The Watts Workshop
September, 1967
It was black friday, the 13th of August, 1965. Like millions of other dazed or complacent Angelenos, I was watching an unscheduled "spectacular," the damnedest television show ever put on the tube. Not long before, I had written an introduction for a new edition of The Day of the Locust, in which Nathanael West projects a Hollywood art director whose masterwork is an apocalyptic canvas entitled The Burning of Los Angeles. West's painter saw his vapid, vicious city consuming itself in a...
