Shanghaied out of Moving Time and into The Eternal Now: The Psychedelic Art of Burt Shonberg.

Burt Shonberg was a Californian artist of the post-war/psychedelic eras who worked in a variety of mediums. In his lifetime, he painted various murals adorning LA nightspots, coffee-houses, and restaurants, as well as album covers for Arthur Lee’s Love, and several specially commissioned works that appeared in two of Roger Corman’s classic Poe adaptations: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and The Premature Burial (1962). Shonberg is a fascinating character: a true sci-fi gnostic who constantly sought to experience a higher, more exalted reality through the psychedelic experience and the language of science fiction movies and the flying saucer craze of the forties and fifties.

Burt was born in Revere, Massachusetts in 1933, and travelled to Los Angeles in 1957 after doing a couple of years of military service followed by study in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In Los Angeles, he first tuned into the strange, mystical currents from beyond that seemed to haunt his life and work. The artist described being routinely hit by VALIS-like beams of illumination:

I had my first dramatic experience beyond the limits of so called ordinary, everyday consciousness. This was not induced by any chemical means or yogic-type efforts on my part, it came by itself and took me by surprize. Every day, for seven years straight, I was hit by a number of widely-separated, monetary blasts of unexpected light. These initial experiences of being unexpectedly and mysteriously shanghaied out of moving time and into The Eternal Now were of such a nature that I saw all the usual, generally accepted notions of what this world is all about as being sheer imagination. (Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Spencer Kansa.)

Between the years of 1958 and ’62, Shonberg was the co-proprietor, along with folk singer Doug Myres and writer George Clayton Johnson (later author of several Twilight Zone scripts, and co-author of Logan’s Run), of a legendary Laguna Beach coffee-house and beatnik “den of inequity” called Café Frankenstein. Decorated by a Shonberg-painted stained glass window depicting the scientific monstrosity and movie icon, Cafe Frankenstein was beloved by a motley crew of beats, surfers, and local teens doubtless in varying stages of Desperation for Kicks. Needless to say, it didn’t play well at all with Laguna’s Square Community. The cafe was first busted for spiking the espresso with brandy, and later for allowing a model to be photographed nude on the premises. It is said that among the regulars were two under-cover detectives who had been dispatched to sniff around for reefer; the two dicks apparently grew to dig the Frankenstein vibes, and became its staunchest supporters. Eventually, the prolonged stand-off with Squaresville came to a head when several ladies from the local Church League marched on the café, claiming that its stained glass window was blasphemous. Burt Shonberg defiantly told the squares to back off, threatening to erect a crucified Frankenstein effigy on front of the café if they didn’t. The squares backed off that day, but it was the beginning of the end of Café Frankenstein. (The whole story sounds like a digression in a Pynchon novel, but it really happened.)

At some point, Shonberg encountered Marjorie Cameron, Jack Parson’s “elemental” partner in the notorious Babalon Working, and a considerable artist and visionary in her own right. The pair lived together for a time in a ranch in the Joshua Tree National Park desert district. Cameron is credited with kicking Shonberg’s mystical tendencies into overdrive, and cementing his fascination with occultism and the new cosmic gnosis offered by the apparent arrival of the UFO. The desert occupied a significant place in the strange and comical saga of the Contactees: George Adamski claimed to have had his first encounter with the Venusian Orthon in the Colorado Desert in 1952; former aircraft mechanic George Van Tassel claimed to have taken his first astral trip on-board a Venusian space ship while mediating near Giant Rock in the Mojave desert. Shonberg met Van Tassel, and, through Cameron, became actively involved in a fascinating subterranean culture that mixed bohemia, occultism, and frequent peyote-aided attempts to initiate intergalactic contact in the timeless, alien wastes of the desert. These strange currents are evident in Shonberg’s fantastic psychedelic artwork, but frequently played havoc with his mental equilibrium. According to his friend, the late actor Dennis Hopper (no model of consistent mental equilibrium himself): “You’d see Burt around all the time, talking to space people or having a conversation with himself while he was walking. He sort of went over the edge.” (Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Spencer Kansa.)

Burt Shonberg passed away in 1977 in the home he shared with fellow artist and sci-fi seeker Ledru Baker, his work having become highly sought after among Los Angeles’ musical and Hollywood elites. The Café Frankenstein continued to be a beat/folkie hang-out under the name 860 Club until 1962, when the land was sold, and the building, including Burt’s murals, demolished; in order, I bullshit you not, to put up a parking lot.

http://www.burtshonberg.com/

I discovered Burt's work through Spencer Kansa's excellent biography of Marjorie Cameron Wormwood Star (Amazon); the Shonberg and Dennis Hopper quotations are derived from that book, as is the information regarding Burt's relationship with Cameron.

Come as Your Madness: Samson De Brier and the Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Imagine you’re a rising Hollywood star in the fifties or sixties. You’re riding the cusp of a wave, on the brink of making it to the lofty heights, to the strange gilded zoo where money, ego, and madness make anything and everything possible and permissible. You have a pointed awareness of being initiated slowly into a world with its own laws and conventions, its own rich history and mythos, woven out of half-truths and an exalted kind of malicious gossip. Hollywood is a place of endless intersections, its mythic canvass crowded with sidelong cameos from politicians, tycoons, mobsters, and gurus. You hear legends about Valentino and the gods and goddesses of the Silent Era, tales of sybaritic orgies that ended in murder, and private megalomanias, peccadillos, and fetishes that wound up in the files of J Edgar Hoover. Your initiation into the Hollywood Babylon wouldn’t be complete, however, without a trip to a certain Victorian bungalow in Barton Avenue, West Hollywood. The bungalow was the home of the self-styled raconteur, aesthete and “Hollywood warlock” Samson De Brier, and throughout the forties, fifties, sixties, and early seventies, it was the scene of a remarkable afterhours artists salon, attended, at some point or another, by a staggering cast of luminaries from the big screen, and far, far elsewhere.

De Brier was born Arthur Jasmine in China in 1910. He was rumoured (very likely by himself) to have been the bastard off-spring of the King of Bavaria. The Jasmines moved to Atlantic City when Arthur was a very young child. According, once again, to the very sketchy providence of legend, his father was a corrupt politician in Atlantic City who was eventually stabbed by a jealous mistress. Fleeing the scandal, the Jasmines washed up in Los Angeles, where Arthur enjoyed a brief and undistinguished career as a child/teen movie star, appearing in 22 films between 1915 and 1925. (Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Amazon.) Of these, the most noteworthy was a 1923 adaptation of Wilde’s Salome, whose beautiful, Beardsley-influenced costumes and sets promted later critics to label it the first art film produced in America:

At age 16, Jasmine set sail for the heady, bustling bohemia of 20s Paris, where he encountered Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and became the lover of Andre Gide. After returning to the States, and trying his hand at a variety of occupations, Jasmine eventually bought a Victorian duplex property on Barton Avenue. The property was situated in an apt location to be haunted by the ghosts of Old Hollywood: a block away was the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, known as Gower Gulch since the silent days when real cowboys had congregated on that street corner, hoping to find work in western pictures at the nearby Christie Studios, and apparently giving birth to the expression “drug-store cowboy” in the process. By renting out the other properties in the duplex, and living in the bungalow to the rear, Jasmine found that he could devote all his time to the activity that best suited his disposition: essentially, the stylized, self-absorbed indolence of the full-time aesthete and bon-vivant. Jasmine adopted the pseudonym “Samson De Brier”, and decorated his home with Art Deco furnishings, oriental rugs, and rare Hollywood memorabilia, until it resembled an opulent, opiated fever-dream; a modest, but serviceable stately Pleasure Dome. Thus established, De Brier began his keeping his salon, and in the ensuing decades, 6026 Barton Ave. would become a strange attractor to a diverse and shifting cast of movie stars, magicians, intellectuals, and degenerates.

Visitors to De Brier's Salon: Stanley Kubrick, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda.

In the forties, De Brier’s orbit was a nexus where various twilight subcultures and scenes converged and coalesced: the Hollywood gay, occult, and drug/bohemian communities were all in evidence. In the early years of the salon, De Brier entertained the gifted rocket scientist and ill-fated magus Jack Parsons, the untalented sci-fi writer and gifted sham-guru L. Ron Hubbard, the composers Igor Stravinsky and Kurt Weill, the writers Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury, and Dorothy Parker, and many others. A teenage Kenneth Anger showed up there, soon to impress Jean Cocteau with his homoerotic 1947 fantasia Fireworks, and De Brier’s salon would maintain a pivotal place in the American experimental/underground film community that emerged in the wake of Maya Deren’s ground-breaking Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). As the decades passed, 6026 remained a kind of living museum exhibit of the increasingly eccentric bohemian pioneers who had had first ventured into the outer limits of drug use and sexual experimentation. Over the years, it would be visited by weirdness-seeking Hollywood luminaries including James Dean, Richard Burton, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, and Jane Fonda. The magickal and exotic ambience of De Brier’s home and salon is preserved in Kenneth Anger’s rapturous underground fantasia The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), which was filmed there, and starred De Brier himself in a variety of roles, alongside Anais Nin and the legendary Babalon herself, Marjorie Cameron:

De Brier passed away in 1995, having lived at 6026 for fifty years. The property went on sale in autumn 2007, described as “the former home of infamous celebrity warlock Samson De Brier” and a “relic from Hollywood’s pre-hippy freak show days.” Whatever ghosts remain there today – whatever flickering shadows of the Dream Factory in its silent infancy, whatever whiff of unspeakable scandal, whatever demons or surreptitious guffaws conjured up by incantations – they must be left to our imagination, like the excitement and curiosity of the various stars as they stood at the threshold of a fading and dreamlike Pleasure Dome, with no telling who – or what – might be within.