Life
Happy birthday, Bobby Womack!
Today I am the age that is also the meaning of life. This is handy. (Bobby Womack is 63 today.) Thanks to Darren in Manchester for telling me that the popular song Happy Birthday To You was first published on March 4, 1924. This is also handy. I think it may be time for me to do or produce something profound. Having recently finished organising my working life (1988-2006) into a book for publication in May, I am more than aware of what we must call my achievements. I also know that I still haven't found what I'm looking for, jobwise. I've done quite a few things in the world of the media, most of which have been superceded by other things. At the moment I am still a DJ, albeit less of one than I was two years ago. I am, however, more of a scriptwriter than I was two years ago. The plates of my indecision constantly shift. I am an author, but not of anything made-up. I'd like to rectify that at some point in the near future. I'm not much of a journalist any more, even though that was my apprecticeship. I write occasional book reviews for the Times and at least one monthly column for Word, plus other bits and pieces when I have the time. I have just finished reading a beautifully written piece by David Denby in the New Yorker about the move from the fringes of filmmaking to the mainstream of fractured narrative. It would be lovely to write something as beautiful as pretty much anything in the New Yorker. It would also be nice to write something with a fractured narrative.
I have this week finally seen Pan's Labyrinth. Although fantasy is not my number one favourite movie genre, I must admit I was hooked in very early on. Guillermo Del Toro is a hugely imaginative filmmaker, and I don't just mean in terms of the weird monsters he cooks up in his notebooks. To make what he describes as an "anti-fascist fairytale" is a tall order, but he's pulled it off with style and subtance. I realise I'm a late arrival on this film, but it's good to catch up. I can say now with confidence that Del Toro was robbed at the Oscars, coming away with just three technical awards and seeing best original screenplay go instead to Little Miss Sunshine! Can any screenplay be more original than Pan's Labyrinth? In 1944, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, an eleven-year-old girl goes with her sickly, pregnant, widowed mother to live with her new husband, a fascist torturer, Captain Vidal, in the middle of the woods where remnants of the republican guerilla army need to be mopped up. Here, she retreats into a fantasy world, where a faun sets her three tricky tasks, by completing which she may return to her rightful place in the underworld, as a princess. Although hardcore fantasy fans may wish the film had less Spanish Civil War in it, and fans of war and 20th century European history may wish there were less vomiting giant toads, you have to admire Del Toro for taking this on, and making both "levels" of the story work - and intertwine so poetically.
What I love most about it is that having watched the illuminating DVD extras, I now have a greater understanding of the film. This reminds me of when Mr Gilbert, my English teacher, unlocked TS Eliot for me at school. I knew I loved The Waste Land but it wasn't until we studied it, in detail, that it came to life. Similarly, I appreciate Pan's Labyrinth more for knowing that, for instance, the tree that the little girl, Ofelia, enters in order to complete her tasks, is shaped that way to resemble a womb, with fallopian tubes either side, because she wishes to return to the womb, where she felt safest, and where he unborn brother currently resides, equally safe. For as long as the baby is unborn, her mother is safe from the murderous treachery of her fascist husband, who tells the doctor to save his child, not the mother. As Del Toro says, it's not monsters we should be worried about, but humans.
Imagine writing something that profound. And then having your Oscar taken by Little Miss Sunshine! I hope Bobby Womack had a nice day. I had a quiet one, and then watched both parts of ITV's newest grisly detective drama, the wishy-washily-named Instinct, starring the bloke who played the policeman on Shameless, Anthony Flanagan. It was one of those with a serial killer who spent an awful lot of time and effort trying to put everyone off his scent. You get a lot of those in ITV dramas. Not so much in real life. Guess what? It was entertaining, but not as profound as it appeared. I'd quite like to write one of those, one day. Plenty of time.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 2:37 PM
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25 Comments:
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday Andrew!
Happy Birthday for yesterday. I hope you enjoyed your day. Here's to the next 42 productive years. Best Wishes.
A friend of mine just turned 35 on Saturday. She's been writing a book for the past 18 years and hasn't quite got to the end yet!
Happy birthday to you. I'll be 42 on June 4. I think I'm where I want to be, but who knows what the future holds?
I hope you got some nice presents.
Many Happy Returns. Yesterday was also the 40 year anniversary of QPR's one and, most likely, only ever cup success, coming from two down to beat West Brom 3-2 in the League Cup Final.
The Denby piece was brilliant, though you have to ask if The New Yorker missed a trick. They could have laid it out in a Memento stylee by placing his final paragraph first and opening one last! I'm pleased you got round to watching Pan's Labyrinth. I can't wait to see The Lives Of Others (it beat Pan's for the Best Foreign Film Oscar) after reading Anthony Lane's review a few weeks back.
At the moment I am still a DJ, albeit less of one than I was two years ago.
In quantity, rather than quality obviously. :-) I do find your reduced lack of presence on 6 Music disappointing. My wife asked me why 6 Music didn't play more of the songs in its own chart. I love the chart's eclectic nature, even if I don't like everything. It has convinced me of the goodness of Circulus, Joanna Newsom - and now I want to hear the full version of Gruff Rhys' Skylon! song too. I just want two hours of goodness every week instead of one.
I also know that I still haven't found what I'm looking for, jobwise.
Happy Birthday! Birthdays are times of self analysis, so I hope you find what you are looking for. As it were. I don't suppose it's helpful for me to talk about journeys vs destinations, but we should remember the wise words of Swing Out Sister: 'It's Better To Travel'. :-)
Happy Birthday Andrew.
Don't agree re: Pan's Labyrinth though. I think it's a misnomer to believe the Best Original Screenplay Oscar measures the originality of the screenplay. It's just the best screenplay not adapted from another medium. Personally, I was turned off PL by the horrifying violence, the rather caricatured fascists, and the fact that the fantasy and real elements did not mesh for me.
Craig, you make a fair semantic point about best original screenplay. I also found the violence in Pan's Labyrinth offputting, but I think he was making a valid point about the thuggishness of fascists, who were certainly caricatured, but only in that Vidal was pretty much the only one we got to know as a character. I though the fantasy and real elements meshed though. I didn't think they would. Have you seen The Devil's Backbone? Because it was a ghost story rather than an out and out fantasy, the two elements meshed well.
Hope you had a great day, Andrew. I too share your age this year; still feel about 25 but like all the good things about being older. But haven't actually managed to apply them to my personal life and career, which are stuck in a rut!
It's a shame, as you've said, that Pan's Labyrinth missed out on any of the more high-profile Oscars, but it was a bit unlucky in its timing. "The Lives of Others", mentioned above, is just superb and was a worthy winner of the Foreign Language gong. Be sure to watch it when it finally gets its British release.
Meanwhile it was obvious that the Academy had picked "Little Miss Sunshine" as their token nod to the independent spirit and had to load it up with awards. That's a mystery to me: Little Miss Sunshine was well scripted, acted and everything, but it's almost as though the Academy have never seen a small-town American picture before. Everything they seemed so enamoured with in LMS has been seen in countless independent movies over the past few years. Yet most were ignored.
Happy Birthday for yesterday Andrew. I hope you enjoyed your day as much as my nephew, who was 7 yesterday.
I bet you didn't you get exciting presents like his - an ant farm, a magnetic bug, some Doctor Who figures, a Meccano remote control car and 2 boxes of Maltesers!!
Might I just join in with a firm 'Happy Birthday'?
Happy Birthday.
The quality / quantity distinction is appropriate here, as I am a visitor to this website essentially because of the quality of the Saturday radio show. It's about the only thing on radio - or for that matter TV - that I actively make a point of listening to / watching every week. Informative, educational and (especially the double act with Herring) entertaining.
Spot on.
Turned 42 myself last week. Maybe it is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything because I seem to understand it all, pretty much.
Anyway, Happy Birthday fella. However many grains of sand you hold in your hand, I hope you asked to retain your youth.
The Oscars don't really have anything to do with excellence, do they? I haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth but I've been a big fan of both The Devil's Backbone and Cronos since the elephantiasis kicked in. I'll probably get around to PL in a couple of years.
6Music is less of a radio station than it was two years ago, in my opinion. But there's no decent alternative (which should be XFM's slogan).
A late happy birthday.
This is perplexing me and I am probably betraying my ignorance (and sadness!) but "Supercede: USAGE The standard spelling is supersede, not supercede. The word is derived from the Latin verb supersedere but has been influenced by the presence of other words in English spelled with -cede, such as intercede and accede. The spelling supercede is recorded as early as the 16th century, but is still regarded as incorrect." By the way Happy Birthday, thanks for the tip regarding The Wire and I hope you find what you are looking for ( I can recommend Primary School teaching if that helps)
Hope you had a great day, Andrew! Mrs Wendell and I spent Sunday in that London readying to see The Kaiser Chiefs and I realised how much reading your blog has changed my outlook - we now go to EAT. for (decaf) coffee and a snack, having blown out the 'other' chains, our oyster cards went largely unused as we walked everywhere (although that was a bit of a mistake to be honest - standing through three bands at the Shepherds Bush was a bit of a strain on the calves at our age), and I felt guilty buying The Guardian!!!
The Chiefs were excellent, as were support The Ripchords and 1990s (no 'the' and no apostrophe according to their myspace) - enlivened by the band pointing out producer Stephen Street in the balcony, only for the crowd to sing "who's the wanker in the scarf!" to him!!
Anyway, Andrew, ta for everything so far, just have to ween myself off The G******n now...!
42. The perfect age to shell out some of your birthday money on Psychotherapy. Three times a week for a few years should do the trick. Discover that your cheerful memoirs were in fact a defence mechanism for avoiding your inner existential angst. Discover that what you REALLY wanted all along was to be was a Local Authority Planning Officer, but that the cut-off age for applications is 40, and you have missed the boat. Deal with the crisis this induces by buying a Harley Davidson and hanging around nightclubs looking simeltanously hopeful and mournful. Eventually become a Scientologist.
You know it makes sense.
While it is important to want to achieve more in the future, equally don't be too hard on yourself with regards to your achievements thus far. You have achieved a lot compared to many people and there are ups and downs in any career.
Best Wishes
Many happy returns! If you're ever stuck for a new vocation I'll take you on. The pay's lousy but we get to listen to the Andrew Collins Show in the office.
Happy birthday also.
I rememebr when Pan's Labyrinth came out there was some talk about a film from the 70's made under Spanish fascism called Spirit of the Beehive. It also looks at the conflict from the point of view of a young girl who attempts to find Frankenstein near her village but instead comes across a wounded republican soldier hiding in a cottage. It's well worth a look, being beautifully made and with a message subtle enough to pass the censors!
Butterfly's Tongue is similar to the fantastic Spirit of the Beehive in this respect: the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of a child. It's by the same director.
Oh dear, this is what you get for trying to be too clever. Butterfly's Tongue and Spirit of the Beehive do NOT have the same director, they have the same leading actor, Fernando Fernán Gómez. I was fooled by the fact that, rather confusingly, Amazon puts the leading actor, not the director, as the "author" of films. Still stupid of me not to check on imdb. There's no way I'm going to get on Newsnight Review with this performance.
I've read that there's a record number of countries entering this year's Eurovision (including semi-finalists) - 42. So I suppose if you wanted you could ascribe an age to each entry - eg Albania 1, Andorra 2 - and find out which was best according to Eurovision. So if say DJ Bobo should win for Switzerland, 39 was best. You get the idea with that anyway.
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