You, Me and the Mythos

Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!

Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.

Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.



It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.

It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set, with which it clearly belongs.

I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.

A New Blog

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Because I’ve been doing such a great job keeping this blog updated. A second one, absolutely, nothing odd about that at all.

But here’s the thing.

The purpose of the bobblog is that it’s about whatever I want it to be about, at any given moment. If I want to complain about an astonishingly uncomfortable bench outside a great big building in Century City, I can do that; if I want to share excerpts from something I’m writing, I can do that; if I want to relate a comical misadventure in Ireland, I can do that too. But from time to time I wax political, and very often when I do, it’s because I feel that someone official is lying to us, for reasons that have nothing to do with good governance and everything to do with exploiting us for their own gain. This is the sort of thing that makes me good and angry, every time.

So I’ve decided to create a new blog. I’m going to call it Damn Lies, an obvious play on “lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Attributed to Disraeli but disputed; Mark Twain popularized its use.) This new blog will only ever be about one thing: the various ways we’re being lied to, and why. It will be political, economical and social, but it will almost certainly never relate how I locked myself out of my car or what those crazy siblings are up to.

Here’s a bit of overlap: the following will intro the new blog...

While writing my first novel I discovered my theme. Proust asserts that every writer only really has one theme, and every new work is a renewed attempt to express that theme, or a piece of it, better than the last work did. (If I could find the quote I would provide it, but those books are huge.) And so, while I was writing a novel that turned out to be about the way our lives are like stories that we tell to ourselves, I realized that this is the idea I will probably explore for my entire life. In my newest work, a play based on the infamous cadaver synod, I examine the ways institutions lie to us, but how the power of a good example, a good story, even if it’s just propaganda, can still transcend its manipulative origins.

Segue to this new blog.

As you can guess from the title, it will focus on the lies we’re told, and how those lies are used to exploit us. But from time to time I hope to also tell the other story, about how we’re able to, let’s just say, take a sad song and make it better. I’ll try to keep it light and entertaining, to restrain the impulse toward outrage can make an outrageous subject seem muddy and clouded, thereby weakening its impact. But when anger is called for, angry I will be.

So there you go. There’s more over on the blog, namely a quick examination of gift cards and calling cards and how they’re being used to swindle us. Just a little taste of what’s to come. Hope you’ll take a look.