Tosh's Journal : December 8 (Tribute to the Bathtub and Izu Oshima Islan...

My job is to reflect on life, and unfortunately, it doesn’t pay. I have a deep interest in the world around me or how I see that world. To be perfectly honest, the world can easily exist without any input by yours truly. Yet, I have known people who wait to hear from me before they enter such a world. My problem (and it is mine alone) is that I can’t get a regular paycheck for my writings on such an interesting landscape as what is out there. “There” being whatever is not within my world.

My ‘world’ is one where I take long baths and focus my thoughts on the bathroom wall. I notice the cracks in the wall, and I immediately think of them as examples of deep distress that is around me, but quite honestly, not in the bath with me. The tub is a no-zone. My sense of being is how hot the water is, and is there enough shampoo in the bottle? Other than that, the crack on the tiled wall is my total concentration on what that scar means to me.

Due to my poor eyesight, the crack has many dimensions attached to it. I often think of it as an island among the blue sea, since my bathroom tiles are in that color. What is the consistency that makes such an image to be so profound? I imagined Commander Perry as he approached Japan’s little island, Izu Ōshima, in 1854, that is two hours away from Tokyo on a jet boat, but still, such a remote island. It has an active volcano and five restaurants on that island that is full of abandoned cats. What one would think of as a stalled car engine is a wave of the sound of cats’ purring in unison. Feline’s urine can be smelled in the exotic landscape on the island. Houses left abandoned, and the numerous monuments for people who had either died due to plane failure or landslides are scattered in the most remote and public areas on Ōshima. I loved the island because the heavy rains served my mood perfectly. Almost as good as being in my bathtub looking at the island of Izu Ōshima on my blue tile.

The words I write are as useless as the soap bubbles from my shampoo as it mixes in with the bathwater. They, too, become islands in the sea of Tosh’s bathwater. Real depression hits me when I undo the drain and watch the water empty into a pipe that leads to a filthy sewer. Whatever happens, there is always the sewer. No one can lie to that space, because I think the stink and filth is very much part of our DNA.

I dry myself, put some cream on my face (to even out the worry lines on my forehead and mouth area), and then I dress very carefully.  First the underwear, then the socks, a striped t-shirt (since it’s Sunday, I choose a navy blue strip against white) and a sensible pair of walking shoes. I then approach my MacBook Air and try to enter into the adventure.

The Sunday Series; Sunday December 27, 2015

The Sunday Series:

Sunday December 27, 2015

Ah, the last Sunday of the year 2015.  A series of moments for me to reflect on all my successes and of course, failures.   Oddly enough, it’s the failures that capture my imagination and attention.   The successes would be perfectly OK, if it wasn’t for the nagging failures that pretty much spells out T.O.S.H. To bring lightness, let’s think of the successes this year.   Synesthesia Press put out my short piece from the “365” series (which I wrote everyday in the year 2014) as well as a short story published by Thistle & Weed Press, in conjunction to the Terry Braunstein exhibition that is taking place at the Long Beach Museum of Art.   So since I left Book Soup (a book store in West Hollywood)  three years ago, I have produced two books under my name, (“Sparks-Tastic” and “The Plum in Mr. Blum’s Pudding”) as well as a short story for the 3AM Magazine website out of London, and critical reviews published by Byron Coley in his zine/magazine Bull Tongue Review.   Through my press, TamTam Books, I have published Jacques Mesrine’s ‘The Death Instinct” and Lun*na Menoh’s “A Ring Around The Collar.” This is all, of course, great. 

The bad news is I’m on the collapse of financial disaster.   This past week I had to fire both my valet and butler.   I began by paying them a weekly check, which slowly turned to free food for them in the fridge.   Now that the food had disappeared from the refrigerator, they have disappeared as well.  I guess we can now sell the fridge, or turn the huge icebox into a bookshelf with a heavy door.   In fact, the kitchen has been transformed into a library.   Antique dishes have been sold through ebay and craigslist, and in the drawer that once had a kitchen utensil, now holds old issues of Mojo Magazine.   Since the gas has been cut off, we have one electric pot to heat up water for delicious cups of hot water while staring out the window on a cloudless evening.   My sweetie and I like to take one spoon we have, and stir the water till it becomes lukewarm, and comment to each other on our state of stress. 

It gets chilly in the winter night, and the cold draft tends to cut right through our summer clothing.  We often have to cut up our furniture and throw it into our fireplace to stay warm.  As we move the (what’s left of it) couch and place it by the one flickering flame at the base of the chimney, we tend to remember old folk songs from the 1930s dust bowl era.  Life was often simpler than now and not only that, but the people in the black and white images looked simple as well.  Due to the photographs I have seen from that era and subject matter, it is all gray and at times it’s gray on top of gray, which makes it into a super gray.  I don’t recall ever seeing a color photograph of the Okies traveling West bound.  I often wondered if they wore bright color shirts or pants.  My image is of them is wearing gray clothing, or perhaps their actual clothing lost color due to the various dust storms that they came upon them on a regular basis.  

Looking at my own life, I clearly saw the areas where I made the wrong turn.  Yet, in my own fashion, I totally ignored the direction I was heading towards, due to a great belief in my ability to write a bestseller or two.  That my friends, didn’t happen.  I wrote a lot of words.  My diary, “I Go With My Moods, ” one of my many writing projects for the year 2015 is over 85,000 words.  Yet, even though my computer screen is full of my words, it hasn’t produced any capital, in other words, currency.   

We rarely go out.  Our existence is somewhere between Turner and Jean des Esseintes in the rather large house that we can no longer live in.   Often in nights, I wonder around each room in a drunken haze, trying to find where I left the right side shoe, while wearing the left.   It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic.  I do have a room where it is devoted to the image of me as a child.  When I was a baby till I was 10, I was often photographed by my father, as well as by his friends.  Due to that, institutions like the Getty own the negatives that feature my presence on film.  If a friend didn’t send me some photos through the miracle of the I-Phone, I would never have them.  I barely recognized myself when I looked at photos that were taken 50 to 55 years ago.   Now, when I look in the mirror I think, as I often do, I wonder what happened to that little boy.   

As I write, I have two scarfs around my neck, a sweater, and a long bath robe.  Today, I’m sad, because it’s the last Sunday of the year 2015.  What have I done?   Where am I going?   And perhaps the most interesting question, who are you?   It is time to get on my horse, and wander off to the sunset at the end of the road.   I’ll be around.  If you need me, all you have to do is put your lips together and blow.  Till then, farewell.  

The Sunday Series: Sunday December 20, 2015

The Sunday Series:

Sunday December 20, 2015

My depression is starting to bore me.   I keep waving my arms above my head to ward off the dark cloud that seems to be around me at all times.  I’m actually a bit shocked that others don’t see this cloud.  Perhaps they are just being polite.  Or maybe they are mistaking it as my hat.  If you’re looking at me from a great distance, one may think it's a hat.    

Since my days are numbered why not go to the most expensive restaurant in town.  I notice that food or beverages doesn’t have any taste anymore.  Is it just me, or is it just a total texture thing now?  Visually, seeing the food in front of my face makes me happy, but once I put the ingredients in my mouth, it is almost a crushing disappointment.  One would think that a beautiful warm piece of apple pie from here would taste what it looks like.  But it seems to be cardboard, and not good tasting cardboard mind you.   The only taste I have in my mouth is for the pretty waitress who served me a vodka dry martini with olive.   The thought of her actually makes me feel drunk, where the drink itself, is basically nothing.  No effect on me at all.  It is like I have a fortification within me, and nothing gets through the wall.  The only thing that gives me any pleasure is the thought of a glory hole in this wall.  Alas, it is nothing, just a thought.

After dinner, I wander out to Park and Sunset Blvd.  I waited for the 603 line to take me home on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset.   It seems like any other evening in my life.   It is very hard to see the stars from the bus stop, oh I don’t know why?  Perhaps due to the street and building lighting.  Then I remember, there are no stars when there are clouds. My bus approaches and I get in.  I use my TAP card, and go sit in the back of the bus by the window.

 I like to watch the buildings and structures go by as the bus moves forward.  The one thing I have noticed is the difference between the Dov Charney billboards and the one’s after he was fired from his company “American Apparel.” They are still sexually enticing, but not as nasty and dirty as under his personal supervision.  I often believed that he himself took these photographs of slightly underage girls, perhaps in a studio, but in my mind, they are taken in his home.  The awfulness of his vision of young girls wearing his clothing is shameful. Yet, that is why I was attracted to his images on the billboard in the first place.  Now, they sort of look like his work, but declawed to a certain degree.  Perhaps it's justice or karma of some sort.   In all honesty, he sort of ripped the images of Terry Richardson's portraits of women.   That is the nature of the advertising world.  One takes an image from another place, and just put your brand on it.  It’s like cattle rustling in the wild west.  You find a cow roaming freely, and you capture it, and put a hot brand on its skin.  You now own the property that is branded.  Charney’s aesthetic or brand image is totally immoral, which a dirty image should always achieve to be as -something shameful.   Oddly enough, it is his images of women that break through my heavy fog that encompasses me.  

The woman on the billboard disappears, and then it’s one warehouse after another.   The landscape becomes blank, which is dangerous, because this is where I project the images from my head onto the dark landscape.   Dark feelings turned into abstract shapes.  The warmth of the bus, just reminds one how cold it is outside the vehicle.   I leave the bus, turn my collar up and walk to the house.  I enter and think “ It’s a Sunday, like all other Sundays.  Oh bloody hell Sunday. ”

100 Books I Read in the Year 2015 by Tosh Berman (all reviewed in Good Reads)

James Kaplan (Doubleday)

Samuel Fuller (Hard Case Crime)

Brian Dillon (Sternberg Press)

Max Jacob (oberlin)

Sarah Gerard (Two Dollar Radio)

Marcel Bénabou (Bison Books)

Terayama Shūji (Merwin Asia)

Ian F. Svenonius ( Akashic Books)

Robert Scotto (Process)

Rudolph Wurlitzer (Two Dollar Radio)

Louis-Ferdinand Cèline (Atlas Press)

Honore de Balzac (Wakefield Press)

O. Nicolai & J. Wenzel (Spector Books)

Frank O'Hara (Grove Press)

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (Wakefield Press)

Charles Jackson (Vintage)

Rosemary Tonks

C.D. Rose (Melville House)

Ludwig Bemelmans

Glyn Johns (Blue Rider Press)

Benjamin Piekut (University of California Press)

Mark E. Smith (Penguin)

Ludwig Bemelmans

Ludwig Bemelmans (Viking)

Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Little Brown Press)

Kim Gordon (Dey Street)

Ludwig Bemelmans (Viking)

Ludwig Bemelmans (Viking)

William Hackman (The Other Press)

Mark Webber (The Visible Press)

Hunter Drohojowska - Philp (Henry Holt)

Cookie Mueller (Semoitext[e])

Ken Emerson (Viking)

Jim Krusoe (Tin House Books)

Robert Fripp (Rare Bird Books)

Keith Porter (Cambridge University Press)

Steve Reich (Oxford University Press)

Italo Svevo (Melville House)

Bernard Cooper (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

Phillip Glass (Liveright)

Alfred Hayes (NYRB)

Don Ryan

F.T. Marinetti (Sternberg Press)

Alain Robbe-Grillet (Calder)

Don DeLillo (Picador USA)

Ralph Rumney (Manchester University)

Shinobu Hashimoto (Vertical)

Pierre Michon (Yale University Press)

Friedrich Reck (NYRB)

Robert Benchley (Ameron House)

Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions)

B.S. Johnson (New Directions)

Howard Devoto (Black Spring Press)

Albertine Sarrazin (New Directions)

Royston Ellis (Kicks Books)

David Castronova (Continuum )

Dennis Duncan (Atlas Press)

Janis Londraville & Richard Londraville (University of Nebraska Press)

George Herms (Hamilton Press)

Mark Gluth (Akashic Books)

Joris-Karl Huysmans (Wakefield Press)

Shigeru Mizuki (Drawn & Quaterly)

Yasunari Kawabata (Counterpoint)

Nik Cohn (Knoph)

Edogawa Rampo (Kurodahan Press)

Kenkō (Penguin)

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Penguin)

Eve Babitz (NYRB)

Emmanuel Bove (NYRB)

Morrissey (Penguin)

Marcus O'Dair (Soft Skull Press)

Simon Critchley (OR Books)

Patti Smith (Knoph)

Boris Vian (Black Widow Press)

Richard Hell (Soft Skull Press)

Deborah Davis (Atria Books)

Boyd McDonald, Introduction by William E. Jones (Semoitext[e])

Bruno Corra (Atlas Press)

Roland Barthes (Seagull Press)

Lee Falk & Phil Davis (Nostalgia Press)

Edouard Levé (Dalkey Archive Press)

Stéphane Mallarmé (Berg)

Michael Peppiatt (Bloomsbury)

Fred Goodman (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Greil Marcus (Yale University Press)

John Wieners (City Lights Publishers)

Roland Barthes (Seagull Books)

Alexander Vvedensky (NYRB Poets)

Nell Dunn (Virago)

Linda Rosenkrantz (NYRB)

Brigid Berlin (Reel Art Press)

David Hurn (Reel Art Press)

Peter Guralnick (Little Brown & Company)

Duffy (ACC Distribution)

Luc Sante (Vintage)

David L. Ulin (University of California Press)

Hunter Barnes (Reel Art Press)

Burt Glinn (Reel Art Press)

To read the reviews of the above books, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/1926501

-- Tosh Berman