« January 2009 | Main | March 2009 »
Bill's blog will be on furlough until March 9th. Thanks to everyone who has been following my posts and for all of your incredible feedback and comments. It has been a blast and I hope to return with new stories and stuff to share with you here.
This quote, attributed to the Spanish director Luis Bunuel, and the cool irony of the paradox it represents, is the essence of one of his short masterpieces, the 45 minute black and white "Simon of the Desert", recently released on dvd by The Criterion Collection.
Inspired by the spirit of my new production company Wonderful Films Corp, the blog this week is being turned into a place for all things WONDERFUL.
Did you know that the old "7 Wonders of the World" have been updated???
With a new 21st Century list supplanting or at least augmenting the old one?
Stonehenge, The Eiffel Tower and The Kremlin were only runners-up! Sheesh! It's tough being a Wonder these days!!
Christ Redeemer, Rio
Do you remember learning the old list of wonders growing up?
Inspired by the spirit of my new production company Wonderful Films Corp, the blog this week is being turned into a place for all things WONDERFUL.
It's funny how our notions of wonderful change over time.
This illustration titled "Wonderful World" from a 60's textbook is a great example.
A colorful vision of a utopian future as defined by our production and consumption of energy. Power plants fueled by gas, coal, and nuclear energy tucked beneath an azure sky under snow-capped mountains alongside of a winding and yet dammed up river.
That one tiny windmill innocently tucked on the hillside seems naively prescient of our 21st Century realities of finding sustainable, non-extracting sources of power for our lives.
I love period illustrations depicting future worlds.
It's fun with the benefit of hindsight to look back at the speculations of artists and writers peering into their crystal balls, their vision informed by the assumptions and prejudices of their age.
What wonderful worlds can we conjure up from where we sit today? Things may seem grim at the moment, but if we build it in our imagination, can we will it into existence for our children?
william
Tomorrow: Wonders of the World
Inspired by the spirit of my new production company Wonderful Films Corp, the blog this week is being turned into a place for all things WONDERFUL.
Today's WONDERFUL subject is cartoons, and specifically the art of the graphic novel as practiced by today's contemporary masters like Dan Clowes, the writer/illustrator of "Ghost World", "Hardball", "Ice Haven, and the strip above, appropriately titled "Mr. Wonderful".
Here is a self-portrait of Clowes in his trademark style of inked drawing.
Artists like Clowes and Seth (Gregory Gallant) and Eddie Campbell and Adrian Tomine among others, and publishers like Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics have redefined the notion of the comic book and, following the tradition of Robert Crumb and other pioneers, invented an industry of sophisticated artistic cartoons for adult readers.
James Sturm is an enterprising young man I met several years ago who is a writer and artist and had the compelling but improbable idea to open up a college for aspiring cartoonists. Due to his industry and the support of many other believers, that idea is now a reality, as the Center For Cartoon Studies opened its doors in 2005 in White River Junction, Vermont.
What wonderful work awaits us from the next generation of cartoon artists to matriculate from the Center and share their bent and comic view of our daily lives?
william
Tomorrow: Wonderful World
Inspired by the spirit of my new production company Wonderful Films Corp, the blog this week is being turned into a place for all things WONDERFUL.
In the 60's, this Frank Capra film had not yet achieved the status of a classic or been shown to death as a perennial holiday staple on television. I first saw it at an outdoor screening projected in 16mm on a white sheet in a summer beer garden in Chicago that was running a free series of old movies like Casablanca, Key Largo and others for their patrons.
Later we screened it in one of my high school film classes, but it was at a screening at Wesleyan University where I was a freshman in 1976 that it first landed on me that this was a real work of art.
The next year I had moved to Boston where I had transferred to music school, but I was living in a house near Somerville with some students who ran the film society at Tufts University, and they booked the film to show in their film program.
The print was laying around the house and we watched it repeatedly, memorizing our favorite lines of dialogue like: "Zuzu's petals!" or "Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets it's wings." or one of my favorite characters, Nick the Bartender saying "I don't know you from Adam's off ox." or "Get me, I'm giving out wings."
For my money, it is an almost perfect movie from theme to structure and story to casting and camera and music. Some people called Frank Capra's work corny (they even coined the term "Capra-corn" to decribe his sentimental ouevre), but I fell for this hook, line and sinker at a young age and it has always held up over the years as a movie that stands the test of time.
The nightmare sequence where George Bailey is forced to see the world as it would be if he had never lived is quite affecting, and the whole movie touches deeply on the sense of wonder we all feel at the mysterious and unexpected contours of our lives.
william
Tomorrow: Mr. Wonderful
Inspired by the spirit of my new production company Wonderful Films Corp, the blog this week is being turned into a place for all things WONDERFUL.
Starting today with an homage to one of my favorite books, "Wonderful Life" by the late evolutionary biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould.
Gould had a magical gift for turning scientific facts into colorful narratives and this story about the immensely rich and diverse fossil record found in Canada's Burgess Shale, how the life forms captured there were viewed and classified by the scientific establishment at the turn of the last century, and how this trove was rediscovered and used to redefine our notions about the nature of evolution and bio-complexity on our planet is as thrilling as any potboiler I've read.
In the book, Gould argues against the commonly held view of evolution as being a slow and steady form of progress, from less sophisticated, less complex forms of life to us human beings today at the apex. He uses the imagery of climbing the ladder of life, and how this false perception of us at the top, and of our superiority over those that came before, both human and other species, leads to all kinds of social biases and distorted views of history and our place in nature.
His opposing theory is called "punctuated equilibrium" which describes a world in which things mostly stay the same for long periods of time, and then are disrupted by remarkable periods of growth and change. How often is this true in our own lives? The notion of "success" that we must climb the ladder to obtain, where true happiness awaits us but is always tantalizingly out of reach, is one of the more powerful illusions we all struggle with, as it is an idea that is so powerfully reinforced by our culture and our evolutionary view of ourselves.
william
Tomorrow: "It's A Wonderful Life"
