William Horberg

"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

Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria

Twenty-three years after I moved to Los Angeles, 49 years after the fabled Pacific Seas closed its doors, 113 years since the family of Clifford Clinton got into the cafeteria business in California, and 78 years since CLIF-ford Clin-TON took the first syllable of his first name and the last syllable of his last name and put them together to open Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria on Broadway in old downtown Los Angeles, I finally took the family there for a food adventure and a taste of Southern California history.

 

The all-you-can-eat for 64 cents sign may be a thing of the past, but the Clifton philosophy of paying what you can afford and feeding the poor and homeless, born in the middle of the last Great Depression, lives on today. At the height of the depression, Clifford opening a "penny cafeteria" and served over two million "guests" for free.

 

The unassuming facade is a far cry from the massive over-the-top Polynesian-themed front for The Pacific Seas which caused an outcry from the City Commissioners when first unveiled in all of its Tiki glory.

 

But the street entrance still has the old mosaic tiles and the entry to the cafeteria and the steam tables and tray lines hasn't changed much over the decades.

 

The jello is electric green and the strawberry pie glows neon red under the serving lights, as Elsa tries to decide on a dish.

 

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

Hot Turkey, Candied Ham, Roast Beef and other old-school staples are carved to order.

 

The kids loved to Redwood Forest decor, including a waterfall and stream running past the tables. Diego wanted to dive in, but cooler heads prevailed.

 

This colorful Clifton regular generously allowed us to take his picture. Wonder how many years he's been making this part of his routine?

Mother and daughter share a smile and a piece of cornbread, just another example of the parade of satisfied customers that have walked through the doors of Clifton's eatery over the last seven decades.

It's an amazing story and a special place that is so out-of-time it is hard to believe that it still exists in the 21st century.

Check it out while it is still here!

william

DIY Postmodernism

I came across a website called Postmodernism the other day, dedicated, amazingly enough, to all things postmodern, and one item there really made me laugh.

It was an incongruous mash-up of two of my favorite things, cartoons and poetry, with words by Frederick Nietzsche affixed to an illustrated image by Family Circus creator Bill Keane. It is given as an example of the post-modern technique of pastiche, or "pasted" elements of previous genres and styles of literature to create a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their contemporaries.

 

It inspired me to try my hand at the same, and I came up with this postmodern pairing of Charlie Brown and Lucy, with words from the Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.

Feeling postmodern? Does anyone want to try their hand at their own pastiche or mash-up? What words would you marry to this wonderful illustration by children's artist Willy Schermelé to give it a new context and meaning?

 

Send me your own pastiche and I'll post it here!

Enjoy!

william

Golden Delicious

It was an unexpectedly sunny rural plot for what I had anticipated to be a dark urban noir classic. 

A wised-up guy gets a tip on a sun-dappled hillside chock-a-block with the season's first crop of Golden Delicious apples. Another guy, just-back-from-sea, and recognizing a main chance when he sees one, strikes an uneasy partnership with the wise guy. Pooling their cash and their held-together-by-spit Army surplus trucks, they drive out to the farm, strike a bargain for as much of the crop as their axles can bear, and put the pedal to the metal to deliver their precious fruit to the San Francisco farmer's market.

Could Jules Dassin's "Thieves Highway" be the only classic film noir whose narrative revolves around Apples?

 

Based on a novel by A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides (who also wrote another noir classic about men and cars and driving with your brights on, Raoul Walsh's "They Drive By Night"), Dassin brings his usual flair for location shooting, great casting, and memorable performances in a film that looks at the gritty underside of the fruit and vegetable trade.

Lee J. Cobb is great as the amoral Italian produce wholesaler Mike Figlia, and Richard Conte is the sailor looking to avenge his father's crippling truck "accident" at the hands of a couple of Figlia's goons, who sees this Big Score flipping his crop of Golden Delicious as the way to kill two birds with one stone. Alternatively tough and foolish, he falls under the spell of fruit market streetwalker Valentina Cortese, who works for Figlia but sides with Conte when the going gets tough.

 

But character actor Millard Mitchell really steals the show as chiseling apple hustler Ed Kinney, who shows his true stuff by saving Conte's life when his truck collapses on him while trying to change a flat tire, but loses his own when his truck loses control coming down the mountains, spilling his load of apples down the hillside while his cab explodes and he goes up in flames. 

It is one of those horror-in-broad-daylight moments, and Dassin talks about the shot of the accident and the tumbling apples as one of his proudest moments, as he recollects details of making the movie in an interview on this Criterion Collection dvd. 

There is a wonderful moment where Dassin's waxes poetic about his interest in markets, the noises, the commerce, the behavior of the professionals who work there, and you can see how that passion translates into the loving detail and documentary quality he brings to getting it right when he shot this movie on location in San Francisco's old market. You can almost taste the first bite of that ripe Golden Delicious apple, even if the crooked fruit dealer is rotten to the core!

Check it out.

william

As The Crow Flies

"The Moon belongs to everyone, the best things in life are free."

When it comes to fun things to do with the kids, let's just say that I'm a big believer in the Lew Brown, B.G. DeSylva and Ray Henderson  (lyricists of the song above) school of parenting.

Diego really loves airplanes, watching them, going on them, and flying his own. 

Paper airplanes, balsa wood and styrofoam gliders, and their rubber-band powered cousins are old-school - inexpensive, fun to assemble, get outside and fly. 

So while not exactly free, it was a treat to stumble upon this grandfather of all such airborne contraptions in a small shop when we were at my cousin's wedding in Amherst a few weeks ago. Known as The Crow, it was designed in Japan by Chuhachi Ninomiya all the way back in the pre-Wright Brothers year of 1899, and is still being manufactured today for the enjoyment of Japanese children of all ages. 

Ninomiya died in 1915, but here is a picture of some of his earliest rubber-band model airplanes that he designed himself.

 

 

Our model, above, (lovingly photographed by Elsita), looks like it came assembled out of the box, but it was actually the result of a few hours of glueing, sanding and assembling and Dad following fairly poorly translated Japanese directions, until finally painting the whole thing black, as the pieces supplied are white styrofoam and tan balsa wood. Amazingly, Diego sat at the table for the duration, really enjoying the process of building something from scratch.

Here is the young aviator himself, having fun with his "Crow".

You can get your own "Crow" model kit to assemble here at Brooklyn 5+10!

Enjoy!

william

Whipped Cream (and other delights)!

The old Farmer's Market is one of the best places in Los Angeles, and one of the best places in the old market is Bennett's Ice Cream, where Natalie and Diego recently went to try out their homemade Strawberry flavor!

The nice man at the counter recognized two patrons and connoisseurs and with the extra touch that makes Bennett's special, added a blast of Whipped Cream to the top of the small cups.

It looks like serious business for these two. Diego ate the whipped cream off the top, but Natalie, like a true artist, mixed hers in, making an even more pink concoction.

I think we all know that sometimes spoons are just inadequate for the task at hand! Especially where there is Whipped Cream involved!

Thanks, Bennett's!

william