Tosh - Tosh Berman

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Steppenwolf as a remainder at Pickwick Books on Hollywood Boulevard. After reading it, he bought most of the copies up and gave the book out to friends. When Wallace was a fan of something, he pretty much became a distributor of that work and made sure all his friends picked up a copy. Not only that, but he became a pen pal of Hesse. They wrote back and forth to each other, but unfortunately, my father’s letters from Hesse were all destroyed in a mudslide in 1965. I read Steppenwolf many years ago as a teenager, and the book made an impression on me as well. The novel is about a man who has trouble finding himself in a bourgeois society not of his making, and he comes upon a person who tells him about a magic theater that is hidden in a music hall. There, he takes a journey of sorts that rejoins his human nature to that of a Steppenwolf, combining beast and intellect to make him whole. I think anyone dealing with the straight world and the tension of that world with the boho scene would easily be attracted to this novel.

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      WALLACE BERMAN / Semina 4, 1959

      Before my family left for San Francisco, Wallace started up Semina. This small publication might be called a “zine” these days. It was a collection of loose pages printed on different papers that consisted of poetry, photographs, and drawings. Editions would have a print run of between 150 and 350 copies, all of them done on a hand printing press in his home or studio. I feel that Semina was the perfect medium for my father to interact with the world. Most of the copies were mailed or handed out for free. When our family moved to San Francisco, he went to City Lights Bookstore to have Semina sold there on consignment. Each one cost a dollar. Nowadays they’re priceless, and it’s tough to find an original Semina, especially one that’s entirely intact. Each issue had its individual look and design, though the size of the publication was almost, if not exactly, consistent. Most issues are loose pages but some were fold-outs as well. For sure Semina had certain trademark visuals from my father uniting the entire run, but to me each issue is a complete world of its own.

      There has historically been a tradition of poets or artists making their publications, not only of their work but also of works that they admired by other artists and writers. A good example is the surrealists, who started up their various publications to publish not only their own work but also that of fellow travelers and artists they admired from the past. The poets in Semina include Michael McClure, David Meltzer, and Philip Lamantia, along with older writers like Hermann Hesse, Jean Cocteau, and Antonin Artaud. Through Semina, Wallace could communicate with and bring the artistic world closer to his home base, not physically but spiritually. Each person who saw, read, or owned a copy of Semina was a fellow member of the club. That’s what a publication should do, and Semina was very successful in those terms.

      The beauty of Semina is that it was a periodical made not to be sold on the marketplace. Wallace’s intention was to personally hand each issue to a friend or someone he admired. Or, in most cases, he sent it to people through the mail. No one could officially subscribe to the publication, and except for that one issue sold at City Lights, Semina never was sold in a retail or specialty shop. So to receive a copy was truly a unique gesture between artist and reader. It was likewise a publication or object that didn’t have money value, at least when my dad was alive. In Latin, “semina” means “seed,” or the thick whitish fluid we call “semen.” It’s a perfect name for a magazine given away for free, which would hopefully inspire other publications. Which it has. Semina has significantly influenced many printers, artists, and photographers, so its name is satisfactory terminology for spreading new life.

      San Francisco / chapter 9

      I have to assume that my crippling sense of vertigo started in San Francisco. As a three-year-old, I had a traumatic incident on the staircase leading to our apartment. I was on the steps petting my cat. According to my mom, a homeless woman came up the steps and tried to grab my cat out of my hands. I held on as she dragged me down the steps. My mom found me, after I screamed, at the bottom of the steps still holding onto my cat, but with my tooth penetrating my lip, which left a pool of blood. I have no memory of this, but what I do know is that I have a deep fear of staircases and heights. I couldn’t stand to be held upside down or lifted by another human being, aside from my parents when I was a child. For many years George Herms liked to grab me from behind to lift me, and I would scream bloody murder. He kept this up even when I was a teenager! I would get a feeling of vertigo or dizziness, like I was about to faint.

      To me, San Francisco was a nightmarish city, not because of its citizens, but because of its architecture and the many hills that make up the dramatic visuals in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo (1958), which was filmed in the city around the time we lived there. To me, the great city of the Bay was a warped landscape played at 45 rpm. I feel that I’m the only person on the planet who had no choice but to come to terms with its landscape that way. The earth spins 1,040 miles per hour, and I could feel its movement under my feet. What others felt was delightful about San Francisco was a total horror show for me. I remember being frozen in my tracks just looking down Filbert Street, which is reportedly the steepest hill in the city.

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      WALLACE BERMAN / Tosh Berman, San Francisco, 1960

      As a child, it wasn’t much of a problem, because usually an adult was either carrying me around or holding my hand, but as I grew older, my vertigo didn’t go away. To this day, in particular locations, I need to hold the hand of a fellow adult, particularly when going up and down staircases. Not all staircases, mind you, just ones that I perceive as grand or big. I am highly sensitive to the size of a staircase and how steep it is. If there is a banister attached to the wall, I can sometimes handle it by myself. The worst thing for me though is when someone is either going down or up the stairs and won’t move aside to let me pass. I can’t stand to be motionless on a staircase, even for 30 seconds. If I’m forced to walk in the middle of the stairs, it’s like a slow painful death to me. The bad part of it all is that people don’t realize what I’m going through, nor do they care. As a child, this was my first lesson about how people treat other people. San Francisco was the first urban city that I was made aware of due to a lot of cement pavements and a large multicultural population. As a baby, I knew our house in Beverly Glen, but the first time that I was conscious of being in an urban city was San Francisco.

      Despite my crippling fears, San Francisco had a lot of things going for a child like me during the late 1950s. I remember the girl who worked at the bakery would give me a free cookie every time I passed that palace of sweetness, and I also recall rambling around City Lights Bookstore, a place where my father liked to go to browse. A Japanese American gentleman by the name of Shig Murao was the floor manager. Shig first came to attention internationally for being arrested for selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) to an undercover cop in 1957. Shig and my dad used to chit-chat while I wandered within and outside the store. City Lights was probably my first bookstore experience. I never got bored being there with my father because I could people-watch and enjoy the different shapes and colors of book covers. It may have been there that I discovered the physical pleasure of books outside our house, and that a bookstore is a sacred location.

      I like how books feel, the texture of the pages, and the beauty of the print on the white page. Being enclosed in a room full of books always gives me a sense of ease and security. At that time, I didn’t have a preference for a type of book or even section. I was far too young to distinguish one type of volume from another. A few years later I became profoundly attached to the comic book sections in magazine stands and markets. City Lights didn’t have comic books. You had to be crafty to avoid the anger of the newsstand managers because they hated kids looking at the comics.

      It sounds silly to describe San Francisco as exotic, but the city had new, sensual, and tasty smells, and the architecture was so different from Los Angeles. Even as a child, I got the feeling that the communities, especially North Beach, were compact in size and filled with people on the same wavelength as their surroundings. Los Angeles is always pop or rock ’n’ roll to me, but San Francisco is 1950s jazz

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