The World of Tosh Berman: Saturday, May 15, 2021 (The Mysterious Michael Braun and Love Me Do!)

 

https://tosh.substack.com/p/the-mysterious-michael-braun-love 

The World of Tosh Berman: The Mysterious Michael Braun and Love Me Do!

Walter Carlos - "Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange" Vinyl, Album, 1972 (Columbia)

 

It's interesting to note that this album is called Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange. They leave out the "A" that is in the original title for the film. Not only that, but Carlos is taking control over her work and presents it as music on its own merits. Nevertheless, this album is the ultimate work of electronic music, not as an experiment, but using the adventuresome aspect of that type of music into pop or classical medium. Carlos and her producer Rachel Elkind are brilliant composers.

The big thrill here is the opening piece "Timesteps," 14 minutes long and a tremendous aural adventure. Written for A Clockwork Orange but not used as far as I know is the ultimate electronic sound collage of dread/humor that perfectly fits the film or the novel's look at the near future of the time. The rest of the album is pretty much what we know of the score or soundtrack to the movie. But re-positioned by the artists that make the work representable to her own aesthetic. The last piece on the album is "Country Line," which has traces of "Singing in the Rain," but almost as an afterthought. 

The World of Tosh Berman: Tuesday, April 13, 2021 (My

 

The World of Tosh Berman: Tuesday, April 13, 2021. My experience at the Cinerama Dome watching "Barry Lyndon." Tuesday, April 13, 2021

April 1, 2020 (In the Year of the Trump Virus)

April 1, 2020 (In the Year of the Trump Virus)

The day went fast. There is a disconnection when I read people’s posts on Facebook, and they are looking for things to do and/or finding enjoyable activity. But for me, I feel very busy at work, and I realize that it is contained in one’s home is usually my typical landscape. Because I’m a writer and was a publisher, the majority of my work took place in my home office. What I do miss is going to the library in Downtown Los Angeles to do work. I noticed when I leave the house to do writing, it feels like work, and therefore what I produced in the library there is something different from what I do at the home office.

Luck has it, I have a paying job staying home, and it’s a writing job. As my dad used to say regarding financial troubles, “The curtain is about to Fall.”  Well, that is precisely my situation until I got this job. It’s a great project, and I’m happy to be involved in something so interesting to me. Still, depression lurks due to hearing people passing away, which is unbelievably sad. One of my favorite films is “Barry Lyndon,” and I remember a scene where Barry joined the Army, and he is told to charge the opposite Army, but everyone in his troop is getting shot down, yet he must keep going onward. The scene is funny but very black humor as he looks at the person by his side get shot, and the fellow in the back of him, being shot, as well as the one in the front, and so forth. Every time I open the computer, I hear of another’s passing, and all of it is just terrible. Death gets closer, and already I have friends who are going through the misery of someone’s death, if not from their family.

My generation, and I was a child/teenager, went through the Vietnam War, but this is the first time I have experienced something that is felt worldwide. The sense of dread or suffering is something that we all share, and I know it’s odd, but I’m almost happy to be part of the world at this time. If I have a good day, I feel I can bring that to the world. Which reading this sounds egotistical, but I genuinely want to entertain you. Have a great evening, and stay at home as much as possible. As one gathers, you can’t really trust President Virus, so use common sense, and with fingers crossed and being aware, we will get through this odd nightmare.

"Liquidation World : The Art of Living Absently" by Alexi Kukuljevic (MIT Press)

ISBN: 978-0-262-53419-2 The MIT Press

A very dense book regarding mostly the "Dandy" spirt or aesthetic through literature and art.   Alexi Kukuljevic pulls out all my favorite heroes in this one volume:  Buster Keaton, Kubrick's "The Shining," Marcel Duchamp, Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché and even the great comedian Andy Kaufman.   A deep reflection on those who lived/worked on the outskirts of their interested field.  Kukuljevic's book is dream-like on a subject matter that is very difficult to nail down.   The above artists and writers (and performers) are hard to define for their 'absently' spirit, where in many cases, it is their art that speaks for themselves, and we reflect on what we think is their personality, but in the end of the day, who knows?  "Liquidation World" got to me because I often think of these artists as major touchstones for my own aesthetic and pleasure.  A fascinating book that keeps turning the wheels in my mind, long after I read the last page.

July 26, 2014

July 26, 2016

Ever since I was a child, I was drawn into the nighttime world, which the Blake Edwards’ show “Peter Gunn” expressed my need for shadows and cool jazz.    As a teenager, I imagine my life as Gunn, where I had a beautiful mid-century apartment, with a gorgeous fuckable girlfriend who seems to visit him in the middle of the night.  Gunn seems to be only active in the night, where he frequents a jazz nightclub called “Mothers” in a city that is not defined, but it appears to be a dock town.  The surroundings strike me as being unnatural, even fake-like, which made me love the TV series even more.  Throughout my life I tried to find a jazz club like “Mothers, ” but realized that’s impossible, because here, the imagination rules, and I follow the rules of dream logic than the waking man’s reality.

I love the idea of a contained environment, for instance the Korova Milk Bar, where one goes to get loaded on milk laced with drugs, where one can drink the milk with knives in it.  It will sharpen you up.  I went there to take mescaline, and as I sat on a couch that resembled a woman’s ass-cheeks and back, I let my mind wander into a shapeless world, and just waiting for my ego to break down. That, will never happen. Nevertheless I left Korova and went to the Owl Drug store on Beverly and La Cienega to look at the displays of shampoo, hair creams, combs, and all sorts of beauty products.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I felt I was really seeing these objects in a new ‘enlightened’ light.  “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.  For man has closed himself up.  Till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” The essence of moving among the buildings in the night, clearly I was looking for happiness, but one knows that “happiness would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Around 3:30 in the morning I arrived at my home, which over time, I tried to design it as Peter Gunn’s apartment, but I neither have the money or the shopping skill to make this work.  Yet, my attempt to reproduce what I saw on television, it became a new interior.  Not even influenced by, but more of a tribute that only I can see.  I put on the song “Sonny” on the turntable which was written and performed by Bobby Hebb, but I much prefer the Manfred Mann instrumental version.  Hebb wrote it as a reaction to the John F. Kennedy assassination but also to his brother who was killed a few days after the Kennedy death.  He was inspired to write something that was ‘light’ and uplifting when his world (and others) went to hell.  I admire the beauty of someone changing their perception of the world, because if there is going to be a real change, one needs to start with themselves.   Or, we flow with the crowd, but that I don’t recommend whatsoever.

March 11, 2014

March 11, 2014

I woke up early this morning to locate a pirated DVD version of Timothy Carey’s film “The World’s Greatest Siinner," with an original score by Frank Zappa.  I never was a fan of Zappa’s work, because his humor was always too obvious for me, but on the other hand I was always intrigued by Carey.  I first discovered him as a kid watching Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing, ” which I must have seen ten times over the years.  It is among those films that I play but only in a special celebratory mood, which believed me, doesn’t often come upon me.

II’m usually lucky to locate pirated DVDs in the Shinjuku area, but the nature of the business is sometimes sketchy, and the storefront that is set up in an almost deserted office building can be gone like steam leaving a boiling pot of water.  I have a bad memory of names, especially if it is Japanese, and also I don’t read Kanji, so I have to guess what floor the shop is, and on top of that, if I’m wrong, I go to each floor till I find it.  So by the time I get to the 9th floor and I can’t find the shop, I’m putting it mildly feeling a little bit of a disappointment coming upon me.  It is like each floor that I go to, as I get higher, I become a low.

I’ve been intrigued to see “The World’s Greatest Sinner” ever since I was a teenager and my dad told me about it.  Carey invited him to a screening sometime in the mid-1960s and after seeing the film, he could never stop talking about it.  To this day I don’t know if he actually liked the film, but he liked and admired Carey, even though they weren’t close friends.  More of a friend-of-a-friend type of thing.  The one thing that I never forgot is when my dad told me that whenever anyone shook Carey’s hand, he would give out a loud fart.  At first it was kind of funny, but after doing it on a regular basis, it becomes slightly and disturbingly weird.  Also one might think that he was making a comment on the people he was just meeting.  My dad wasn’t insulted and he always wanted to see the film again, but like the fart that leaves the ass, the smell is there, but not the actual fart.   I guess for a while now I have been looking for that ‘fart, ’ even in Tokyo.

Timothy Carey passed away in 1994, and the only other story I know of him was when I was going out with a girlfriend in the 70s and she was the waitress at a Sambo’s diner in the San Fernando Valley.   She worked the night shift, which at that time was midnight to dawn.  Carey would come in around 3AM to eat breakfast, obviously he was a man who kept his own hours.   It went against the rules, but during her break she would go out with him for a drive on Ventura Boulevard.  She told me that he would have a 8-track tape of Henry Cowell’s music with the volume playing at full-blast.  It was not possible to have a conversation with him, and he didn’t talk, just drove from one end to Ventura and then make a u-turn and take her back to her work.   Surely I thought something sexual happened between the both of them, but that didn’t appear to be the case at all.  He just enjoyed the company while playing Cowell’s music in the car.

In our household, my father had this weird obsession of watching the squarest program on TV, The Lawrence Welk Show.  At first I thought it was a joke, but he seemed to like the music, the production, and the aesthetic quality of Welk’s performance and his music of course.   My dad had exceptional insight into pop culture and all of its weird side-effects on our world.  I loved him for it, and to be honest, I love him for bringing Timothy Carey’s film to my attention.  It may be a film that I will never see, but for sure, I will never smell a Timothy Carey fart.

February 21, 2014

February 21, 2014

My favorite Jacques Demy film is “Model Shop” starring Gary Lockwood and Anouk Aimée, who plays the same character that is in an early Demy film “Lola.” Not long ago, when I found myself in Paris, I purchased the Demy box dvd set.  I’m often in my bathtub screaming (not singing) tunes from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” So, by my very nature, this was an indispensable box-set for me to have.  I don’t know if Lockwood is my favorite actor, but he is one that I often reflect on.  Like million others, I admired Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey, ” but oddly enough I find his character in “Model Shop” more distant or foreign like.  He appears to be an astronaut who landed in Venice, California. 

As a child, I went to Venice all the time, and I have these faint images of the oil wells on the beach pumping the tar up from the ground. There was a consistent noise being produced by these giant horse shaped wells, that was creepy, and it seemed it went on for 24 hours, 7 days a week.  Watching “Model Shop” where the Lockwood character lived on the beach, Demy captures the sound in all its drama and surrealism.  I totally forgot the sound, till I saw the film, and brought back memories of Venice.  

One of the things I remember as a child quite visually was a drunk on the street walking down Ocean Front Walk, which is basically on the beach, and seeing him being tormented by a group of kids.  Maybe four or five kids in all, but what they do is taking turns in pushing the drunk to the ground.  Once he tries to get up, they keep pushing him back to the pavement.  What I remember is the sound of the oil wells blended in with the kids taunting the drunk, and his voice pleading for them to stop.  Then it got really ugly.  One of the children began to throw rocks at him.  In a way it was like trapping a small animal, and keeping it contained in a space, as you commit torture on the poor helpless beast. 

Ever since then I never wanted to visit Venice, but I had to go with my parents because they had so many friends who lived there.  Every moment there my stomach would tie up in knots, and nothing could erase the anxiety till we actually leave the neighborhood.  I’m very sensitive to space and location, and if something happens within that specific site, I can never erase it from my mind.  So even watching Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop” brings back the violence of that neighborhood.  Even though I can’t be totally sure, but it seems that Lockwood’s small Venice house is located on or very close to the public beating I witnessed as a child.   By watching the film I become obsessed with the memories, but I know being at a distance and this is only a film, I’m fairly safe from the trauma.  

Living in the canyon areas of Los Angeles, we are often have unwelcome insects in our home.  The kitchen and bathroom would get a sizable population of ants marching on the counter and for some reason in the bathroom washbasin.  On hot days, ants I imagine being thirsty, so I would fill the basin with warm water, and watch them drown.  I would often give a few ants a chance to live or get out of the basin, but with perfect timing I would force the ant under the water to see what he or she will do.  Once it stops struggling, I feel immediately sad and depressed.  It reminded me of the drunk, and now, I also connect the soundtrack to “Model Shop” by the Topanga Canyon band Spirit.  To this day, I’m ashamed of my cruelty but very happy to have a dvd copy of Demy’s “Model Shop. ”