to. Not only was it played on a constant basis in our household, but my German grandmother, Martha, also owned a copy, so when I visited her, I heard it there too. It’s a fantastic album on many levels. The songs by Lenya’s husband Weill and Bertolt Brecht are brilliant. The melodies steeped into my childhood like Peter Lorre’s voice calling out to a child in the Fritz Lang film M (1931). Also, one of the first TV shows that I can remember was The Ernie Kovacs Show (1961–62). The program used Lotte Lenya music for its theme song, which was weird enough because that show was such an odd one for a small child to watch. Even as a teenager, I couldn’t escape: The Doors recorded “Alabama Song” (1966) and later David Bowie did a version (1980) as well. I can’t ignore the three recordings of that song. It is not about love or hate. The melody and the song are stamped on my personality.
With that in mind, it’s probably not so strange that I was raised with an image of Jean Cocteau always somewhere around the house. Cocteau was a poet, and he made poetic novels, poetic drawings, poetic art, and of course, poetic cinema. Cocteau’s definition of cinema was “poetry written on light,” which is, in theory, an excellent explanation of movies. As I mentioned before, Wallace never talked about why he liked an individual artist or art movement, but he often showed his affection by putting the artist’s image up on the studio wall, or wherever he did his artwork. The house on Scott Street had homages to the great on its walls. Someone like Cocteau made such an impression on Wallace, I think, not only due to his skills as an artist and filmmaker but also for the way he transformed his world into an artistic landscape. Cocteau’s taste reshaped his world as his personal platform. Wallace was attracted to this artist who conveyed his signature with not only poetry, but also with films, prose, drawings, and his own outsize personality.
WALLACE BERMAN / John Wieners, at 707 Scott Street, San Francisco, 1959
At the time, Cocteau’s poetry was published here and there in English. My dad published one of the poems and a drawing in Semina, but Cocteau’s films made the deepest impression on Wallace and his circle during the early ’50s. A family friend and filmmaker from the Bay Area, Lawrence Jordan, owned a 16mm print of Cocteau’s Orpheus (1949). He had an incredible collection of 16mm film prints, and he would treat us to a movie after dinner. I remember I was very fond of Lawrence’s little handmade books of stills from his favorite films. Each book was focused on one film. He made one of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944), as well as Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), among others. I presume he took photographs of the movie screen. These private showings were a real treat for me as a kid, not only for the exposure to such remarkable films as a child, but also for the seriousness of the proceedings, the sense that what we saw on the blank white wall was something incredible. Lawrence would never show anything less than fantastic. Even with the films I didn’t pick up on, owning to my tender age, I had a delightful time sleeping in front of the images flickering on the wall. The comfort of being in a dark room with my parents and their good friend made me sleepy, and that feeling has stayed with me forever. I remember watching a variety of films over at his house, but without a doubt, dinner was always spaghetti. So to this day, when I think of Orpheus or The General, I immediately think of spaghetti with tomato sauce.
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