Tosh's Journal - September 5 (John Cage & Yves Klein)

TOSH'S JOURNAL

September 5

It is hard work to do nothing. I'm always filling my day with things to do, to avoid the nothing. Once I wake up in the morning, there are a few minutes of dread where nothing is happening. I'm trying to set my mind on what the day will be like. I check my calendar, and like a lot of people, I'm obsessed with making lists. If I have less than five things to do that day, I feel depressed. Then slowly the feeling of guilt that you should be producing something, even if it's not essential. I open up my computer and look at the blank screen. Nothing is happening. I then look out my front window, facing Waverly Drive, and I see no one. Usually, people are walking their dogs at this time in the morning, but alas, I see only a fat furry cat walking down the sidewalk by him or her self. A dog when is either on a leash or free from it always walks without a purpose or direction. A cat walks going to a specific direction in mind and is rarely side-tracked by anything unless someone approaches it. There is one moment which becomes tense when I see the cat walk behind a parked car, and I wonder if I will see it again exiting that car. The moment I see the cat still, I feel a sense of relief. He or she then enters into an opening of the bush and disappears.

For me, there is no feeling of the cat being cute or beautiful. I like to see it walking down the sidewalk with a sense of purpose or plan. This inspires me to get back to my writing. There is a piece of music that causes me a great deal of anxiety, and it's John Cage's "4'33." It has a strict format where the piano player sits behind his keyboard and doesn't play anything for the duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. People think this is a work of silence, but it is the opposite of silence. When you are in a concert hall or theater "hearing" this piece, you are immediately aware of the sounds around you - perhaps a nervous cough, a clearing of the throat, a fart, or the fear of making a farting noise, air conditioner, heating vent, shuffling of feet, and so forth.

When I write, I need consistent sound around me — either music or outside ambient sounds. For instance, traffic noise, as well as a child, is screaming down the block from me. Each sound is like someone hitting me with a live electric wire, which gets my brain to jump. I work in a lonely place, which is pretty much my head. This is no longer a bad thing at all. To actually feel the space between yours truly and the world is an area that I can measure and fill up images with, but I also can subtract imagery as well. The thing is you have to control the noise around you, and something like "4'33" is chaos. Because you can't control the noise level of silence in one's life. So setting everything aside, you sit there for "4'33" in the quietness that is impossible, and also the anxiety or blissfulness knowing that things will happen again at 4 minutes and thirty-four seconds. It has a beginning and an end.

It's very work-orientated. We usually have 8 hours a day to work. Within those 8 hours, we have two fifteen minutes breaks, and often an half-n-hour lunch. Or it could be an hour lunch. Nevertheless, this sets a schedule for the entire day that one can't question or get out of unless you call in sick. Or like me, unemployed. When you don't have a job, you're facing a series of moments that cannot be filled. So one is left with the anxiety of confronting 'nothing.' Drinking is an effortless way of dealing with the sense of time wasting away. Because at least you are taking something that sort of comments on time passing, and you reflect on the failure or happiness of those moments.

-Tosh Berman



I'm trying to do away with my vices, so I focus on being on the entrance to nothing. I want to face that void, and be contented with the blankness that will come upon me. That hasn't happened yet. I remember seeing a performance by Yves Klein called "Monotone-Silence Symphony" in New York, and what the piece consists of is an orchestra of 70 musicians and singers performing a D major chord for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence. The members of the orchestra are instructed not to move and sit on their seats. It's a tougher piece than "4'33" because we know that the silence will last exactly 20 minutes. So one is getting around 16 minutes of more silence. But we do get the contrast between sound and silence in this work. I have met someone who went to one of the performances and felt that the work failed because the silence part was not done correctly.



Daniel Moquay, who is in charge of the Yves Klein archive and the estate was quoted regarding the performance of the piece that took place in a Parisian church: "The door of the church was open, and a pigeon came in and sat where everyone could see him," he said. "During the 20-minute silence, he did not move at all. It was kind of incredible. And then when the silence was over, he left."

December 10, 2014

December 10, 2014

   I live on Waverly Drive, and there is a location on the corner of my street and at Glendale Bouvelard that's a total mystery to me.  But due to its mystery, I find myself attached to this location.  I often wander around my life without asking questions.  I find things by chance, and I feel the nature of chance-taking is what leads me to another place.  Even now, when I reach the location, I try to imagine what was there, which is often not based on fact.  Or is it?

The location is on the corner of Waverly Drive and Glendale Bouvelard.  It is now a building condo complex, but for years it was a vacant property.  I never knew who owned it, but there were the remains of a staircase leading towards the lot, and then nothing.  At first I thought there may have been a mansion built on this property, but many years later I discovered it was once an osteopathic hospital called Monte Sano.  It was built 1931 and it closed during the 1970s.   When you research the hospital on the internet, there is so very little information about the hospital and the location.  One never gets a narration, but just snips of the story - that is a great deal like memory itself.  There seems to be births that took place in this hospital, and I have read that it was a location that un-wed mothers would go to, to have their child delivered to this world.  Also there was also a very vague report that an African-American serial killer by the name of Robert Nixon, threw a brick at either a nurse or a fellow patient at the hospital sometime in the 1930s.  I read on a blog “Red Car Property” that Monte Sano was California’s first osteopathic hospital, and was founded by Dr. Brigham.  He had a son, Dr. Creighton Brigham, who was also a doctor at the premise.  According to a resident whose family lived on Waverly Drive, claims that the Doctor and his family had a home on Waverly Drive; that was the first house built on that street.  He remembers a huge cage unit on their property that was concrete and wire.  His initial impression was that it was an aviary “although it always seemed large for that. ”

It also appears that at one time, there was a red-car station called “Monte Sano” but there are no longer any traces of either the station or the sign.   I often walk by this property, and I always think about what was there, and why is such a structure, a medium sized hospital, and yet there is no real record of it existing - except from people’s memories and the few photographs that are found on the Internet.   What is intriguing is that young people used to go into the deserted building, hoping to find the morgue.  Perhaps they did find it, God knows that there must have been a lot of deaths at this location.  Also there is not any record of why the building was torn down, and what happened to the hospital itself?   Some may feel that this location is haunted with ghosts who went to the hospital and not make it back alive.  For me, the ghost is not the people, but the building itself.

I had a vision one night, while I walked by the empty lot, and I imagined that there was the building - and at the time, I thought to myself, “that’s funny, I never noticed that structure before.” When I took another walk, about a week later, the property was vacant again.  At the time, it was late at night, and was very dark. Perhaps I mistaken the structure for some of the trees that were on the lot at the time.  Although I clearly have a memory of an entrance way, and maybe even a large window.  As I have mentioned before in another blog, I find buildings more profound than humans.  Even though humans build the structures, it is what is left on this world - often way past a human’s life span.  So it always seems cruel to me, to destroy a building because it is not being utilized or nature taking over the structure.   Even though the new condos are built on that property, when I go in the middle of the night, I see not the condos, but the original building.   I know it is not actually there, but for whatever reasons, that is what I see.