January 4, 2017 (Tosh's Diary)

January 4, 2017

I haven’t been sleeping that well, I think due to the tension of trying to raise funds for the Trump statue.  My purpose is to bring people together, but it seems that the road is way too large to bring both sides to the middle of the road.  I will not give up.  But the latest news on my front is that I can’t find the 8mm footage of “Greed” in my storage shack.  I’m now worried that someone may have taken it, or perhaps I just misplaced the damn film.  I have to imagine that it will show up.  I have lost things before, thinking that history has it in its closet in some different time zone or dimension, but then one day I would walk into a room, and there it is all of sudden.  Sort of the Borrowers system of little demons that lives in one’s house that takes away the other sock from the washer. It is often a frustrating experience, but once found, happiness comes back to Toshville.

Last night, feeling restless, I went to Counterpoint Books on Franklin just to window shop and look for ideas.  I came upon a book behind the counter that caught my eye.  It’s what they all a “Better Little Book.”   From 1935 to 1939, the Better Little Book published narrations from comic strips of the time, with illustrations.  It was very much a Depression era of book publishing at the time that attracted young readers.  A lot of the Walt Disney characters, for instance, Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck were part of this phenomena.   What I found at the store was a beat-up copy of “Mandrake the Magician and the Midnight Monster” by Lee Falk and Phil Davis.  Falk did the daily comic strip of Mandrake as well The Phantom.   Davis, I have to presume, wrote the narration to this book, and Falk supplied the story line as well as its illustrations.   It’s a beautiful adventure of a professional magician who travels around with a Black African by the name of Lothar.   How these two became friends or worked together is a total mystery to me.  What they do is solve crime by fighting various criminals throughout the world.   Mandrake had the ability to make others see visions of his choosing.   Quite a talent!

I then went home to work on my memoir called “Everything I Know,” which so far is about 150 long.  At the moment I’m writing this memoir by hand.  I use a ballpoint pen as well as a notebook from Muji, which specializes in designed objects of all sorts.  I tend to work late at night.  It is just usually an owl that sits on my window pane and me.  Hoot Hoot.

"Mandrake the Magician: Mandrake in Hollywood" by Lee Falk

"Mandrake the Magician: Mandrake in Hollywood"

Throughout my childhood, I was dedicated to one cartoon strip in the newspaper.   Mandrake the Magician had a natural pull for me, because I think I always was attracted to men who wore tuxedos and a top hat.  The fact that he was a master of illusional tricks as well as having a servant from Africa, appealed to my sense of exotica.   It seems like Fellini was a fan as well.  Nevertheless, I found "Mandrake in Hollywood" at my local library, and one sitting read the book.   It is composed of three separate stories that deals with Madrake's time in Hollywood as a struggling actor of sorts.   Even in 1938, the widespread media at the time looked at Hollywood as a cynical landscape.   The narratives are silly and actually not that important.  What gets my attention, besides re-visiting my childhood, is the character of Mandrake and his man-servant, and a good friend, Lothar.   Day in-and-out, he consistently wears his suit and top hat as he would wear on stage.  The sense of the stage and 'real life' is totally erased - and since it's a comic strip, we are allowed to accept that the wall between reality and fantasy doesn't exist.  To me, there is something beautiful about a personality like Mandrake, who commits illusions, not only for the purpose of entertaining, but also to fight criminal activity.  Mixture of showbiz with crime-fighting.    What more can one want?

- Tosh Berman

March 13, 2014

March 13, 2014

Like all writers, I have an obsession with what is good and what is bad.  But for me, it’s a blurry line at times.  Which makes it even more evil.  When one looks away from evil, is it because you prefer evil over good?  I never read the works by Paul Morand, but he was an aristocrat wealthy man who counted Jean Cocteau as a friend and actually dined with Marcel Proust. Yet, he was very much part of and supported the Vichy government.  He was also seen as a modernist and a member of Imagist.  That was a literary movement that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.  Which one can gather by now, is not exactly my aesthetic!

On the other hand I have a deep interest in artists who went along the facist route, and I try to think if that is also in their own work as well.  Cocteau was a real mystery to me in a sense, because he was the poet who sees everything as an extension of poetry.  In other words, an art for art’s sake.  Which to be honest is what I pretty much follow.   But if that art leads one to a darker political path, is it good for the soul?  Is the soul important?  Often participants on both sides of the road, when it involves art, are trying to find a moral ground to stand on.  But I am not sure if that is what art is about.  I think it's about a lot of things, and it’s best to accept the good, but one has to acknowledge the evil as well.  Like Robert Mitchum’s character in “,The Night of the Hunter” when he grasps both hands to show the tattoo “love” and “hate” on the other.  

What I can’t fully understand is why Morand would be for a government that would want to stop the zazous from having a good time listening to jazz and records from America?  Why would he want to hunt down children, who eventually will turn out to be Serge Gainsbourg or Roman Polanski?  In my mind, there are two different types of “art for art’s sake” groupings.  There is the Oscar Wilde, who for sure was a man involved in his world, and acknowledge the political affairs of his time and age.  Then there are people like Morand and perhaps Cocteau, who ‘ignore’ the shit around them.  One uses art to build a wall between the outside world and themselves, and Wilde I think just wanted to make a difference or to being in a world of shit, and somehow stand beyond it.   Celine (who I love as a writer by the way), Cocteau and Morand seemed to love the company of power, or at least acknowledge that power as almost as a turn-on for their art.   Well, let me take Celine back, I reckon he was just nutty.  But Cocteau and Morand were not nutty.  They must have understood what was happening at that time, and while Cocteau’s role is sort of cloudy in those years, what was Morand’s excuse?

What’s interesting is the Imagist movement, because of its need to see things clearly.  Art to me is naturally messy, like nature.  The need to make order out of a mess is a very strong aesthetic, which I have to admit, I share.  But alas I think that need is also the root of an inner-fascism.

Around the same time, Lee Falk, who was a theater person, created the comic strip “The Phantom, ” and “Mandrake the Magician.” As a kid I loved both comics, and to this day I have an obsession with Mandrake.  Again, for me, the visual clothing Mandrake wears - the top hat, the tuxedo, and cape is very extractive to me.  Also in those comic strips there was evil, and evil had to be destroyed.  There were not any gray areas, and it makes one life easier to grasp.  I pretty much follow the comic strips and Oscar Wilde!

I’m also intrigued by someone like L. Ron Hubbard, who was a science fiction writer who somewhere down the line decided to be something much bigger than a pulp writer.   Yet, I feel the organization he started is very much in a pulp tradition.  Its history reads like a noir Southern California fantasy.  It’s interesting how an artist can make a utopia of sorts, and perhaps Morand wanted one as well, to express his wealth, and his stance in the 20th century.  Oddly enough, only one of his novels is available in English.  I must read it!