Happy By Tosh Berman

 

Happy by Tosh Berman

Silver Lake + Meguro = Me

 Silver Lake + Meguro = Me

I Tour, Therefore, I Exist by Tosh Berman

 

I Tour, Therefore, I Exist

How Far Can You Go Into The Depths Of Despair by Tosh Berman

 

How Far Can You Go Into The Depths Of Despair by Tosh Berman

The Buzz Buzz of the Bumble Bee by Tosh Berman

 

The Buzz Buzz of the Bumble Bee by Tosh Berman

Tosh's Journal - November 24 (Depression)

Tosh's Journal - November 24 (Depression) Read the original here: http://tamtambooks-tosh.blogspot.com/2014/11/november-24-2014.html

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. ”

The Sunday Series: Sunday December 13, 2015

The Sunday Series:

Sunday December 13, 2015

My job is to basically 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 bath 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 if full of abandoned cats.  What one would think of as a stalled car engine is actually a wave of 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 intense 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 bath water.  They too become islands in the sea of Tosh’s bath water.   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 stripped 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.  

December 21, 2014

December 21, 2014

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” The thought of growing old doesn’t bother me, but I’m feeling very vain about my looks changing.   Not long ago I took a self-portrait of myself, with direct sunlight hitting my face.  It was just like looking at the future, or what I would look like in ten years.  I didn’t like it.

Then and there I decided never again will I take a photograph of myself, or allow anyone to do so.  I have a wrist watch, and that very day I threw it on the ground and stepped on it.   A dead watch represents time being stopped.   Yet, even with that, I can feel the energy being sucked out of me.  The only thing that still lives within my system, is anxiety.   It is just like a leaky faucet that drips consistently.  No one else can hear the sound, except me, and I feel cut off from my fellow citizens.  I’m sure there is a pill to make it go away, but I don’t want to cut off the only thing that I can feel.  Even though it’s misery, it is still, essentially, a feeling.   When one doesn’t have that many choices, you have to roll with the dice.

I have read that today is the winter solstice, which means the daylight will be short, and the darkness longer.  The temperature has dropped, but for the life of me, I just don’t want to turn on the heater.   Once I do that, it is admitting to oneself that things have changed, and although I like to think of myself fading into darkness, it is more like time standing still. You can’t go forward or backward.  My editor Diana told me this: “I’m not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them.  I have reached a stage in which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.” At the moment I feel like a wrapped present, covered by ugly Christmas wrapping and a string with a bow that is too tight.  I just want to do away with all that packaging, and just become my natural state.  In my normal skin.   The skin of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

It would be an interesting experience to sit on one’s lap, and not have a thought in my head.  I’m just responding to the ventriloquist - it’s an one-sided conversation, where I ‘m pretending to respond, but in fact, I’m nothing but wood and pieces of plastic.  Not exactly alive, but neither am I dead - more like ‘living a life’ that’s imagined.

November 29, 2014

November 29, 2014

A chorus girl is not a chorus girl in my hands.  I take her, and I multiply her by the hundreds.  My sense of eros is not sleeping with one, or two, but hundreds.  And when I sleep, I mean deep penetrating sleep.  I never want to wake-up from the dreams that I formed half-awake.   There are some who bring poetry to a pretty girl, but I bring pretty girls to poetry.  It’s the least I can do, and if I can do it in a large warehouse in Burbank, with me on a camera crane, many feet up,  looking down into these great beauties, and present that series of moments to you, dear reader, then I did my job properly.

Some are used by the movie studio system, but speaking for myself, I use the movie studio system for my precise work.   I need the system to do what I have to do.  In fact, the problem is when I’m not working in the system, I have a tendency to fall off the map.  As long as I’m in the studio and I have my girls in front of the camera, I’m perfectly OK.   Otherwise, and out of the studio, I’m a mess.

Behind the camera crane, yes, but behind a driving wheel, I recommend that you get out of my way.  When I’m on the open road, and then finding that road ain’t that open, well, people will die or get hurt.  California State Route 1 is my destiny and anyone who is there at the same time as me, better buckle-up, because it is gonna be a ride to the very end.

Three people were killed and five were seriously injured.  Heck, even I was hurt, and I was the driver!  All-in-all, Ada Von Brieson, her son William Von Briton, and Dorothea Daly died in the crash.   What happened was there was or is a line dividing the highway, and I somehow either lost that line, or it disappeared, or something like that.  Which is ironic, because my day job is to make sure the girls are in line and they stay in line.  Yet, I somehow failed myself in this type of choreography.  I’ll never be able to see a landscape again that is made from my perfect designs - instead I see the crushed metal of the cars, the twisted bloody bodies on the pavement and I think to myself, that this is the other side of my personality.  My fear of dis-organization, chaos, dis-order, anarchy, destruction… it is truly me.  My fear is my aesthetic.  If I can take a group of beauties and form patterns, it is almost like a math problem.  1 + 1 = 2.   But if something disrupts the formula, then I go totally out of whack, and that ain’t a good thing, believe me my brother and sister.

I only exist when the world is found to be in disorder.  My skill is to put some sort of design or order to the landscape, that is our world, or the world I want to make.  I can’t do that, without the assistance of the Studio System.  Without it, I’m a drunk driver speeding on the Pacific Coast Highway.

November 24, 2014

November 4, 2014

Depression is a bitch.  As well as a bastard.  Nevertheless nothing is worse than waking up and realizing that someone or something enforced a steel framed dark cloud over you.  The weather outside my window is beautiful, but with my little friend “Depresso, ” here by my side, it seems to mock, more than to please me.   I would laugh, but it’s too painful.   Lately my life does not appear to have a beginning, but just a long delayed ending.  It’s akin to being in quicksand, and you’re sinking slowly.  You try to grab an object to pull yourself out, but it seems that object, structure, a limb is greased with oil.  I just slip back to my place in the mud of shit.  Nevertheless, it is Monday, a day of the week that doesn’t have that many fans, and I just have to get on with it.

“Develop success from failures.  Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” Since I’m at the bottom today, and I’m in the position to gasp for fresh air, I need in order to remind myself that once you’re on the bottom, there is nothing lower than that - except death.   Also today being Monday, I had to live on six or so days of misery to get to this point.   The last six days I have been dodging and running away from “Depresso,” but he always catches up with me on Monday.   In the Netherlands, it seems more people commit suicide, or call in sick, or even worse, surf the Internet on Mondays.  I think my source of depression is the fear of wasting time.  Time is money, and therefore I do not have money.  And “Depresso” always remind me of that fact.   I just have to keep in mind that “most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” The big question right now, am I one of those people who can keep on trying?

The hours drag on, and I’m too anxious to be bored.  I feel the day can exist without me, and that alarms me the most.  I sit here and have a cup of coffee with “Depresso,” and it seems he wants to embrace me with his arms.  I can’t bare the thought of “Depresso” touching me, especially to be trapped in his hold.  I know he doesn’t exist as a person, but somehow making him into a 3D figure, it becomes more real to me.  Otherwise I am just facing a huge void.   I can feel that void sucking me into its entrance, and once entrapped in that non-world, what will become of me?  I obsess about the silliest things.  When my neighbor Forrest J. Ackerman passed away, I was concerned about his collection.  What will become of it?  It only made sense when it was put in place in his Los Feliz home. If it was sold, piece-by-piece, his collection will become meaningless.   The thought of spending one’s life in obtaining objects, books, and …well, stuff and then what happens when you die?  I have a full music and book library, but it’s only significant when the collection is intact.  Once removed, it becomes just another item.  It is only important when someone attaches themselves to that object.

“I begin with writing the first sentence - and trusting to Almighty God for the second.” My life is from one sentence to another.  The fear of not coming up with that sentence is deathly to me.  “You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so.  For I must remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.” Since I can’t change my fortunes, I can only write, and hopefully write myself out of my despair.   “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” So perhaps all of this will pass… or not.