Collaboration recommendation gratification
Includes Moog elephant money
The type of writing I do for this newsletter is generally pretty different from what I do every day in my job as a corporate communicator, but sometimes the diagram overlaps. This week my workplace published a blog I wrote about methods of stoking group creativity that go beyond traditional brainstorms. Like it or not, we live in a digital world, which makes it easier to create collaboratively over time and distance - it just means thinking a little differently about how we connect. So here are some thoughts about that!
Excitingly, I was also asked to illustrate the post (as well as the first and second posts in the series), and one of our talented animators brought it to life. Look at it up there! My baby’s all grown up!
So I hope one of the reasons you read this newsletter is because you’re curious. Sure, most of you know me in real life, so of course I value loyalty, friendship, all that rot. But if you keep coming back, I’d like to think it’s because you want to learn about something new - because I provide a thread that you can follow through the endless labyrinth of our culture to discover books or movies or artists or videos or experiences you think you might like.
As newsletters go, one of my own most cherished threads to follow over the past few years has been The World of Tosh Berman. Tosh is a poet, essayist, critic, editor, and publisher who writes several posts a week about the books and music he’s consuming at any given moment. His eclectic tastes spin me out in all possible directions - over the past week, for instance, he’s written about the prose work of poet John Ashbery, the latest album by The Smile, and a novel by the French writer Michel Butor, which Tosh discovered through the Ashbery book (see, a thread!).
I first learned about Tosh through his work as an editor of work by the French writer and musician Boris Vian. I’ve only just slowly dipped into the world of Vian, who was a playful renegade and experimentalist, but his 1950 Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, first published in English in 2005, is a delightful snapshot of postwar Paris, equal parts snarky and spellbound. That edition was edited by Tosh, who I followed from his introduction to the book to Goodreads to his newsletter, where he’s written capsule critiques of books by many other interesting French authors, along with Japanese, British, and American counterparts.
One of the things that makes Tosh’s perspective so interesting is his own unique background. I recently read his moving, melancholic memoir of growing up as the child of artists in bohemian Los Angeles during the ascendance of the ‘60s counterculture. It was a time when high art and Hollywood rubbed elbows in unexpected ways, meaning young Tosh came into close contact with figures ranging from Dennis Hopper to Marcel Duchamp. He played Tarzan’s son in a Warhol film and was babysat by Leslie Caron. And, of course, he ended up in a lot of situations that a kid really shouldn’t be in.
But beyond the gossip (and the book does feature some incredible anecdotes), it’s a powerful portrait of a bygone world. It’s through Tosh that I learned about his father Wallace Berman, a Beat-adjacent visual artist who served as a linchpin of this L.A. scene. Wallace Berman is one of those quietly influential figures who rest just beneath the surface of the mainstream - but once you know about them, you suddenly see them everywhere. He’s one of the faces on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album! He was a pioneer of assemblage art, beating the Pop artists to some of their signature tropes, and was an innovative small-press publisher who created the legendarily rare art and poetry journal Semina. But he was a quiet eccentric who eschewed the typical paths to art-world stardom, so his tragically early death in 1976 - just a few months before I was born - meant he never quite achieved the fame that was his due.
In his memoir, Tosh is very candid about both the power and the pain that come from being raised a lurch to the left of the mainstream. But the fact that this background launched him into a life of writing and publishing informed by his early experiences is everyone’s gain.
I have a handful of other posts up my sleeve, but none of them are quite cooked yet. So instead, I figured I’d leave you with a handful of quick video recommendations. Are you okay with that?
All of these date from a few years before and after I was born - I keep finding myself unconsciously drawn to artifacts from that time, and it’s no wonder, because that’s the stuff that was cluttering up the place when I got here. In fact, I didn’t even notice the temporal proximity of these three clips until I saw them all together here in chronological order.
In 1969, Leonard Bernstein introduced a bunch of bored, incredulous, but strangely well-behaved kids to the Moog. Someone answer me seriously, did this scene end up in Bradley Cooper’s movie? (Also, is anyone else utterly incapable of pronouncing “Moog” properly? I toe the line in polite company, but at home and in my head I pronounce it like it looks.)
The funky animation style of this 1975 educational film “Pink Elephant” belies a compassionate and non-judgmental message about alcoholism - come for the cartoon weirdness, stay for the disarmingly moving story arc and comments section.
Maybe you’ve heard this oddball cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” by experimental British outfit the Flying Lizards, which was a bizarrely huge hit in 1979. Even if you have, this Dutch TV appearance does a great job of making hay with the artificiality of the whole “live” lip-sync format. And vocalist Deborah Evans-Stickland delightfully channels Veruca Salt more directly than the band that was named after her.
Hopefully these will keep you busy for a few minutes this weekend. If you follow any of the threads that these lay out for you, be sure to let me know where they lead!