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Adam Goldberg’s Heart Grows Fonder For: John Tottenham, Poet/Artist

The Goldberg Sisters is the new musical project from Adam Goldberg, the always entertaining actor/filmmaker whose impressive resume includes the likes of Saving Private RyanDazed And Confused, Friends, Entourage, Zodiac2 Days In Paris and the Flaming Lips’ Christmas On Mars. The band’s 10-track, self-titled album (on Apology Music/Play It Again Sam) follows Goldberg’s 2009 musical debut, Eros And Omissions, released under the moniker LANDy. As with that project, The Goldberg Sisters finds Goldberg collaborating with Aaron Espinoza (Earlimart, Admiral Radley), though this time out, the duo was assisted by a handful of other musicians, including Goldberg’s girlfriend Roxanne Daner on violin. The result is a satisfying collection of effects-heavy, urbane psychedelia held together by Goldberg’s high-pitched, Lennon-esque croon. Goldberg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him.

Goldberg: I met John Tottenham in 1991 working at Book Soup after a failed stint at Brentano’s on the heels of a failed stint at college. He was only 29 at the time. But I was 20. And he seemed 53. So he loomed large and old, though his face itself had a peculiar beauty: angular and carved, but almost feminine. He has very soft hands. He was and continues to be the crankiest person I have ever met. Crankier than me. His crankiness an artform. Incredible to think he worked retail. “Book So … ,” he would barely mumble when he answered the phone. He was for many years the greatest writer I never read and perhaps who never wrote. Until finally he revealed his meditations on his inability to write, to create, to meditate. A brilliant and paradoxical book of poems called The Inertia Variations. He’s also a talented artist, known for his paintings of nude girlfriends holding geriatric walkers and other stills of civilized couples in the park—the man often with his fist gently shoved in his lady’s mouth. I made 16mm films that attempted to illustrate his poems.

Video after the jump. Photo by Adam Goldberg.