Tosh Berman's Blog, page 91
May 10, 2021
The World of Tosh Berman: Monday, May 10, 2021 ("Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries" by Adrian Dannatt)
https://tosh.substack.com/p/doomed-and-famous-selected-obituaries
My observations on the magnificent "Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries" by Adrian Dannatt. My version of a perfect book.
May 9, 2021
Become a Paid Subscriber to "The World of Tosh Berman"
Become a paid subscriber to my "The World of Tosh Berman" and as a perk I'll send you a Sunday piece every Sunday. $5 for monthly/$70 for Yearly and founding member is $210 a year. I plan to add more perks as well.
May 8, 2021
The World of Tosh Berman: Saturday, May 8, 2021 (T*** of Finland)
The World of Tosh Berman T*** of Finland: Saturday, May 8, 2021. Read it here, and if you wish, please subscribe to my page, thank you. https://tosh.substack.com/p/t-of-finland
vol.13 - Relah Eckstein (Who Is Lun*na Menoh?)
We talk about Relah Eckstein on our mini-documentary on the bigger documentary "Who Is Lun*na Menoh?" Relah is truly a cineamtic genius. Think of John Waters/Luis Bunuel/David Lynch if they lived and worked in the San Fernando Valley (Encino to be specific). Lun*na and I worked on her films which throughout the years, and why she is not better known is a mystery to me. Here you can see film stills from her work. Enjoy!
May 6, 2021
The World of Tosh Berman: Thursday, May 6, 2021 (Who is Winthrop Kellogg Edey?
The World of Tosh Berman: Who is Winthrop Kellogg (Kelly) Edey?
Who Is Winthrop Kellogg (Kelly) Edey?
May 4, 2021
The World of Tosh Berman: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 (Philippe Clay)
The World of Tosh Berman: The importance of Philippe Clay in my life.
Read it here: The World of Tosh Berman (Philippe Clay)
BOOK MUSIK: Peter Stanfield on his Book on The Who
BOOK MUSIK: The Who
On BOOK MUSIK we discuss the early roots of The Who with the author Peter Stanfield. Gustav Megtzer, Pop Art, Auto-Destruction, Mod culture,and The Who Sell Out. You can hear it now!
May 3, 2021
Radio Aether Series Image No. 1 by Wallace Berman (Kohn Gallery)
Radio Aether
Like the musicians and Beat poets he befriended, Berman preferred to operate on the margins of society, honing in on life’s darker side. In late 1963, around the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Marcel Duchamp’s influential retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art, he created his first collages with a Verifax machine, a forerunner of the photocopier. Built on materials appropriated from the popular press, the new work owed much to Duchamp’s revolutionary idea of the Readymade and eventually engendered Berman’s signature image: a handheld transistor radio, inlaid with found imagery and arrayed in grids ranging from four to fifty-six hands at a time. The radio, immortalized in Jean Cocteau’s classic art film Orphée and John Cage’s seminal chance compositions of the mid-1950s, became Berman’s defining motif; a potent expression of his abiding interest in secret transmissions and in the semiotic fallout of popular culture.
Inside his radio frames, an encyclopedic universe of images - machines, bodies, animals, buildings, plants, nuns, athletes, astronauts, guns, esoteric symbols, intergalactic nebulae, rock stars, and celebrities, among many other things - proliferates in webs of cryptic significance. “No hope in making, assembling, binding together ornate bibles of history,” Berman’s friend, the poet David Meltzer wrote about the artist’s vast and surreal dictionary. “The clues are found everywhere: inside the sleeping poet; on the streets; beneath the sea; in levels, stratum, the years of a desert; and aurora all around the dead we bury within ourselves.” The grid was likely inspired by Berman’s love of comic strips; and by Andy Warhol’s infamous Campbell’s Soup Cans, which he had first exhibited in 1962 at the Ferus Gallery. To try and solve Berman’s visual puzzles would be missing the point. His Verifax grids, like mankind’s deepest mysteries, are best approached obliquely, presciently streaming as they do the visual flotsam of a particular time and place.https://www.kohngallery.com/berman
May 2, 2021
The World of Tosh Berman: Sunday, May 2, 2021 (At The Bottom of Echo Park Lake)
Read it here: At the Bottom of Echo Park Lake
