William Horberg

Star Student

 

Natalie came home with this "star student of the month" certificate from school right before the Thanksgiving break.

We're proud of our star student and are sure this is the first of many!

Congratulations, Miss Natalie!

Dad

Matt Damon Is A Liar!

And as an actor, a damn good one, too. 

In watching his portrayal of the unbelievably, pathologically truth-challenged Mark Whitacre in Steven Soderbergh's latest film "The Informant", it was hard for me not to connect this performance and this character with the role he played ten years ago in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", another story of a perverse fabulist whose every blithe utterance suborns reality to his own purpose.

For me, Damon, for all of his success, is one of the most under-appreciated actors of his generation. Since acting itself is a form of lying, or "behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances", it is a mark of his craft that he has a unique ability to get under the skin of characters like Thomas Ripley and Mark Whitacre and show the humanity within the turning wheels of their elaborate artifice.

Although the tone of "The Informant" is quite different than "Ripley", with Soderbergh turning his liar's tale into a black comedy and Anthony Minghella giving his a more Hitchcockian treatment, with Damon's solid skills in common, they are companion pieces in the great American theme of reinvention through fabrication.

william

Happy Thanksgiving

(Natalie protects her little brother from some over-excited Turkeys)

Enjoy!

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

(Autistic) Kids Say The Darndest Things

Fifty-some years ago, Art Linkletter, the radio and television host from Moose Jaw, Canada, made a career out of paying attention to the brilliant comic malaprops of children.

Our autistic son Diego is also a poet of the comical non-sequitour, in the famous Linkletter tradition. Like a great rapper or a cut-and-paste author like William Burroughs, he has a wonderful memory for sound bites and bits and pieces of pop culture that he picks up from dvd's or billboards or overheard conversation. 

As his vocabulary expands and his reciprocal language grows (yeah!), he is the funniest guy we know, although his biological clock could still use a bit of fine tuning!

These are just a few of the things he said to us yesterday morning.

5:18 a.m. - "I want to go to Fresno."

5:36 a.m. - "Can you draw Candyland, please?"

7:41 a.m. - "Can I have a glass like a Christmas Tree? I want big, strong stripes on my water."

8:18 a.m. - "This one's from the special, secret part, Mom."

11:30 a.m. - "I want Super Up, Papi"

12:30 p.m. - "Hey, what about a heart-shaped bottle of shaving cream?"

 

Believe it or not, Art Linkletter is still with us today, at 97 years old. 

It is hard not to imagine that his longevity could somehow be attributable to those many years of having his heart filled with the laughter and wisdom that came from the "special, secret part" of all those children.

william

The (Not So) Famous Paramount Picture

Even though Paramount Pictures started life in 1912 as Famous Players and made many famous movies over the last century, the 1941 animated gem "Mr. Bug Goes to Town" from Dave Fleischer was not very successful when first released, and in my opinion has been sorely overlooked and under appreciated ever since.

With songs by such luminaries as Hoagy Carmichael and the great Frank Loesser, and charming character design and animation, this tale of a garden of small insects uprooted by the construction of a modern skyscraper is a distant precursor of contemporary classics like A Bug's Life and even Up.

 

The story is a love triangle involving the screw-up grasshopper Hoppity, who gets in hot water when he convinces the group to move to a new site and is accidentally responsible for a fire which almost burns down their insect village; his love interest Honey, the ingenue bee; and the mayor and money bags of this micro-society, C. Bagley Beetle, who also wants to marry Honey and will stop at nothing to get rid of his romantic rival.

 

Known variously as Mr. Bug Goes to Town and Hoppity Goes to Town, it was out of release as a mainstream title for some time, and only last year surfaced as a dvd put out under the title of "Bugville".

There is an amazing night club sequence with electric colors and jazzed up drawing techniques that feel very modern. 

And you'll leave humming tunes like "We're the Couple in the Castle," "Katy Did, Katy Didn't" and "I'll Dance at Your Wedding (Honey Dear)," music and lyrics by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser.

Enjoy!

william

"I behaved unethically, for ethical reasons"

I read this quote from the Turkish-Saudi arms dealer and former "richest man in the world" Adnan Khashoggi in a recent New York Times profile, and it suddenly struck me as the perfect motto for these troubled times.

As Anthony Minghella once wrote in the screenplay for "The Talented Mr. Ripley": "You never meet anyone who thinks that they're a bad person. What ever they do, whatever harm they cause, it all makes sense within their own head."

Khashoggi has lived his life at the center of a lot of controversial events and transactions and for a long time was able to profit handsomely from almost all of them, most famously as a player in the sale of Isreali arms to Iran that became part of what was known as the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980's. 

According to the article, his business m.o. seemed to be to spend as much money as possible on his lifestyle and personal accoutrements (at one time it is said that his nut was $250,000 a day) in order to create a climate conducive to the enormously lucrative business of selling weapons systems around the globe. 

I read a pulp paperback once years ago that was a thinly veiled fictional account of a Khashoggi-like character spreading "baksheesh", or the bribes that lubricate the wheels of the corrupt system.

In his way, the aging Khashoggi, who started his career in the '60's, feels like a trailblazer today, lighting the way for the Madoff's and others who symbolize our current kleptocracy and casino-like economy. 

Or as Walter Matthau once put it: "Poker exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great."

william

Play Yourself Redux

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called "Play Yourself" inspired by Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman and their passionate insistence on artistic honesty. 

 

When I read this post from the rapper 50 Cent and his co-author Robert Greene, it seemed serendipitous as it expressed the same idea much more completely and eloquently than I was able to. So much so, that I felt it worth reprinting and sharing with you here.

Make Everything Your Own

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every maneuver in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose -- you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

You came into this life with the only real possessions that ever matter -- your body, the time that you have to live, your energy, the thoughts and ideas unique to you, and your autonomy. But over the years you tend to give all of this away. You spend years working for others -- they own you during that period. You get needlessly caught up in people's games and battles, wasting energy and time that you will never get back. You come to respect your own ideas less and less, listening to experts, conforming to conventional opinions. Without realizing it you squander your independence, everything that makes you a creative individual.

Before it is too late, you must reassess your entire concept of ownership. It is not about possessing things or money or titles. You can have all of that in abundance but if you are someone who still looks to others for help and guidance, if you depend on your money or resources, then you will eventually lose what you have when people let you down, adversity strikes, or you reach for some foolish scheme out of impatience. True ownership can only come from within. It comes from a disdain for anything or anybody that impinges upon your mobility, from a confidence in your own decisions, and from the use of your time in constant pursuit of education and improvement.

Only from this inner position of strength and self-reliance will you be able to truly work for yourself and never turn back. If situations arise in which you must take in partners or fit within another organization, you are mentally preparing yourself for the moment when you will move beyond these momentary entanglements. If you do not own yourself first, you will continually be at the mercy of people and circumstance, looking outward instead of relying on yourself and your wits.

Understand: We are living through an entrepreneurial revolution, on a global scale. The old power centers are breaking up. Individuals everywhere want more control over their destiny and have much less respect for an authority that is not based on merit but on mere power. We have all naturally come to question why someone should rule over us, why our source of information should depend on the mainstream media, and on and on. We do not accept what we accepted in the past.

Where we are naturally headed with all of this is the right and capacity to run our own enterprise, in whatever shape or form, to experience that freedom. We are all corner hustlers in a new economic environment and to thrive in it we must cultivate the kind of self-reliance that will help push us past all of the dangerous dependencies that threaten us along the way.

Think of it this way: dependency is a habit that is so easy to acquire. We live in a culture that offers you all kinds of crutches -- experts to turn to, drugs to cure any psychological unease, mild pleasures to help pass or kill time, jobs to keep you just above water. It is hard to resist. But once you give in, it is a like prison you enter that you cannot ever leave. You continually look outward for help and this severely limits your options and maneuverability. When the time comes, as it inevitably does, when you must make an important decision, you have nothing inside of yourself to depend on.

Before it is too late, you must move in the opposite direction. You cannot get this requisite inner strength from books or a guru or pills of any kind. It can only come from you. It is a kind of exercise you must practice on a daily basis -- weaning yourself from dependencies, listening less to others' voices and more to your own, cultivating new skills. As you progress on this path, you will find that self- reliance becomes the habit and that anything that smacks of depending on others will horrify you.

In listing this post, I wasn't sure what category to put it under, as it is written by a musician, touches on current affairs in the way the world is reorganizing itself, and captures an artist's stance towards his work and the world. 

In the end, I decided it fit my definition of Wonderful stuff, as it inspires me to remain true to the values of my own company, Wonderful Films.

Thanks, Curtis and Robert!

william

Sweet Home Chicago

Friday the 13th today, but nothing unlucky about this classic Robert Johnson recording of Chicago's unofficial theme song.

Enjoy!

william

Red Kley

I found this striking vintage digest of science fiction stories at the flea market recently. 

 

Naturally, I was curious to find out more about the cover artist, only credited by his last name "Kley".

Heinrich Kley was born in the 1860's and reportedly died in Munich near the end of World War 2. He was a master of line illustration, and supposedly his published work in Germany was brought to the attention of Walt Disney and was an inspiration for some of the animation of the "Dance of the Hours" sequence in "Fantasia".

I loved learning this fun fact from a website which has a short biographical sketch of Kley:

Heinrich Kley was first introduced to the American audience by the then new Coronet Magazine in three consecutive issues in 1937. A few of his satirical line drawings were reproduced. In its introduction to Kley, Coronet said that he had "died in a mad house a few years back." In 1937 Kley still had eight years to live, and he had never been in a mental institution.

I wonder what he would have thought about his art being used posthumously to illustrate the work of American science fiction writers in the small pulp digest format that graced the newsstands of our postwar metropolis? He might have ended up in that madhouse, after all!!

william