Tosh Berman's Blog, page 110

The Important Records from 1983 for Tosh

 

1983, such a strange year. I was working at Licorice Pizza in West Los Angeles with a terrific cast of characters, but it seems to look over the releases that year, I was not into any album. Only singles. There was one mini-album or 12" ep, and that was The Art of Noise's "Into the Battle with The Art of Noise." How can anyone not love "Moments in Love?" Probably one of the first magnificent production of a minimalist piece of music. The other singles that made an impression on me are Fun Boy Three's "Our Lips Are Sealed," The Smiths' "This Charming Man," Kraftwerk's "Tour de France," and last but for sure not least, Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home). I presume that song is an answer song to Bowie's "Space Oddity." I remember my friends hating that record, but I had a special love for it, for some perverse reason that I can't remember now. -Tosh Berman

"The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City" by Matthew Beaumont (Verso)

 

ISBN: 978--1-78873-891-9

A collection of essays focusing on the nature of walking in an urban city from the 19th-century to the 20th. Very much a literary study on the subject matter of wandering through the city on authors C.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Georges Bataille, Ray Bradbury, Edward Bellamy, and most important to me, Ford Madox Ford. I found the essay on Ford as a very personal approach to the subject matter of having vertigo in public spaces. I suffer from the same, but I have trouble defining the issues behind my phobia. Reading the chapter on Ford, with his connection of walking in large areas in cities and feeling not quite right. A part of the book I'll read over and over again. As for the rest of the book, it's a worthy volume on a subject matter that is very dear to my heart and mind.

"Manet and the Object of Painting" by Michel Foucault & Translated by Matthew Barr with an introduction by Nicolas Bourriaud (Tate Publishing)

 

Manet, to me, is sort of like wallpaper. I noticed it for a second and then moved on to the other room. But since reading this beautifully designed slim book by Michel Foucault, I now see him in a new light. 

This is actually a lecture that Foucault did on Manet sometime in the early 1970s. Compared to his other writings, this is very much a book you can read on a good bus ride from Downtown L.A. to the beach. I like it because Foucault is not an art reviewer or someone from that world. He's looking at the artwork from a totally different angle, which of course, makes it a unique study on an artist's work.

Foucault focuses on maybe 10 paintings by Monet and comments on the space and lighting in the pictures. Reading the text, I start noticing somewhat eccentric aspects of Monet's work that I didn't observe in the first place. 

Foucault's observations are very focused but done in a way where the reader, or perhaps if you were in the audience at the time, start making your own connections to the work on hand. For me, this makes excellent art criticism.

January 10, 2021 by Tosh Berman

 

January 10, 2021

It must be challenging to be Jared Kushner, to have money, but have nothing else. Today is his birthday, and he turned 40-years old. When I researched a subject matter, I like to look at their images when they were young, especially if they're photos from their childhood. Oddly enough, it's impossible for me to find a picture of him as a ten-year-old or younger. And nothing of him as a teenager. His father, a felon and recently pardoned by Trump is the same age as me. Which I found shocking. In that sense, if I had a son, he could be the same age as Jared. Selfishly, I chose not to have any children, in case I produced a monster like Jared Kushner.

On January 10, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and Jared did the same when he got married into the Trump family. His father, Charles, was a strong figure in the Kushner family. He often had temper tandems and cruelty against his enemies, including a family member, married to Charles's sister.  He set him up by hiring a prostitute and then secretly recorded their sex sessions and sent them to his own sister. He was sent to prison for two years and released on my birthday, August 25, 2006. 

Jared and his wife Ivanka have a sizable art collection, including Alex Israel, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Alex Da Corte, and David Outrowski.  Richard Prince was alarmed that they own a work by him and told the media it was 'fake art.' Ivanka did a photoshoot for her Instagram page, showing Christopher Wool's painting behind an Ivanka Trump brand Mara Bag. That image was deleted from her account. Already, the embarrassment of being associated with the Kushners was starting when Trump became President in 2016. Still, it's almost impossible to read Jared's face. He is known to be extremely polite and never seems to lose his temper. He was taught to dance around his father's anger, which made him perfect in Donald James Trump's world. 

Jared shares a birthday with Frank Sinatra, Jr.  Frank Jr. was kidnapped when he was 19-years old. Dad paid the ransom, and all the negotiation was done through pay telephones. Frank Jr was concerned that he wouldn't have enough dimes for the phone calls, so to the very day of his death, he always carried 10 dimes in his pocket and was buried with 10 dimes in his pocket.  Being named and the son of Frank Sinatra opened doors for him. Still, he was quoted as saying, ""a famous father means that in order to prove yourself, you have to work three times harder than the guy off the street." Jared, as far as I know, never talked about his father in such a manner. 

On his birthday today, it must be a gloomy day for him. To turn 40, and knowing that your reputation is trashed, as well as your wife's career thrown in the trash can as well. The one thing I'm sure he's aware of is that his father's career was destroyed, but he came from the shit landscape into the air of New York Property.  Power rarely loses power, but one can be isolated into the vacant world of a building or home that serves no purpose but a reflection of an empty soul drowning in infinite images of failure. In all sincerity, I acknowledge Jared's birthday today as one of a celebration of a person who never had a soul. Nor, as far as I can see, a picture from his childhood. 

-Tosh Berman.

January 9, 2021 by Tosh Berman

 

January 9, 2021

It seems throughout my life I have heard of Scott Walker but never actually heard his solo albums until the 1990s. I was aware of The Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Going To Shine Anymore" because it was on the AM radio in my youth. Also, decades later, I heard that was the song being played on the juke box at the Blind Beggar when Ronnie Kray shot and killed George Cornell. Legend has it that the record got stuck with the word "Anymore" played repeatedly. Beyond that, I knew nothing of Scott. It wasn't until the musician Julian Cope put out a compilation of solo Scott music, "Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker," which focused on the music he wrote. At the time, Scott was a memory for mostly those who know him for his middle-of-the-road cover songs. The post-punk world was finally introduced to this magnificent artist, thanks to Cope. 

I never owned this compilation, and as far as I know, his original solo albums were out of print at the time. Scott was very much a mysterious figure at the time, and some say in retirement. It wasn't until 1984 that I purchased my first Scott album, "Climate Of Hunter." Strangely poetic, with a beautiful voice, and a strange sensibility. Eight songs on the album, including a piece by Tennessee Williams, "Blanket Roll Blues, "I believe was from the film "The Fugitive Kind, based on Tennessee's play "Orpheus Descending." The song is sung by Marlon Brando in the film, and oddly enough, Walker used the imagery of Brando in future songs. Like Bowie, Scott never loses influences; he just kept them as a collection and went into that closet to take out what he needed for inspiration and doing his art, the songs. It's interesting that as one of the great lyricists in the 20th-century, he named four of the songs on this album as "Track Three," "Track Five," "Track Six," and "Track Seven." An artist who wrote such passionate music to name songs in such a dry manner has always been a head-scratcher for me. 

Eleven years of silence from Scott until he released "Tilt." I bought it as a CD at the Virgin Mega Store on Sunset Bouvard. I came to that store to find that specific album. I had to look in the "w" section of British imports to find the damn album. They only had one copy, and they ordered just one copy for their inventory. When I took it home and played "Tilt," I was emotionally taken away by the words' density, but they were minimal as well. Every silence and space became part of the music. I never heard anything like this before in my entire life. 

Six other Scott Walker albums came after "Tilt," including the all-instrumental "And Who Shall Go to The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?" and his two soundtrack albums "Pola X," and "The Childhood Of A Leader." Scott Walker's birthday was only a day apart from David Bowie's. It's interesting to note that Scott shares birthdays with Karl Čapek, Simone de Beauvoir, Heiner Müller, German filmmaker Harun Farock, and Richard Nixon. All of them could have easily been a subject matter for a Scott Walker song. 

My Elvis Collection

 

My Elvis collection. 

The Important 1982 Albums for Tosh

 

As a 27/28 years-old, these albums were essential to my taste at the time. 

January 7, 2021 by Tosh Berman

 

January 7, 2021

My first feelings of sexuality, beyond Brigitte Bardot on the big screen, is Morticia Addams. Not an actual living person, but a cartoon figure, made and drawn by Charles Addams. He was married three times, and it has been reported that he based this character on his first wife. That's not the truth. He married three women who looked like his character Morticia. I'm a fan of any artist/writer who bases their work on their sexual obsessions. To me, there is a connection between "Tom of Finland" and Morticia. It's desire drawn to perfection without any interference from the real world. The Addams Family is a series of single-panel cartoons that Addams did from 1938 to his death in 1988.  It wasn't until the television show came to be that these cartoons became officially called "The Addams Family."

Besides being hysterically funny, I was drawn into their world as the ultimate outsiders of society. But they are also aristocratic, which is another strong magnet for my love of a family tainted with horror but still holding on to some form of a tarnished system but existing. Morticia, with her tight black dress, fitting her perfect figure, and a love that is clearly forbidden in polite society. She was one of my first cultural heroes as a child and teenager. I adored the Television show as well, but the cartoon anthologies that I purchased over the years became the blueprint of my sexuality. 

Over the years, the blending of the 1960s TV show and the cartoons become one to me. I can't comment on the full-length movies that came out later because I never saw them. Carolyn Jones will always be Morticia to me. Her remarkable eyes as she dissects her fictional husband Gomez as a weapon, but one made of desire and power. Charles Addams is clearly an artist with tremendous dark wit, but also in the service of Eros.  

January 6, 2021

 

The presence of Movie Cowboy great Tom Mix in my neighborhood of Edendale, now known as Silver Lake, is of great importance to me. From my living room, I can oversee the strip mall that is 365 Whole Foods, and that property used to be Tom Mix’s film studio. I’m a firm believer that there are spirits from that era and beyond that lives on that property. Tom Mix died in a car accident, and he was 60-years old. These days that is still considered young, but a man who spent a great majority of his life on a horse named “Tony the Wonder Horse” and did his own stunts. An excellent shot with a pistol, Mix was the real deal. 

Like America itself, Mix had the talent to make a new identity for himself. He enlisted in the Army during the Spanish-American War. Tom went AWOL when he married his first wife, Grace Allin. That marriage was annulled after a year, and a few years later, he married Olive Stokes in 1909. Mix rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s parade with horsemen, who some were former Rough Riders. Years later, with the help of Hollywood publicists, Mix suggests that Mix himself was a Rough Rider. 

Tom Mix joined up with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, which was a large ranching business. The ranch had its touring Wild West show, and Mix was part of the spectacle. His horse riding skills, using the rope, and pistol-shooting came handy as he turned into an entertainer.  It was around this time that my German Grandmother as a teenager, joined the Mix Wild West Show and toured America and Cuba. Mix started to make films in Edendale (Silver Lake) and made over 100 films for the production house Selig Polyscope Company. And here is where the presence of his being comes into my life. 

I have an 8mm print of “The Cowboy Millionaire” (1909). I play it on his birthday at least three times while looking out the window simultaneously, imagining the scenes from the film are happening down below. The gunfight specifically between Mix and the bad guys made an impression on my imagination. With the images of the movie burning in my brain, I go out and put on a large white cowboy hat and a toy pistol and a gun belt around my waist. I reenact the scene in my head (and heart) from the film as I look over the property that was once owned by Tom Mix. 

The Important Albums from 1981 for Tosh

 

There were many important artists and albums released in 1981. Still, for me, the essential albums were Japan's "Tin Drum," The Associates "Drawer Fourth Down," Heaven 17's "Penthouse and Pavement," Sparks's "Whomp That Sucker," The dBs' "Stands for Decibels," and The Lounge Lizard's first album. "Tin Drum" is Japan's third album, and I was drawn by this record due to the cover. I was intrigued by David Sylvian's perfect hair, make-up and him eating rice under a photo of Mao. At this point, I avoided Japan because I thought they were a 'hype' band, and perhaps a rip-off of Roxy Music. Alias, I was really wrong. Japan (must forgive them for their stupid name; never name your band after a city/country) is a very unique band, due to their arrangements of fretless bass, electronics, excellent drumming, and Sylvian's voice. After I purchased this album, I went back to the other previous two albums. All winners. The dBs is simply a great pop combo. The Fab Four mixed with garage rock, but with incredible sophistication. I truly don't understand why they weren't huge in their time. Other bands who almost have that dBs sound became very successful, but perhaps Chris Stamey and company were too twisted in their pop song imagery. Sparks, for them, almost went mainstream, except their excellent songwriting and performance make "Whomp This Sucker" an incredible experience. The wit of their songs alone makes them exceptionally special.Out of the first version of The Human League comes Heaven 17. An electro-duo with real instruments and songs that were political. I find this album from track one to the last, all exceptional. I even bought all the 12" remixes at the time. The Lounge Lizards (perfect band name for 'fake' jazz group) was the image of Manhattan to me. The off-kilter jazz brilliantly performed by the band with the additional guitar noise from Arto Lindsay was a mega-wow to me. Truly a 'cool' album.And last, but not least, the brilliant Associates. Joe Meek meets experimental David Bowie. This is sonic madness put on vinyl or tape. Unique, original, beautiful, noisy, it's just a perfect compilation of their early singles in the dawn of the 80s. They were magnificent. Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine.