, but this was greeted with some scepticism by a white-haired member of our group who spoke for us all.
‘How much of this is supposition?’ he wanted to know.
It was all a matter of record, she insisted, could all be verified by things Rodia had said in interviews either while the towers were being built or after he’d finished, when they began to attract the attention of the world at large. By then they had become mythic, and it is the nature of the mythic that it remains true to itself while subtly adapting to the spoken or unspoken needs of those to whom it appeals, whose hopes it embodies. But the towers’ adaptive capacities are also a proven physical fact. They bend away from the sun, our guide told us, like sunflowers in reverse. This was met with a long silence, a breathing scepticism, but then she explained that concrete does this because of thermal expansion. The fence kept people at bay; the towers leaned away from the sun, their non-denominational appeal causing myriad meanings and associations to flow towards them, unimpeded, free. From them too, as if they were not ship but radio masts, transmitting the sound of which they were the visual embodiment, broadcasting their location, drawing us to them.
Those earlier mentions of Mingus and Cherry were not just circumstantial: in another passage in Underworld the towers put DeLillo’s narrator in mind of ‘a kind of swirling free-souled noise, a jazz cathedral.’ The improvised nature of the undertaking, of learning in the process of doing and making—of being in the grips of something without necessarily being sure what the outcome will be—seems intrinsic to it. But jazz, in essence, is communal, and by Mingus’s time there was a considerable history and a large body of theory to draw on—or reject. Rodia worked alone, building his intricate and epic solo inch by inch, without the benefit of architectural theory or the support of collaborators like Dannie Richmond, Roland Kirk or (in Ornette’s case) Cherry and Haden. What he most wanted from the community—which may have been the motive for buying his plot of land here in Watts—was to be left alone, to go about the business of bringing this thing into an existence that would owe nothing to anyone else, but which would end up being for everyone.
Actually, the other half of that phrase from Underworld—‘cathedral’—is as important as the adjective ‘jazz.’ From certain angles, especially in photographs, the towers loom over the landscape like the shirey spires of English cathedrals in Oxford or Salisbury. But the crucial thing is that at some point the comparisons fall short, as it were, of the ramshackle magnificence of Rodia’s structures. The comparisons are helpful because they emphasise the towers’ defining what-else-ness. But let’s stick with the cathedrals for a moment and see how they measure up.
Raymo
nd Williams once spoke of how, though moved by the great English cathedrals, he saw ‘the enormous weight of them on man.’ He was amazed by the ‘sheer material effort involved in the production of these buildings, many of them fine churches in stone which have survived from periods in which hardly anybody actually would have had a stone house.’ On the one hand, it is ‘perfectly clear that this was a mode of construction imposed from above.’ On the other, they suggest a willingness to expend huge amounts, ‘often under protest but at times of their own will, of productive labour on buildings which had nothing whatever to do with satisfying the physical urgency of survival.’ The people doing this were physically exposed ‘at the very time when they were building shelter for an authority which was not human, which was not of them.’
Rodia worked by day for the means of survival and continued to labour in the evenings and at weekends, working on something that had nothing to do with either necessity, survival or personal gain. He was under no external compulsion to do this and was not collecting any tithe from the community to fund his efforts; nor was he being paid. Naturally, before he worked on his towers he had to make sure he had a house, a shelter for himself. The towers that he went on to create were not designed to shelter any kind of authority. They are an expression of authority—of his authorship—and therefore of his humanity. If that—humanity!—sounds sentimental or lazy, we can go back to another passage from Williams, in his book The Country and the City.
About the spread, in the eighteenth century, of English country houses and the ideas of ‘heritage’ they incarnate, Williams is less ambiguous. Yes, such houses are invariably beautiful, but
Think it through as labour and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labour, has managed to become, by the efforts of any single real family, however prolonged. And then turn and look at what these other ‘families,’ these systematic owners, have accumulated and arrogantly declared. It isn’t only that you know, looking at the land and then at the house, how much robbery and fraud there must have been, for so long, to produce that degree of disparity, that barbarous disproportion of scale. The working farms and cottages are so small beside them: what men really raise, by their own efforts or by such portion as is left to them, in the ordinary scale of human achievement. What these ‘great’ houses do is to break the scale, by an act of will corresponding to their real and systematic exploitation of others.
Seen in this light the houses become ‘a visible stamping of power, of displayed wealth and command: a social disproportion which was meant to impress and overawe.’
To read this passage is to be moved still more deeply by Rodia’s towers. First, again in contrast with the building of the cathedrals, because no tax was levied on the surrounding community. Second, because Rodia was able to produce, in his own words, ‘something big’ only by dint of an effort that goes so far beyond the scope of ‘ordinary human achievement.’ In its way it exists in the same relation to the ‘ordinary’ as a Beethoven sonata does to someone teaching himself basic tunes on a piano. While Williams has to urge us to view a country house and ‘think it through as labour,’ it is impossible to look at Rodia’s towers as anything other than labour, without thinking of the extraordinary work involved in their construction. How else could we regard them? So, yes, in certain extraordinary circumstances, what one family—one man—can produce is not ‘so small’ if his hobby consumes his entire life to the extent that there is no room in it for a family. The towers are disproportionately large compared with the surrounding bungalows and railroad tracks, which so often serve as indicators or gauges of flatness, but they do not ‘break the scale.’ They are not a visible stamping of power, still less, in another of Williams’s phrases, ‘visible triumphs over the ruin and labour of others’; instead, they’re a gift. They don’t make the buildings around them shrink but have served to raise up the surrounding community—almost as if, to revert to the idea from Heidegger mentioned earlier, the towers caused Watts to be founded around them.
Which makes it still more of a shame that a condition of the towers being protected and conserved is that they are surrounded by that unclimbable steel fence. The great country houses were designed to be seen and to keep people out. Within Rodia’s modest plot and its low walls, the structures were designed to be part of the community. Hence the name he inscribed in them: ‘Nuestra Pueblo,’ our city. The necessary fence grants the towers a special status, which their specialness explicitly rejects. The harm done by this fence does not stop there. At the same time that the fence annexes off the towers it also shrinks them, reduces their scale. They feel confined, ghetto-ised. It’s a far cry from the early sixties, when, as Thom Andersen puts it in Los Angeles Plays Itself, ‘the Watts Towers were the first world’s most accessible, most user-friendly civic monument.’ He illustrates his point with nutty footage shot there by Andy Warhol in 1963. It’s impossible to cavort around like that now, or even to be photographed in the way that Cherry was. You cannot be photographed by the Watts Towers; you can only be photographed by the fence that surrounds the towers. Stonehenge has been similarly shrunk—very nearly destroyed—by the measures designed to protect it.
The fence is doubly frustrating since the essence of the towers is that they are self-contained. At a certain point, when he was quite high up, Rodia was able to work from within the safety of each of the towers, so that the thing he was building—that grew around him—also served as a safety feature. Beyond that point, as the radius of the spire tightened, he had to step outside the spiralling cage but no scaffolding was used. The towers were—and remain—scaffolding: a highly decorative exo-skeleton for an absent interior. They were built with simple tools, with Rodia’s own hands, from basic materials—rebar, steels twisted and bent together without welding, bolts or rivets—so that the intimacy and intricacies of their construction are not concealed but laid bare. The sense is of something organic rather than planned: as if blood flowing through one of the main structural arteries will end up going though the smaller decorative radials. The hieroglyphics and patterns imprinted in the wet cement were formed by the tools used in the towers’ construction: hammers, the head of a garden hose. All of which adds to the impression of self-containment. If the towers are temples, they are dedicated to their own construction. Our guide told us that the legal limit on the height was a hundred feet. That, she said, was why Rodia brought the tallest of the three spires in at ninety-nine and a half feet. She might be right, but Rodia’s story is adorned with sentiment—bits and pieces of good feeling that cling to the legend like the broken bits of crockery and glass that he stuck into the cement of his towers. It is possible that the achieved height created the ceiling beyond which they were officially forbidden to grow. Freed from bureaucratic interference, they could implicitly have continued on forever, ad astra, in spite of the foundations being less than two feet in depth.
This was one of the reasons why, after Rodia had moved on, the city of Los Angeles condemned his construction as unsafe. Having purchased the property for three thousand dollars in 1959, Cartwright and King devoted their energies to preventing the demolition of the towers. The campaign for their preservation in the face of the city’s insistence that they be torn down (before an earthquake caused them to topple over) resulted in a deal and a test. If the structures were able to withstand ten thousand pounds of pressure—the equivalent of a seventy-mile-per-hour wind—they would be allowed to stay. On 10 October 1959, cables were attached, and force was exerted and increased until, our guide explained, the cable snapped. When a new and stronger cable was found, either the crane to which it was attached broke or the truck doing the tugging tilted on the axis of its wheels. We were getting into a realm of variant specificity where the facts are adorned so decoratively as to acquire a suggestion of the miraculous. This is either the enemy of truth or the product of insufficient do
cumentation. It is also a highly malleable proof.
A different kind of test of their ability to withstand potential damage came in August 1965, a few weeks after Rodia had died. During the Watts riots, when the neighbourhood was set ablaze, the towers remained untouched and unmarked. This is factually correct, but Rodia didn’t just leave Watts and give the towers to a neighbour because the work was complete: he was tired of battling the city for permits and fed up with vandalism. Also, Watts had changed, had, by the early 1960s, become almost exclusively African American. In her book Pop L.A., Cécile Whiting writes that Rodia ‘seems to have envisaged the towers at certain times as a refuge from deteriorating conditions in Watts’ and ‘may have abandoned his home in 1955 because of the changing population around him.’ The irony is that after the uprisings the towers—spectacularly realized symbols of immigrant dreams—became resident totems of African American cultural expression and aspiration. ‘In other words, at virtually the same moment as the Watts Towers were preserved as part of the city’s cultural heritage, arguments broke out over whose heritage they represented.’ The malleability of the towers is such that they can surmount this perceived schism; their strength allows them to hold competing claims together like rope in a tug-of-love. Within a year of the uprising, they had become, according to a prestigious reporter for The New York Times—Thomas Pynchon, no less—‘a dream of how things should have been.’ The tense is crucial. Not how things might or will be in the future, but, with more than a touch of regret—even of nostalgia—‘should have been.’ It’s almost a corollary of the way the towers are always putting one in mind of something else: whatever one says always needs qualifying. Even loyal admirers would not claim them as an unqualified masterpiece. Unless . . .
We are familiar with the idea of the work of art never being completed, only ever abandoned, but Rodia would seem to have abandoned his at the moment of completion. The moment of the towers’ completion was also the moment at which he was completed by his life’s work. In another sense, they are constantly being completed or fulfilled—by things like the Cherry album cover, by the visitors who come from all over the world, by the various festivals that take place here each year. (Explanatory panels on the fence stress the importance of the Gigli Festival held in Nola, Italy: ‘The Watts Towers resemble the icons used in the festival so closely that they are considered a likely inspiration for his work.’) Repairs have been needed, but the surprising durability of the original work was further enhanced and authenticated when it became apparent that, over the years, it was the repairs that needed repairing. The towers were more robust than the means employed to preserve them. Their capacity to create legends about themselves was self-generating and inexhaustible.