Podcasts about tosh berman

Tosh Berman is the author of the wonderful memoir TOSH : Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World. Tosh is the son of Shirley and Wallace Berman, central figures of the underground Beat-era art scene in Los Angeles from the 1950s thru 1970s. Wallace was a well-respected experimental artist whose friends included many famous artists, musicians, actors and poets of that time including Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones, Dennis Hopper, Ramblin'Jack Elliot, Dean Stockwell and the list goes on. So young Tosh grew up around all these famous characters of the LA arts scene and his book shows that world thru the eyes of a child and teenager. It was great to talk with Tosh about his book and about life in L.A. then and now. We discovered that Tosh is also an actor who co-starred in several experimental art films with the GoGos drummer Gina Schock. He also hosted a tv talk show in the late 1980s called Tea with Tosh interviewing various artists and musicians, most notably composer Philip Glass. More recently he puts out a video series called Tosh Talks where he discusses literature, music and culture. In addition to his TOSH memoir, he has also published a book of his poetry called The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding, and a memoir of his experiences following the band Sparks in London and Paris called Sparks-Tastic. Tosh is an editor and publisher as well. His publishing house TamTam Books focuses on 20th century international literature, specializing in the works of Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Mesrine, and Sparks.

Perhaps the most mysterious death of the 21st century is that of Elisa Lam. We share the tragic story of this young woman on this edition of Unpleasant Dreams. Cassandra Harold is your host. EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer. Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: Anderson, Jake. Gone at Midnight: The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam. Citadel, 2020.  Anon. “Questions Remain Three Years After…” LosAngeles.cbslocal.com. https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/10/31/questions-remain-3-years-after-womans-body-was-found-inside-la-hotels-rooftop-water-tank/ Retrieved 16 February 2021.  Barrett, Christina. The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam. CreateSpace, 2016. Brown, Jack. “Body Language Analysis No. 2313: Elisa Lam Video in Elevator at Cecil Hotel.” BodyLanguageSuccess.com. https://www.bodylanguagesuccess.com/2013/02/nonverbal-communication-analysis-2313.html Retrieved 16 February 2021.  Buzzfeed Unsolved. “The Bizarre Death of Elisa Lam.” Youtube. 18 March 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48jBi86ih5Q Moncrieff, JH. “Whatever Happened to Elisa Lam?” JHMoncrieff.com. https://www.jhmoncrieff.com/whatever-happened-elisa-lam/ Retrieved 16 February 2021.  Peters, Lucia. Dangerous Games to Play in the Dark. Chronicle Books, 2019. Steel, Danielle. How Elisa Lam Got Disappeared. Sifox, 2017. Swann, Jennifer. “Elisa Lam Drowned in a Water Tank Three Years Ago, but the Obsession with her Death Lives On.” Vice.com. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3bkmg3/elisa-lam-drowned-in-a-water-tank-two-years-ago-but-the-obsession-with-her-death-lives-on-511. Retrieved 16 February 2021.  You can find EM Hilker's full article that this podcast was based upon HERE and a transcript of the podcast version below: PODCAST TRANSCRIPT It was early February of 2013 when some of the residents of the Stay on Main (formerly the Cecil Hotel) began to have problems with their tap water. The water pressure was inconsistent, and the water itself tasted peculiar and was oddly discoloured. In response to the residents' complaints, the hotel sent employee Santiago Lopez to investigate the issue. His investigation took him to the water towers on the roof of the hotel where, upon examination, he found the decomposing body of a solitary young woman, naked, floating in the cistern, her clothing and some personal effects in the water alongside her.  No one recognized by authorities knows precisely how Elisa Lam died. The known facts are that Elisa arrived in Los Angeles on January 26th 2013 and checked into the Stay on Main on January 28th. She was reported missing on February 1st, 2013, after she had fallen out of contact with her family; some time prior to that she displayed seemingly erratic behavior in the hotel elevator, which was caught on tape and has been much-analyzed by professionals and amateur sleuths alike. Her body and clothing were found in one of the rooftop water cisterns, which, in theory, should have been inaccessible by the hotel guests. For a period of time, the guests consumed the water that contained her body, which had been discoloured and had an unwholesome taste. Her clothes were in the cistern as well, covered with what appeared to be sand. It was noted that her cell phone and glasses were missing. Autopsy revealed that she had been dead for several days at a minimum, that there was water in neither her lungs nor her stomach, and that aside from a small abrasion on her knee that she could have gotten anywhere, she had no obvious external trauma that wasn't accounted for by decomposition.  Among the things that are unknown: how did Elisa get in that cistern, which was said to have been difficult to access? How did she get onto the roof, for that matter, where the cisterns are located, past the secured door? What was Elisa up to in that elevator? Was she alone? Before we delve into the details of this strange case, and the plentiful theories of what precisely happened, there is Elisa herself.  She was a young woman, only 21 years old at the time of her death, and at the beginning of her adult life. She had struggled with mental illness for many years, but despite her struggles she was kind, empathetic, dedicated, and passionate. She liked fashion, art, and literature, and found a great deal of solace on her blogs “Nouvelle/Nouveau” and “Ether Fields.” She was close to her parents, with whom she connected each day as she traveled. She called her trip “the West Coast Tour.” She had been very excited about it.   I think it's important to remember who Elisa was. That she was a real, warm, living person with hopes and goals and dreams and struggles. It's easy to forget Elisa herself in the twisting paths of this case, in all the weirdness of the circumstances and the copious amount of theories on what really happened to her. Elisa wasn't just a part of a mystery to be solved: she was a vibrant young woman, taken too soon from a life that she had only just begun. LAM-ELISA TB Test The circumstances surrounding Elisa's death, and her stay in Los Angeles in general, were strange, but little was as strange on the surface as the colossal coincidence of the LAM-ELISA tuberculosis test. The name LAM-ELISA seems like an improbable coincidence. The test was developed at the University of British Columbia, oddly enough, the university Elisa had attended more than four years before her last, fateful trip. LAM-ELISA is named for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or ELISA, an enzyme used to detect lipoarabinomannan (Lie-poe-a-rab-in-o-min-in) (LAM) in samples of human sputum, in order to diagnose tuberculosis in the patient. There was, additionally, an outbreak of TB in the Skid Row section of Los Angeles at the time of Elisa's disappearance. Some conspiracy theories have cropped up around these coincidences, though none really fit the facts. The naming convention of the test is clear and logical, the test itself predates Elisa's stay in LA by literal years, and there was no sign of TB in Elisa's autopsy findings.  Dark Water Another strange coincidence comes in the form of two movies called ‘Dark Water' (a Japanese movie from 2002, and the American remake from 2005) as well as the short story by Koji Suzuki on which the two movies were based. As in Elisa's case, there were water supply issues caused by the body of a young girl in the building's water tower. Interestingly as well, the American remake names the lead character, Dahlia, which just so happens to be the press' nickname for murder victim Elizabeth Short.  The Elizabeth Short who was allegedly drinking at the then-Cecil hotel's bar shortly before her murder.  “The Suicide” The Stay on Main, formerly the Cecil Hotel but re-named in 2011, has a dark and violent history. There have been at least sixteen deaths (that we know of) at the Cecil hotel since the first recorded suicide in November 1931 (a selection of which include: self-poisoning, infanticide, and strangulation). Jake Anderson, author of, Gone At Midnight, the book on the case, believes the number to be higher.  Because of its reputation as a place frequented by death, it was popularly called “The Suicide.” In addition to the selection of murders and suicides in the hotel itself, it was also known for having housed both Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez during the period of his murder spree in the 1980s and Austrian serial killer Johann “Jack” Unterweger in the 1990s. Also, as previously mentioned, there is the fact that Elizabeth Short, “The Black Dahlia”, may or may not have had a drink at the Cecil in the last few days of her life. Inaccessible roof and sealed water tower? The roof should have been, many have said, inaccessible. The set of stairs leading to the roof from the fourteenth floor had a security alarm, which was not triggered the night of Elisa's disappearance. Indeed, Santiago Lopez had to disarm it before finding Elisa's body on the roof. There were, however, fire escapes that could be climbed to access the roof. Jake Anderson points out that there was graffiti on the roof, as well as reports of drinking up there; someone was accessing it. The cisterns have been said to be sealed in some sources, but elsewhere simply awkward and heavy. Somebody — Elisa or otherwise — got it open, after all. And then, perhaps most disturbing The Elevator Footage The footage of Elisa playing in an elevator on what was most likely the last day of her life, which the LAPD released to the public on February 15, has gotten a lot of attention online. The footage, as released, is certainly disquieting to watch, if only because of what would happen to her later that night. This footage has originated a number of the theories that we will discuss later. All is not as it seems on the surface, however. Often noted is that the elevator doors take an unusually long time to close in the video, though upon examination Kay Theng found that the doors to the elevator only close upon pressing the “close door” button or upon someone summoning the elevator from another floor. This may have been unusual behavior for elevators in general, but it was not unusual behavior for this particular elevator. Body language expert Dr. Jack Brown believes her body language to be playful rather than afraid, and speculates that there may be another person outside the elevator she's playing with.  However strange the circumstances surrounding her trip may be, the question remains, how did Elisa wind up in that water tower? The Paranormal Theory Well before Elisa's death, the hotel was thought to be haunted. The Ghost Adventures team has recorded a two-hour special in the former Cecil, noting that “it's undeniable that there are spirits inside this building.” Renowned psychic Joni Mayhan was asked to analyze the case for Anderson, and concluded that Elisa had been murdered, her murderer having been influenced by a malevolent force.  The Elevator Game The elevator game, which is said to have originated in Korea, has a very simple premise: you enter an elevator in a building that has a minimum of ten stories, alone, and after entering the elevator on the ground floor,  press the buttons in sequence, each after traveling to the last buttons' floor, without exiting the elevator. The order is 4, 2, 6, 2, 10, 5, 1. Certain things are said to happen along the way – a woman may enter the elevator at the fifth floor, to whom you must neither speak nor look at. It's not clear what happens to you if you do. In theory, if you've done all this correctly, when you press “one” to return to the ground floor, the elevator should instead ascend to the tenth floor, where you will find another world. You can either leave the elevator and explore this new world, an empty, dark world with a burning crucifix in the distance, or reverse the sequence of floors that you pressed to get here. The dark world is said to be hard to find your way back from (you need to use the same elevator that you used to get there). And, internet speculation has it, that Elisa Lam was playing that game in the elevator footage. I have a few problems with this theory: first, and perhaps most importantly: “Elisa had given virtually no attention to the paranormal. In all of her hundreds of pages of writings, not once did she ever reference ghosts, or hauntings, or possessions, or anything in the esoteric paranormal realm,” as Jake Anderson observes. There's no reason to believe that she would have played a relatively obscure game to go to another dimension, when she doesn't seem to have done so much as watched an episode of Ghost Hunters. Secondly, the infamous elevator footage took place on the fourteenth floor. The fourteenth floor isn't part of the elevator game, and the rules are very clear that you must begin on the ground floor. Thirdly, she's shown pressing what appears to be random buttons hurriedly, rather than traveling to each floor before pressing the next button in the sequence, and she doesn't appear to be pressing them in the order of the game. Finally, she leaves the elevator, which you're not to do until you reach the tenth floor. The Mental Health Aspect Elisa Lam was diagnosed and medicated for bipolar disorder, which she seems to have struggled with for most of her life and wrote about at length online. She had been taking medications to treat the disorder, but the toxicology results from her autopsy suggest that she hadn't been taking all of her medications at the time of her death. She appears to have been taking one of her antidepressants (Venlafaxine, ven·luh·fak·seen) regularly, but her other antidepressant (bupropion,byoo·prow·pee·aan) was in small enough amounts to indicate that it had been taken recently but certainly not that day. This was true of her mood stabilizing drug Lamotrigine (luh·mow·truh·jeen) as well. The antipsychotic she had been prescribed, quetiapine (kwuh·tai·uh·peen), was entirely absent from her system.  The autopsy report isn't the only reason to believe that something was amiss, however; Elisa had originally checked into her hotel room with two other women. Several days into Elisa's stay, the roommates complained to management that Elisa was acting in ways that made them uncomfortable, and Elisa was moved to her own room. Anderson had discovered one of the last people to see her alive, a man named Tosh Berman, who had encountered her in a bookstore. He described her behavior as erratic and unbalanced, and noted that he had been worried for her safety, not because of any immediate threat but simply because she was so unstable, and seemed so vulnerable. Skinny Dipping One theory on how Elisa wound up in that water tower is that she got in voluntarily. That perhaps in her manic state, she chose to go skinny dipping, alone, in a water reservoir on the roof of a 19 storey hotel that is — in theory, at least — hard to access, sometime in  February. The average daytime temperature in Los Angeles in February is 21 degrees celsius, or 69.8 degrees fahrenheit. That is, of course, assuming she had stolen away to do this during the day, when it's warmest but also presumably the easiest time to get caught). The interior of the water reservoir was completely smooth, lacking entirely in any way for her to climb back out. The theory is that she realized this too late, and the poor woman was left to tread water, hopelessly, knowing that no one knew she was there, knowing that rescue would never come, until she died.  The Murder/Manslaughter Hypothesis A very common theory is that Elisa was murdered, and that perhaps she was dead before her body entered the cistern. Dr. John Hiserolt believes that she may have been suffocated, and her body thrown in the water tower. He acknowledges the possibility of laryngospasm , sometimes called “dry drowning,” but finds it unusual that there was also no water in her stomach. Many have pointed out that a hotel employee could have accompanied her to the roof without setting off the alarm, and many others have pointed out that there were several registered sex offenders in the hotel at the time of Elisa's death. Jake Anderson himself suspects perhaps a date rape that became a murder. Mystery author JH Moncrieff agrees, writing at one point that “Personally, I think she was murdered, and not by a ghost, either.”  Ultimately, we may never know what happened to Elisa. But there's one more theory I'd like to share with you, which may be no more true than the others, but which accounts for at least most of the facts: It's possible that Elisa may have indeed gone skinny dipping in the water tower, perhaps in a manic state, with whoever she was playing with in the elevator footage. This person may also have helped her open the lid to the cistern. She took off her clothes, her watch, and her hotel key card, placing them in a pile on the floor of the roof, picking up the particulate matter that was found on them, and jumped in the water first. Quickly realizing that there was no way to get back out, her companion perhaps panicked (if this hadn't been the plan all along), and rather than getting help, threw her clothing and personal effects in after her, and left her to die. It's hard to hope for an answer to the mystery of Elisa Lam's death. At the time of this recording, it has been eight years. There is hope, however: recently, Netflix has released a documentary, and Jake Anderson has drummed up new interest with Gone At Midnight. With luck, this new spotlight on the case will lead to fresh information on Elisa, her last days, and perhaps finally an answer to the circumstances surrounding her tragic loss.    

EPISODE: 1  THE INTERVIEWTosh Berman—poet, publisher, bookstorebuyer, record store clerk, son of artistsWallace and Shirley Berman—discusses hismemoir, entitled simply Tosh (CityLights). The subtitle says it all: “Growingup in Wallace Berman’s world.”THE READING  Tosh reads from Tosh, his memoir.Credit: Music by Thelonious Monk   

Interesting insights, provocative commentary and music from Tosh Berman, Beatie Wolfe, The Dark Bob, Brendan Constantine, Phil America, Nancy Baker Cahill and Christie Hayden

Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work. All previously uncollected, these pieces range from sharp personal essays on body image and the male gaze to playful meditations on everything from ballroom dancing to kissing to perfume. There are breathtaking celebrity profiles, too. In one, Nicolas Cage takes her for a ride in his '67 Stingray and in another she dishes about dragging Jim Morrison to bed before the Doors had even settled on a band name ("Jim was embarrassing because he wasn't cool, but I still loved him," she writes). In another essay, the author ponders her earliest days in the spotlight, posing nude with Marcel Duchamp, and in another, the never-before-published title essay, she writes about the tragic accident that compelled her to leave that spotlight behind forever.

Tosh Berman chats with Hole in the Air's Gabrielle Neuman, Paul M. Neuman and Renee Nahum about his book, Tosh: Growing up in Wallace Berman's World, as well as about many other famous and not so famous folks, music, L.A.,and even the TV Show The Rifleman.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp talks about Lit Lit festival and Tosh Berman’s memoir

Tosh Berman, the son of the artist Wallace Berman, describes his childhood surrounded by the revolutionary artists of the Beat movement.

TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music, and literature, with local and international luminaries regularly passing through. Tosh's unconventional childhood and peculiar journey to adulthood features an array of famous characters, from George Herms and Marcel Duchamp, to Michael McClure and William S. Burroughs, to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Toni Basil. Tosh is joined by actor, screenwriter, and musician Jason Schwartzman.

Tosh Berman's memoir, Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World, is a depiction of culture brought into Los Angeles from the rest of the world: reinvented to be here.

Author and publisher Tosh Berman, son of the influential artist Wallace Berman discusses his upcoming memoir, Tosh, Growing Up In Wallace Berman's World. Tosh spins tales of growing up with the likes of beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, being cast as a young boy in Warhol's Tarzan movie with Taylor Mead, hanging with Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as with Dennis Hopper, Neil Young and anyone else that mattered in the California art scene from the 50's to the 70's. Tosh, Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World out on January 22, 2018 on famed City Lights Press is a complete portrait not only of the time but also of Wallace Berman the artist and his continuing contribution to history. This is a lively interview for the record.

Hello everyone! I talked with Tosh Berman, an influential and beloved member of the Los Angeles literary scene, on his new book entitled, Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World. This book is a masterful story of growing up as the son of the well-known artist Wallace Berman, who is often referred to as the creator of Assemblage Art and was a beloved figure in the early "beatnik" or hippie scene in California. Tosh recounts his unique childhood and talks openly about the cavalcade of luminaries that visited his home, his father's influence in the art world, and the impact of Wallace's untimely death on the young Tosh.  Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman's World is published by City Lights books, and is a beautifully written, honest, and endearing memoir of a unique upbringing. The book will be available on Amazon and directly from the publisher. You can learn more about Tosh's book, and Tosh himself, here: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100746120&fa=description Thank you, and enjoy the show!    

Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema (Visible Press) Slow Writing is a collection of articles by Thom Andersen that reflect on the avant-garde, Hollywood feature films, and contemporary cinema. His critiques of artists and filmmakers as diverse as Yasujirō Ozu, Nicholas Ray, Andy Warhol, and Christian Marclay locate their work within the broader spheres of popular culture, politics, history, architecture, and the urban landscape. The city of Los Angeles and its relationship to film is a recurrent theme. These writings, which span a period of five decades, demonstrate Andersen’s social consciousness, humour and his genuine appreciation of cinema in its many forms. Thom Andersen’s films include the celebrated documentary essays Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975), Red Hollywood (1996), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015). Of the thirty-four texts included in the book, six are hitherto unpublished; others have been revised or appear in different versions to those previously available. Praise for Slow Writing “There are few writers and few filmmakers who make me rethink what cinema is more than Thom Andersen. Sometimes this is a matter of introducing fresh perspectives, such as making cinema and architecture more mutually interactive. It’s always a political matter of figuring out just who and where we are, and why.”----- Jonathan Rosenbaum “In his disarmingly plainspoken introduction, Thom Andersen more or less apologizes for not becoming a film critic, and for not delivering a manifesto. Slow Writing shows us just how terrific a critic he hasn’t (mostly) bothered to be. This book belongs on a very small and special shelf of the most incisive and ungrandiose books by artists.”----- Jonathan Lethem Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for the city has deeply informed his work, not least his widely praised study of its representation in movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which was voted one of the 50 Best Documentaries of All Time in a Sight & Sound critics’ poll. Andersen made his first short films and entered into the city’s film scene as a student of USC and UCLA in the 1960s. His hour-long documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974) was realised under an AFI scholarship and has lately been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. His research into the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist, done in collaboration with film theorist Noël Burch, produced the video essay Red Hollywood (1996) and book Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (1994). Andersen’s recent films include Reconversão (2012) on the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015), a personal history of cinema loosely inspired by Gilles Deleuze. A published writer since 1966, Andersen has contributed to journals such as Film Comment, Artforum, Sight and Sound and Cinema Scope. He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987, and was previously on faculty at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. Also a respected film curator, he has acted as programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum and curated thematic retrospectives for the Viennale. Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema is the first collection of his essays.  Tosh Berman is a writer and poet.  His two books are Sparks-Tastic (Rare Bird) and a book of poems, The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding (Penny-Ante Editions).  He is also the publisher and editor of his press, TamTam Books, which published the works of Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Guy Debord, Jacques Mesrine, Ron Mael & Russell Mael (Sparks) Gilles Verlant, and Lun*na Menoh. 

This is my homage to my favorite band, Sparks, and the core of Sparks, brothers Ron & Russell Mael. I speak to Tosh Berman of Tam Tam Books, who wrote a book about a history-making Sparks 21-album concert series in London and who published a book of Sparks song lyrics. I also chat with Eric Theise, an artist, musician and avid and articulate Sparks fan. Laurie Cohen, Director of the Mill Valley Philharmonic, shares her first impressions of Sparks music, and I mention something about each of Sparks' 25 albums from 1972 to the present, and play excerpts from some of my favorite tracks. The episode closes with "Part One" of my conversation with Ron and Russell Mael! There's a great podcast totally dedicated to the music of Sparks called "All You Ever Think About Is Sparks" that can be found at https://sparkspodcast.podbean.com (https://sparkspodcast.podbean.com) if you'd like an even deeper dive into the music of Sparks. Check it out!

Tosh Berman is one of my favorites. We had a podcast together back in 2008, which was big in Japan. During our podcasting reunion, Tosh shares about the process of publishing books in translation, his own writing adventures, why he went to see Sparks every single night of their London performances in 2008, and details about his re-released poetry collection."  The L.A. Times calls Tosh "a Los Angeles original." They are right.  In addition to discussing books and writing, Tosh gives some unusual relationship advice and hints at a new book on this topic.  Definitely our most avant-garde episode so far... you won't want to miss it.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Plum in Mr Blum's Pudding (Penny Ante Editions) “My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.” - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding is Los Angeles native Tosh Berman's first printed collection of poetry. In 1989, Berman left the United States behind, moving to Japan after learning his wife's (artist Lun*na Menoh) mother was ill in Kitakyushu. The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding was penned while both rapt and lost by this transition. Gracefully toiling between the quirky and earnest, these poems describe the liminal space of the foreigner caught between the strange and the familiar. The result is surreal and unclassifiable, a book of love poems overshadowed by isolation and underscored with curiosity and lust. Originally published in 1990 by “Cole Swift & Sons” (Japan) as a small hardcover edition of two hundred copies, this new edition acts to preserve this work and features an introduction by art critic and curator Kristine McKenna and an afterword by Ruth Bernstein. Tosh Berman is a publisher and writer. His press, TamTam Books, has published works by Boris Vian, Guy Debord, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Mesrine, artist Lun*na Menoh, and Ron Mael & Russell Mael (Sparks). He is the author of Sparks-tastic: 21 Nights with Sparks in London. As the son of artist Wallace Berman, Tosh has delivered talks and various essays toward furthering his late father's artistic legacy including his influential folio series, Semina (1955–1964). He resides in Los Angeles. Ruth Bernstein lives in Highland Park where she writes postcards and collects books.

Colin Marshall interviews Tosh Berman, founder of Tam Tam Books and author of "Sparks-Tastic."

Colin Marshall sits down above Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with Tyson Cornell, proprietor of Rare Bird Books and Rare Bird Lit, former longtime Director of Marketing & Publicity at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, punk rocker, and co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales. They discuss the seeming contradiction between Los Angeles' image as an "unreaderly" place and its rank as the largest book market in America; this city's tendency not, unlike other cities, to tell you straight-up what it is; how his study of the American newsstand brought him to Los Angeles, and then to Book Soup; the perspective he gained on Los Angeles through both working newsstands and having as a neighbor the manager of the Laugh Factory; how the reading came first in his life, and then the punk rock; Yes Is the Answer and the supposed antagonism between punk and prog; his time rocking in the both-advanced-and-retrograde Japan alongside former hair metalists; Sparkstastic, the upcoming book on Los Angeles (but England-beloved) band Sparks by Tosh Berman, also formerly of Book Soup; the nature of working at a bookstore, or of trying and failing to work at a bookstore, among the industry's classically high-functioning freaks; how much crazier crazy writers can get than crazy rockers, and the ultimately tiresome nature of the non-Thompson, non-Bukowski literary wild man persona; the way that books and bookstores seem both unimprovable, in away, and yet somehow headed straight for disappearance; why books cost so much, and the advantage of slapping dogs on their covers; and the implications (and potential conspiracy theories surrounding) girls who make millions on their self-published vampire e-books.