William Horberg

The Annals of Oddball

A friend of mine shared this book with me and it definitely stands out as one of the oddest, most unique publications I have come across. 

"Ceau" is, of course, short for Ceausescu, the surname of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the long time dictactor and his wife who held power in Romania from 1965 until they were overthrown and executed on Christmas Day in the violent political upheavals of 1989.

My own interest in Ceausescu stems from living in Romania for most of the year in 2002, as it was in a huge field outside of Bucharest and in the mountains of Poiana Brasov three hours north of the city, that we built and filmed the world of 19th Century North Carolina for the movie "Cold Mountain". My driver on that production was a young man in his early thirties, and over the months of driving the long, winding mountain roads of Transylvania, he opened up to me and shared something of his own biography growing up under the dictator.

It turns out that he was a young man in the Army in December 1989, and was on active duty on the night that his whole world changed. In the course of 24 hours, he went from standing guard in the capital while Ceau gave a desperate speech, his last, to the huge crowd that had gathered in the Revolutionary Square. My driver was ordered to face the crowd of demonstrators and shoot if necessary, one of the most tense moments of his life, as for the first time the public courageously turned on their despot and started booing him and rioting. By the next night, after failing to quell the disturbance at the Central Committee headquarters, the first couple fled in their helicopter, and suddenly his orders were reversed as his officers and everyone else tried to save their skin and show their opposition to their former government.

 

"Ceau" the book, is a collection of hundreds of portraits, both naive and professional, of the dictator and his wife, alone or as a couple, and sometimes with smiling children or an adoring public, that were painted over the decades, and collected in this one volume. It is both an art book, and a subtle critique of the psychology of subjugation to power.

 

There are no words accompanying the portraits, but the book ends with the written transcript of the hasty kangaroo-court trial put on by the military before they were summarily executed. 

It is said that the firing squad did not even wait for the customary niceties of putting on the blindfold and tying their hands before they started firing.

If there is an "art" to living, and dying, as a dictator, this odd book really captures it.

william
 
 
 

 

Fair and Unbalanced

I was talking to a screenwriter the other day about the idea of false equivalency; how we are programmed to think in the dichotomy of "on the one hand, on the other hand" or, put more simply, "there are two sides to every story."

I guess we are also programmed to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear, as it wasn't long afterwards that I was reading David Mazzucchelli's new graphic novel "Asterios Polyp", and found this simple illustration that seemed to jump out at me, as I felt that the book was reading my mind, and expressed in simple line drawings and word balloons this idea more clearly and eloquently than I could.

 

But in your experience, how often would you say this "system" isn't mistaken for reality, or for a way of getting at or describing the "truth"? 

We see it all the time in journalism, where a fact is given equal weight as an opinion, and placed in false opposition to each other. Our post-modern world is one of intensely competing narratives, and everyone is a storyteller, trying to wrangle the chaos of life to fit into their own narrative.

It is hard to see the sphere instead of the line, but it is worth the effort sometimes.

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

Il Colore Della Morte!

Fumetti Per Adulti screamed the ad copy! Cartoons for adults. 

Il Colore Della Morte! The Color of Death. 

What an enticement. How could I resist when I saw this vintage horror mag tucked away in a glass cabinet at the Chapel Street Bazaar on my last day in Melbourne, waiting for me to discover it and bring it home to share here with you!

No one did a certain kind of sleazy horror better than the Italians circa the early 1970's. 

In films they called it giallo, and practitioners like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulvi were masters of the genre. But before then, even dating back to the 1920's, there was a robust tradition in Italy of these paperback books and pocket magazines that combined fantastic elements with horror and eroticism.

I was surprised to find that some of the pages in "Jacula" are too xxx-rated to post on a nice wholesome blog like this. 

But you've got to dig the anonymous mad artist(s) who drew and colored these hyperbolic fumetti and the fans who consumed them in massive doses.

william

Parker's Mood

Donald Westlake wrote a series of books under his pen name of Richard Stark featuring a tough criminal named Parker who is a one man army seeking revenge on the mob and the men who double-crossed him. 

The first in the series was called "The Hunter".

Now artist/illustrator Darwyn Cooke has brought Westlake's characters to life in a beautifully drawn graphic novel of the same name that has a cool duotone style while losing none of the rough hewn edges of the original's muscular verve, as you can see from the very first page here.

Here is Cooke's full page portrait of Parker washing his face in the mirror of some dive bathroom. You can almost hear the flies buzzing around the light bulb. 

We're told this is the first in a series and it strikes me a great way to reintroduce these books to a new generation of readers as well as give us old-timers the pleasure of something familiar re-imagined beautifully in a new medium.

Check it out!

william

Something In Common

You know that expression about the person who has excellent taste because it so closely resembles your own?

As a big fan of manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi and his epic memoir "A Drifting Life" about growing up in post-war Japan and being part of the dawn of the manga takeover of pop culture there, I was tickled to discover buried within his meta-narrative that his protagonist and I had two things in common.

First, a passion for the hard boiled noir crime novels of writer Mickey Spillane.

Second, check out this scene of the characters going to attend the Japanese showing of Rene Clement's "Plein Soliel" starring Alan Delon as the "scheming villain". Almost 40 years later, I produced "The Talented Mr. Ripley" based on the same Patricia Highsmith novel as the Delon picture.

Funny how certain pop culture influences ripple across time and borders.

Mr. Tatsumi, I admire your taste!

william

Sketches of Tatsumi

Here are a few more handmade sketches of characters out of "A Drifting Life", Yoshihiro Tatsumi's epic autobiographical masterpiece on the history and development on the Japanese comic book form known as manga.

Kuroda was a colleague and rival at Tatsumi's manga publishing house, the Hinomaru Bunko Co, Ltd.

Shuzo Yamada was one of the bosses there.

In the book, the protagonist's name is Hiroshi Katsumi, a thinly veiled stand in for the author, and his older brother, pictured above, is Okimasa. There is a wonderful story of sibling rivalry threaded through the narrative. Okimasa suffers from pleurisy, and stays home in bouts of lethargy, while living both vicariously and jealously through Hiroshi's adventures.

Thinking of the great documentary "Crumb" about comic book legend Robert Crumb, and also about "Epileptic", an amazing French memoir in the form of a graphic novel by the artist David B., I am struck by the coincidence of all three of these artists who were so influenced by their older brothers. In each story the older talented brother has some handicap or illness which limits their ability to pursue their own path as an artist, while at the same time inspiring the work of their younger sibling. 

For Hiroshi in the book, drawing manga is an experience comparable to a "runner's high", an out of body sensation he gets when so engrossed in the imaginary world he is drawing and the lives of the characters he is portraying.

Still going strong in his 7th decade, Yoshihiro Tatsumi is running life's marathon, and his work just keeps getting deeper and wiser and giving us a "reader's high"!

william

A Drifting Life

I briefly met the great Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi when he was autographing copies of his beautiful book "The Push Man and other stories" at the ComiCon in San Diego a few years ago. The next year I got his collection "Abandon The Old in Tokyo". They are the works of a master storyteller and it was really cool to get him to draw a cartoon inscription into each edition.

But I didn't really know that much about him, or his historical place in the history of Japanese comics. A lack of knowledge that I can now correct, as his latest work "A Drifting Life" may be his masterpiece, an 834 page autobiographical memoir in manga form that tells his life story as it parallels and coincides with (and Tatsumi plays a major role in) the birth and development of Manga in postwar Japan.

I copied a few drawings from the pages of the book as an homage and appreciation and a way to share them with you on the blog (and because I do not have a scanner here while I am working in Melbourne!).

While still in high school Tatsumi started drawing the 4 panel cartoon strips that were starting to appear in newspapers in Japan in the late 1940's and early 1950's as the country started to pull itself out from under the ashes of its wartime defeat and post-war occupation. He won a local competition and eventually got to meet his hero Osamu Tezuka who is really the godfather of Japanese manga. He even formed a kind of junior league manga club with other young fans around the country who shared their work with each other and helped to promote the books and artists they liked.

Tatsumi's simple, elegant drawing style is a real pleasure, but more than the artwork, he has a great story to tell and is a natural storyteller, full of humor and humanity. What a gift that he shares with us his life story in this artistic format that he himself helped to invent and shape!

william

Tomorrow: More Tatsumi!

Buddy Up!

My wife, the artist Elsa Mora, has been an inspiration to me and to countless others around the planet who have seen her fine art work in museums and galleries, her intricate paper cutting and craft work as featured in her Etsy store and her blog, and have read her personal stories of growing up in Cuba and her life as an artist there.

Now she has entered the publishing world with a book just out from German artpub Te Neues called "Blossom Buddies". If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to check it out here.

It has a fairy-tale history as it started with a backyard exploration one day by our autistic son Diego which led Elsa to make these little creatures out of flowers and other organic material she found in our modest garden. After photographing the "flower people" and posting a few of the pictures online, she was struck by the outpouring of comments about her creation. In the new way of the net she got an email out of the blue from a woman in Germany who worked as an editor at Te Neus and felt that the pictures and the idea behind them would make a great book. 

Having never heard of Te Neues before, Elsa researched them online and found that they are one of the major publishing houses in the world and one of the pioneers of the marketing of images in museum stores and art book stores everywhere. She became pen pals with the people in Germany who spearheaded the project, asking her to create and photograph hundreds of individual flower personalities in order to arrive at the images in this beautiful book.

Now less than a year later, having never met them in person, her book has arrived in both old school brick and mortar bookstores and virtual bookstores everywhere. 

The new way of the world!

Enjoy!

william

On The Way Home

Graham Greene never wrote a novel with that title.

But he started to, and he made notes on the characters and plot he intended to dramatize, which became a kind of running commentary throughout the book he did write, "Getting to Know The General" about a relationship he formed fairly late in his long life with the then-leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos Herrera.

Greene's guide as he tours the backcountry of Torrijos' Panama, then divided into the Republic of Panama and the American-controlled Canal Zone, is a poet/mathematician named Chuchu who is working as a military aide to the General. His frequent refrain as they are shut out of various locations Greene is interested in investigating is they will see it "on the way back", and an idea takes place in the novelist's head - the story of a journey unfulfilled - "there would be no going back for my chief character."

The imagined elements of the book are typical of Greene's blend of exotic locale and political intrigue: "..the dangerous situation between Panama and the States; Chuchu himself; the bomb in his car; the expression he had used in the motel - "A revolver is no defense"..."

But later, in a really insightful look at the writing process from a master, he admits the reason he stumbled with this yarn and never got beyond sketching the first chapter or two: "for the first time as a novelist I was mistakenly trying to use real characters - the General, Chuchu - in my fiction. They had emerged from life and not from the unconscious and for that reason they stood motionless like statues in my mind - they couldn't develop, they were incapable of the unexpected word or action - they were real people and they could have no life independent of me in the imagination."

Instead Greene writes a compassionate account, almost a diary, of the many visits he makes to Panama as a guest of Torrijos during the crucial years of his negotiations with the United States over the treaty to turn control of the Canal Zone back to Panama; an agreement that was finally reached between Torrijos and President Carter, but then was controversially amended by the U.S. Senate after it had been signed by both countries in a lavish ceremony attended by the heads of state of all of the Latin American countries, which at that time included several right-wing dictators like Videla of Argentina, Stroessner of Paraguay and Pinochet of Chile.

As Greene relates the anecdote, Torrijos was unhappy that Carter invited these leaders to attend the signing, as none had supported him during his long years of struggle to gain the treaty. In the formal ceremony after the signing, he kept his distance and limited himself to a cool handshake with each. But the wily Pinochet noticed his actions, and as he approached, he grabbed him in a warm embrace so the media and the American people and the anti-Pinochet demonstrators filling the streets outside would all forever see Torrijos as one of his own kind.

In 1981, Omar Torrijos, "on his way home" by plane to a small village in the mountains of Panama, disappeared. The wreckage of the plane and his body were later found, and while at the time it was denied, subsequent revelations make it more widely believed today that he was the victim of a CIA bomb in his plane, just the kind of bomb that Greene imagined in the plot of the book he never wrote!

william