My father, who wasn’t the sort to bother with notions of high culture—certainly not the sort to be moved by the empty grandeur of ivory towers—used to take me regularly to the Watts Towers. A place that, by the time I was old enough to process it, already held its own kind of mythos, woven between the rusty, shimmering spires and the grimy streets where history had quietly coagulated. He never tried to explain it—not in the articulate, “educated” way the world demands of things—because maybe he didn’t have the words. But he’d take me there anyway. It was almost as though he understood, intuitively, that something had to be saved, something worth saving, from the sea of dead noise around us. And in his peculiar way, he knew exactly what it was: the tangible proof that a person, with their hands and their intentions, could create something—a structure, a monument, a physical rebellion against the pull of entropy—that stood, without question, against everything we’d been taught to believe about worth and meaning.
He’d take me to those towers because, well, there wasn’t a map for it, not a single instruction manual to explain what it meant to be there—just the sound of metal scraping metal and the thrum of something primal in the air. You could feel it, the blood pumping through every inch of the steel and the mortar, the grind of existence becoming something more than just dust. It didn’t require an art critic, or some glossy magazine, to make you understand: something had been made, not by the hands of the rich or the highly trained, but by someone who had seen and heard this place differently, perhaps with a clarity the world didn’t want to acknowledge. And in that moment, you knew: that’s the power of art, the real power, the kind that can stand in defiance against the sterile halls of the elite.
Those critics, who scurry about in the shadows of their own high towers, trying to control the language and the narrative, don’t understand this. They couldn’t. They’re busy with their jargon and their curated collections, too far removed from the pulse of what real creation feels like. But my father, in his way, showed me what mattered: a single man, with the audacity to construct something lasting and true, in the middle of all this chaos, standing there like a beacon to everything that refuses to die.
