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more exciting if a full run of the originals weren't in the very first vitrine of "Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle," a kaleidoscopic but surprisingly coherent show at SMMOA that collects artworks and ephemera from 50 of Berman's closest friends.

Derived jointly from the Semina roster and a mother lode of never-before-seen photographic portraits culled from the thousands of unprinted negatives in the artist's estate - Berman was killed by a drunk driver on the eve of his 50th birthday in 1976 - "Semina Culture" provides a rich and detailed historical cross section of a fascinating layer of American culture and a superabundance of cool art. Co-curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna (both occasional Weekly contributors), "Semina Culture" casts a wide net and serves up a smorgasbord of old rubber boots and ripe red herrings - beautiful if you have eyes to see, and deeply compelling if you're looking for a few good stories. 

Take Cameron, for example, a.k.a. Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, cover girl for Semina 1 and author of the specific line drawing (a peyote vision in the doggy style) that sent the LAPD into such a tizzy. Cameron is known to aficionados of arcane Angeleno lore as the elemental vessel for Jet Propulsion Lab founder Jack Parsons and pre-Scientology L. Ron Hubbard's "Babalon Working" - an attempt to spawn a "moonchild" or apocalyptic "Scarlet Woman" to usher in a global empire based on the magickal principles of Aleister Crowley's Thelema. You know. After Ron fucked off with Parsons' wife, Betty, and 10 large of his petty cash, Jack married Cameron before dying in a mysterious chemical explosion in his garage in 1952.

That's a great story, but you don't need to know any of it to appreciate the sampling of Cameron's visual art on display in "Semina Culture" - sinewy figurative works including the original "peyote" drawing. Nor do you need to know the story behind Jay DeFeo's monumentally thick 1-ton painting, The Rose, to savor the peculiarly gnarly studio stool - encased in seven years' worth of the same white paint - she gave to Bruce Conner (whose seven-minute black-and-white documentary on the painting's eventual removal from DeFeo's San Francisco studio - at the behest of Walter Hopps - is included in a night of related screenings at American Cinematheque). This sort of intricate overlapping of personal and art-historical melodramas underlies "Semina Culture" like a fungal mycelium, and is to some extent responsible for the exhibit's success.

Unraveling every last rhizomatic strain of these tangled histories is impossible. Text panels provide some context; the excellent catalog quite a bit more. The show is laid out with a simple recipe: a newly printed Berman photo portrait of the artist or poet in question, followed by a selection of their work. Some, like Henry Miller, Dennis Hopper, Toni "Oh Mickey You're So Fine You're So Fine You Blow My Mind Hey Mickey Hey Mickey" Basil, and a who's who of has-been child actors, including Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Billy Gray and Bobby Driscoll, will be puzzlingly familiar to the most casual viewer. Art types will recognize Conner, DeFeo, Jess, Altoon, Joan Brown and many other luminaries. Literati will thrill at the inclusion of the West Coast Notebooks of Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras street posters and the teletype scroll manuscript of Kirby Doyle's forgotten Beat novel Happiness Bastard.

But nobody will get it all. Which means that, sooner or later, you allow yourself to give up, to surrender to the immediate gestalt of the collection and the pleasures of its individual components, secure that web upon web of meaning lies beneath every pregnant surface. As in Wallace Berman's art. The Verifax radio collages - just on example of which is squeezed in here - coax and disrupt our hard-wired penchant for linear narrative, atomizing what we want to be a storyboard sequence into a timeless aggregate of moments, presented to us with the sole directive "Behold." "Semina Culture" demonstrates materially how the same formula was manifested in Berman's social life, infusing it with creativity and hidden layers of meaning, and making it an art-generating engine that churns on to this day.

SEMINA CULTURE: WALLACE BERMAN & HIS CIRCLE | BERGAMOT STATION G1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica | Through November 26

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