The World of Tosh Berman, Wednesday July 21, 2021 (Pandora's Box)

 

Tosh Berman's Pandora Box with Poetic Realism/Jean Vigo. Read it here: 

Pandora Opening Her Box by Tosh Berman

July 21, 2014

July 21, 2014

To be honest, I’m very much influenced by the misery that is in the world.  For what I do, I need despair on a political and criminal level.  The horror of the bombings in Gaza as well as the commercial flight being shot down over Ukraine is fuel for my writing.  Without it, I do not have a thing to write about.   At this level, it becomes pornography.  I have seen so many images of death, that it has become meaningless to me.   As an artist I rather see a representation of death, then an actual obliteration of a human being, animal and architecture.  I imagine being a journalist in a war or disaster area, and telling the story through one’s eyes, has to be a difficult skill.  There is a need to distance oneself from what they are seeing to get a clear picture with respect to what that they’re reporting on.   Data facts are significant as well.  One just has to note the correct number of deaths, and buildings destroyed.  If one makes a mistake, it can throw off your whole story.

Often the problem is that we are looking at that singular tree, instead of the massive volume of forest around that tree.  This same problem happens when one is writing or doing art as well.  It is almost impossible to stay neutral when the world in front of you is being destroyed or changed radically.  Also the feeling of things not changing but just repeating itself over and over again, is a frustration in motion.  It’s like being trapped in a television show, where you pretty much know what is going to happen at the end of the episode. Yet, we keep watching it because the format gives one some sort of comfort that there is an order out there that will make everything to reach its natural conclusion.  The thing is, I don’t believe there is an order in this world.  I think every culture has a bit of self-destruction tendencies because it is somewhat embedded in our DNA.   This I thinks is what causes strife, horror, or in other words, Pandora’s Box.

I have a fear of doing something that will make things worst.  I think a lot of people feel that way. Yet there are a large percentage of people who jump in to something and ask questions later.  The impulse to jump into the fire is actually sexy, especially if one is doing it to feel more vibrant or even out of curiosity.  So when you do get that beautiful box or container and you know you shouldn’t open it, but alas, you do.  Well, that's human nature.  Between you and me, I never cared for human nature that much.

Acts of violence are never a good solution to a problem.  I understand the violent act, it can be satisfying to step over that line that separates insanity and sanity, but the circumstances of such an act can or more likely cause severely detrimental and far-reaching consequences.  I refrain from feeling regret, so therefore I pretty much ignore all my impulses in committing any acts of violence.  But on the other hand I don’t mind using violence in a narrative that I am writing or have or will have used in my work.   I like realism, but only in the context that it is made in a studio or on the page.  The French had a loose film movement called “poetic realism” where one recreates realism in a stylized fashion, and usually filmed in a film studio.  This, serves my sense of aesthetic and therefore I want to take the horrors that are out there, and re-arrange them to suit my purpose, either for narration sake or an aesthetic image.  As the world crumbles, I believe “art for art’s sake” becomes more important to me.

April 9, 2014

April 9, 2014

If I had to live a life besides my own, I think my choice would be Charles Baudelaire.  Even though he suffered greatly through his life, his suffering sort of became his set-piece or art.   I have read so many biographies on Baudelaire, but in truth, who will be willing to read my biography?  Yes, I can hear the shattering silence even from over here!  As I finish up my childhood memoir, the one Baudelaire quote that gets me started, is his “genius is childhood recalled at will.” When I turn on my computer and go to the page that I am writing on, well, that’s the first thing I see before anything else.

I have been in Paris, and walked around with Baudelaire's image in my head, as well as Guy Debord.  I mix the two up as I left my hotel room, and the only decision I make is either to turn left or right.  Being me of course, that decision took me 20 minutes or so, and there I was but standing outside the entrance of the hotel looking towards my left, and then slowly to my right.  I made the decision due to the fact that I’m left-handed, so therefore I must turn left.  It was a good decision, because I ran across a series of gorgeous girls as well as interesting architecture on Rue Saint-Michel.

 But here in Los Angeles, a city that is deemed to be un-walkable, I wonder through this sleepy city like a man starved for attention.  I find myself feeling like the French actor Michel Simon, in the great Jean Vigo Film “L’Atalante, ” as the sailor who was born to wander the seven seas and every land that hit the ocean.  My curiosity goes overtime when I’m walking around 5th Street and Spring, because each building appears to have a mystery for me.  If I stand on the corner of 5th and Spring, and stare at the Alexander Hotel long enough, I feel I can see the ghosts coming in and out of that building.   It is never Rudolph Valentino or Charlie Chaplin, but just people from the early 1920s carelessly strolling in and out of the entrance.  I wanted to go in, but I felt that my thoughts in my head were more correct, and I didn’t want to expose them to something “now” or even anything that will defuse my imagination.  To imagine is much better for me than say a reality.  That my faithful readers, is a let-down for me.

Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “À bout de souffle” (Breathless) strikes me as the same type of me in how I deal with the everyday world and all its citizens that react in that specific world.  Belmondo sees the world as a film, and when I wander through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, I feel more alive with that thought in my mind. Actual history and the architecture are important, but what is even more important is how we look at history and its buildings, and to alter it to serve our own creative impulses.  I can understand the need to be aware of facts, but I want to know why those facts happen, and that alone is a narrative.  In other words, what I see is the real to me, and therefore that will be my narrative for today and perhaps many days afterwards.

Although Hugh Hefner is not by any means a Charles Baudelaire to me, but I still admire how he changed his reality into something more desirable, for himself of course, but for his audience as well.  The image is what we know of the man, and rarely do we need to know more.   So when I take my walks, now mostly in downtown, I look up to the surface, and within my soul I start building downwards to make a foundation for the image that makes my heart weep.