Photos from my family's visit to the Watts Towers:

This took 33 years for one person, Simon Rodia, to build all by himself.

At a distance both my brother and I thought it was far less colorful than we had expected. But up close we realized it was made up of many pieces of shell, colored tiles, broken bottles, etc. Beautiful!

Really VERY amazing artwork by someone obsessed with doing something to be remembered. And here is the obsessed gentleman (an immigrant, something too often reviled these days) who contributed to the cultural scene of a poor area of Los Angeles:
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My family just got back from our annual vacation in Los Angeles where I have both family and friends...and every other year (including 2009) a conference at UCLA.

This year traveling was marginally better because we flew into Burbank airport, which is considerably better than LAX. And flying Jet Blue meant there were no stopovers. In general I have not found Jet Blue's prices competitive, but this year they were, so we tried them out.

This time we rented a Nissan Altima hybrid. It got us about 32 mpg in the city...not as good as we once got in a Prius, but a tad better than we once got in a Honda Civic hybrid. My wife liked to drive both the Prius and the Altima...but not so much the Civic in comparison.

As usual, one of the best things for me was hanging out at UCLA, a place I have hung out around since I was a young boy when my mother had an office in Bunche Hall (which we always called "The Waffle"). Bunche Hall and the sculpture garden are part of my childhood memories. South campus and the medical center are part of my grad school memories. And the whole campus is, to me, kind of the Platonic form of a university campus. But I wrote about that last time we had a conference at UCLA.
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Opus the Penguin is gone.

I remember when Berkley Breathed started Bloom County back in the 1980s. It was a breath of fresh air and left-wing perspective in a world taken over by Ronald Reagan's right-wing dementia. From the Iran-Contra affair to the myth of the welfare queens, there was nothing sacred in the Berkley Breathed canon of satirical targets.

For this Puerto Rican girl who could navigate "Anglo" culture with an inquisitive yet critical eye, Bloom County gave me the kind of political commentary I could find nowhere in the MSM exports of Time and Newsweek, needless to say in our island's papers either.

Actually, back in the 1980s, all the Anglo political irreverence I was getting through the mainstream media that reached our island, came in the guise of comedy or cartoons : Bloom County, Doonsbury, Pat Oliphant, Jules Pfeiffer and the stand up comedy of Steve Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Don Rickles, Bill Cosby. My life was never the same after watching Whoopie Goldberg's one woman show on HBO at the end of the 1980s.

ACK!
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Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Mothterfucker
Tits

An amazingly simple legacy of free speech, civil disobedience, philosophy of language and culture criticism all wrapped up in the guise of stand up comedy.

New York City to me has rarely been to me the voice of Woody Allen or Seinfeld. New York City has always been the voice, the "tawk" and the raunchy wit of George Carlin.

Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Mothterfucker
Tits
Fart
Turd
Twat

To celebrate George Carlin as a champion our civil rights and the integrity of the US Constitution I give you thee the original stand up skit that went into the Supreme Court Decision of FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION v. PACIFICA FOUNDATION, 438 U.S. 726, 98 S.Ct. 3026 (1978).
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