William Horberg

Survival is the new Success

"Survival is the new success". 

A friend of mine laid this pithy aphorism on me at lunch the other day.

 

With all of the huge changes going on in Hollywood, as the film industry like all of the other media businesses struggles with how to reinvent itself in the digital age, and companies and jobs disappear left and right like some mass extinction, it certainly felt like a timely message for an age of downsized expectations.

 

But success is such a funny word.

The finely-tuned calibration of success has really been one of the essential arts of Hollywood, as measured out in Box Office Gold or statues of Bald Gold Men at Oscar time, or Power Lists or television Q Ratings or any other quivering celebrity-meter on the internet.

 

Framed in those terms, success can feel always just out of reach for some, or here today and gone tomorrow for others.

 

Pretty ephemeral stuff.

 

Mostly we think of it in terms of popularity or profit, but it really applies to any goal or attainment. It can even apply to failure, if one successfully learns a lesson from one’s defeats or setbacks.

 

When you think about your life and what you have accomplished, how often do we really measure our success in terms of material things? Sometimes we feel successful just getting out of bed or getting our kids to brush their teeth, and sometimes we feel successful for striving towards greater goals, the things that really matter.

 

In my life, no one has taught me more about success than Diego, who, as a boy on the autistic spectrum, works so hard to accomplish things that others might master more simply, but perhaps appreciate less for their ease of attainment. He has his setbacks, but he is rarely defeated when he puts his little mind and heart on a goal.

 

Solar system courtesy of Natalie, Space Man courtesy of Diego

 

If survival is the new success, Diego is not only a survivor but a winner, and we are all made richer for knowing him.

 

william

RARE - Newly Discovered Footage of Duke Ellington and Martha Graham

                     

False advertising, you say?

Well, the music is an Ellington composition - Pie Eye's Blues from his classic Blues in Orbit album.

And Natalie's amazing, original, dance moves could fit right in to a modern dance by Graham.

And this RARE video footage will stand the test of time as part of the archives in our family history. 

It was a golden moment, and I'm glad to have the friendly confines of the Blog to be able to share it with you all here.

Enjoy!

william

HBO Plans Iran Hostage Drama

Hey there! 

Some more "Wonderful" news, as in an exciting new project for Wonderful Films.

Check out this link to the Variety story:

HBO Plans Iran Hostage Drama

Posted using ShareThis

"Play Yourself"

The expression on bass player Charlie Haden's face as he remembers it almost fifty years later is still one of shock and awe: walking into a jazz club to see the legendary Charles Mingus perform, and arriving just as the band has stopped playing and a heated argument has broken out between Mingus and his piano player, leading to Charles walking over to the piano, reaching in through the open top, grabbing a fistful of strings, and ripping them out of the piano!

Haden skedaddled out of there that night as the place erupted in chaos, but the impression of a fiery and vengeful giant of jazz stayed with him, as did the lesson beneath Mingus' outsized actions directed unsparingly at his fellow band member - don't just play the music, don't just play notes, play yourself when you're up there, anything else is crap not to be tolerated.

Or as Haden's longtime collaborator and master of self-expression Ornette Coleman puts it "your thoughts, your feelings, your mood, your politics, your anger, your joy, your love."

Both men, along with fellow musicians Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, are featured in a new documentary from the BBC called "1959: The Year That Changed Jazz", which takes a peek behind the making of 4 seminal albums that were coincidentally all released that same year.

Miles' "Kind of Blue" is the biggest selling jazz album of all-time. Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" played with time signatures and brought 5/4 time not only into jazz but into the white mainstream as the first jazz artist to widely cross over. Ornette Coleman seemed to come out of nowhere with an album arrogantly called "The Shape of Jazz to Come" that admirer Lou Reed says "changed everything".

But, while I love all four of those recordings, it is Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um", and the personality of its creator, that made the strongest impression on me in the documentary.

Not only as a consummate work of creative composition and ensemble performance, but as a fearless cultural and political manifesto from a rousing rebel. Although Columbia would not allow Mingus to include the lyrics to his original song "Fables of Faubus" about the segregationist Arkansas governor Orville Faubus on the album, the mockingly comic song was nonetheless a rallying cry for artists, as Herbie Hancock points out in the film, to tackle head on the political issues of the day.

Jazz was at least 60 years old by the time Charles Mingus composed and recorded this amazing album with its disregard for convention and its synthesis of all the musical idioms and styles that preceded it into its own unique voice.

The voice of course of Charles Mingus, the leading proponent of "play yourself"!

william

The Trick-or-Treaters

Natalie was styling with her homemade Coraline costume. In addition to the yellow boots and rain slicker, you can't really tell in this photo but she has Blue Latex Paint in her hair (will it ever come out???) and a beautiful dragonfly hairpin to match her stop motion animated heroine.

 

Diego was going for a Kung Fu Panda look with a homemade costume styled after the legendary warrior himself, "Po" ! ! Unfortunately, Mom and Dad got the panda's color scheme backwards. Instead of a white tummy circle on a black body, Diego ended up with a black circle on a white body. Most Halloween revelers mistook him for a cow or a puppy, but we decided that his INVERSE PANDA LOOK was totally awesome!

A little face paint, my black trenchcoat and beret, and a quick pilfering of props from Elsa's studios, made for an improvised last minute faux Dali for yours truly. The rudimentary French that I could remember from Miss Epstien's class back at The Latin School of Chicago ("nous mangions dans le restaurant ce soir") didn't add much to the overall effect!

 

Elsa went solidly for the Adorable Look of which she is a living master. Some high quality photos of her outfit can be found at her fashion-leaning blog The Hidden Seed.

 

Although Coraline was a Focus Feature directed by Henry Selick in stop motion animation with a very handmade style, while Kung Fu Panda was a Dreamworks blockbuster, I still think they go together nicely and make a handsome couple.

Don't you?

Happy Halloween!

william

"Heppy" Birthday, Clifford

One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time, Clifford Brown would have turned 89 years old today. Instead, in one of jazz music's many tragic stories in the category of "they died too young", Brown and fellow musician Richie Powell died in a car crash in the rain on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on the way to Chicago for a gig. He was only 25 years old and had been recording for only 4 years, but the music he left behind will live forever!

I found this old birthday card and was waiting for the perfect opportunity to share it with you here. What could be more "hep", that a swinging, soulful solo by "Brownie"?

If you're not familiar with Brown's music, you can't do better than his recording of the swinging "Sandu", which can be found on the classic album "Study in Brown" here.

Enjoy!

william

Halloween Spooks

"Halloween Spooks outside my window, Halloween Spooks behind the tree,

I wish that the children could see, but I can't find them for the life of me,

cause there's Halloween Spooks, outside my Window...."

Nothing says Halloween like the classic Lambert, Hendricks and Ross recording of the ultimate spooky scat-singing song "Halloween Spooks". 

I couldn't find any original footage of the trio performing the song, but here is a nice montage of vintage Halloween images set to the music.

 

Enjoy!

william

The Pumpkin Patch Kids

Diego and Natalie were SUPER excited by our visit to the Pumpkin Patch to pick out our pumpkins for carving into Jack-O-Lanterns this year! We found a new patch called Mr. Bones, which is a clever kid-friendly combination of amusement park, pumpkins and Halloween accessories sure to empty your wallet as it entertains your family.

 

In the fading light of early evening, the trusty old Polaroid does not do justice to the giant paper mache statues of Hekyll and Jekyll hovering over the patch.

 

The handy oversize wagons are good for carting off your massive pumpkin purchases, or whatever other wee Halloween Spooks happen to suddenly materialize for a ride.

 

Diego managed to climb up the Skeleton Slide no problem, but once up top inside the mouth decided that was as far as this little hombre wanted to go. 

Guess who had to climb on up there and slide down with him? Guess who then discovered "hey this IS fun" and then wanted to climb up and slide down ten more times? (Hint: the answer to the first question and the second question is NOT the same person).

Natalie got the biggest pumpkin this year, Elsa's is kind of skinny and tall, Diego's is perfectly round and cute, mine looks perfect from the front but has one of those lopsided flat heads from lazying around on the ground for too long. We got an extra tall pumpkin for extra tall Miro in the hope that he'll make a rare Halloween appearance this year!

william

In Walked Buddy

His students included Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, Sonny Criss and James Newton. He was a founding member of the influential Chico Hamilton Quintet. He was a lifelong friend and frequent collaborator with another famous Angelino jazzman, Charles Mingus. And he is the epitome of the West Coast sound in jazz as a multi-instrumentalist on saxophone, clarinet and flute. 

His name is Buddy Collette and he turned 88 on August 6th this year.

I found these old EP's at a flea market recently, and they reminded me why Collette is one of my jazz heroes. While not the monster improviser or innovator that Dolphy was, Collette was consistently in the groove and imaginative, and he was one of the pioneers of that cool West Coast jazz flute sound. He was also a leader in his day in efforts to desegregate the musician's union in Los Angeles, as well as a civil rights activist!

Collette suffered a stroke in 1998 that left him unable to play anymore, but as a player and educator he is the definition of an Unsung Hero for the many musical gifts he left us, so finding these small albums with their cool, clean graphics seemed like the perfect opportunity to Sing his praises.

william

Billy the Kid

I don't remember when I first discovered that my childhood namesake wasn't actually a William, Bill or Billy after all. His real name was Henry McCarty and he was born exactly 100 years before me, in 1859. 

William H. Bonney turns out to just be one of his many aliases, in a life in which fact and legend have competed ever since the man who reputedly shot him down, Sheriff Pat Garrett, co-authored a book with M.A. Upson called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Then as now, whenever you hear the word authentic, you'll probably do well to assume it means just the opposite.

His story, or whatever version of it the teller chose to tell, has been the fodder for countless books, pulps, magazine stories, movies and television shows throughout the 20th century. King Vidor, Roy Rogers, Robert Taylor and Buster Crabbe were just a few of the film artists who brought their own interpretation to the myth in the early days of talkies. Not to mention Howard Hughes who made marketing history when he featured Jane Russell as The Kid's love interest in "The Outlaw".

Like every legend, time leads to revisionism and reinterpretation. Two of the more interesting later Billy the Kid films are Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun" starring Paul Newman, and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" featuring Bob Dylan in a supporting role and writing his haunting song "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" for the soundtrack. Unfortunately for the Penn film, most scholars today seem to agree that Billy the Kid aka William Bonney aka Henry McCarty was actually right-handed!

This oversize children's book from 1958 really just used the excuse of featuring The Kid on the cover as a lure, as the content was chock-a-block with all kinds of other Western-iana.

Stereotypes like the Mexican bandito (above) and the savage Apache (below) are celebrated in both photographs and paintings within, but it was the fifties, after all!

Notorious outlaw or beloved folk hero? 

The Kid and his exploits belong to a time gone by, and the mythic resonance that his story had for the imagination of generations of kids holds little purchase today, an analog story in a digital universe. But it was fun to come across this mid-century picture book dedicated to his exploits and a celebration of the Western genre.

william