Wormwood Star The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron by Spencer Kansa

Author:Spencer Kansa [Kansa, Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: mandrake
Published: 2014-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Aya at the Eronbu ranch: “Cameron had her visions out there.” (Courtesy of Aya’s personal collection).

When it came to Crystal, Cameron made good on her previously reported intention to raise her children with the freedom to do as they liked. Meltzer got a taste of Cameron’s hands-off approach when they went for a meal at a local Chinese restaurant and Crystal ran amok, and her mother refused to intervene when she crashed other people’s tables and bumped into things: “Her attitude was, ‘That’s how she’ll learn.’”

For Joan Whitney, Cameron’s attitude was in accordance with the edicts of Crowley: “I think Cameron was more of the school of ‘You don’t say no,’ and with Crowley, one of the things I learned in life to this day is, it’s very hard to say ‘I’ because you had that thing that if you said ‘I’ you slashed yourself. So I think Crystal was just never told ‘No!’ Aya saw it as a case of like mother like daughter: “Cameron refused to be tamed and so she brought up Crystal that way: uncivilized.”

During the period Cameron spent with Meltzer, she made little reference to her past, save for one key incident: “I remember walking together through a tunnel to North Beach and she admitted that it was the first time in years, since Jack’s death, that she’d been able to walk with her head up and look people in the eyes again.”

Someone that Cameron could look in the eye again was Edward Silverstone Taylor, a Pasadena-born pianist who used to frequent the parties she and Jack threw back in the coach house days. Since then, Taylor had become a well-known hipster on the North Beach Beat scene, organizing such events as the Collective Expressionism happening at The Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac read poetry and participants destroyed a piano and many of the artworks on display.

Taylor also dabbled in film and had devised the Lucitron: an optical projector that could be manipulated to create an endless variety of patterns and colours according to the skill of the operator. After the two of them became reacquainted, Taylor decided to train his visual eye on Cameron, and made her the focus of his seven minute film short Street Fair San Francisco. (4) The silent, colour, home movie-style footage captured Cameron hawking her artistic wares at the bustling street fair on Upper Grant Avenue. Crystal is seen briefly in the film too, holding a naked dolly, as are Wallace and Shirley Berman, who would soon take over Cameron’s vacated apartment on Scott Street. (5)

Among the display of Cameron’s paintings, two pieces really stood out. Crystal was a sublime depiction of her daughter as an elemental sprite, rendered on a discarded door panel, which gave the feel, if not the appearance, of the kind of assemblage art that was being made by some of Cameron’s friends, like the junk artist George Herms. While a canvas, alternatively known as The Beast or The Vampyre Woman, depicted a jackal-like creature with a vaguely human face and a mane of red hair.

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