As an aside, and way off topic today, I have never understood why celebrities feel the need to disclose all in their autobiographies, whether written by their own fair hand or ghost-written. I can well understand marking the points in YOUR life and how that affected you, your sddictions to alcohol, gambling, sex, flagellation or dressing up in nappies (diapers) to quote only the most common but I have never understood detailing other people's personal story in the guise of telling your own. Shame on Mr Connors; he deserves whatever bad press and public approbation* he gets and then some.
It is perhaps strange that this particular story should break on a day that I should decide to revisit 'Once'. A curious, almost insubstantial, low budget 'indie' movie made in Ireland for little more than the cost of one day's make up and cocktails for Lindsay Lohan, it is essentially about a love affair that isn't a love affair between a wannabe singer-songwriter who is the wrong side of thirty-five and whose long-time partner has left him and a married nineteen year old Czech ingénue with a two year old daughter and a mother in tow who happens to play the piano. Played by musicains not actors, Glen Hansard of the Frames and Markéta Irglová, it is a tale that will be familiar to most people; will a friendship be ruined by pushing too hard and should I therefore abstain from any hint of how I actually feel? There is an affecting charm to the performances, although lacking in affectation; another time, another place maybe.......and it is that artlessness which make the movie so appealing, although it does appear at times, well nearly all of the time, to be a music video for Harland and Irglová's songs, one of which incidentally won an an Oscar for best song; very remiscent of Damien Rice and his erstwhile, long-time collaborator, Lisa Hannigan.
We live in a world made cynical by violence, divorce, random acts of unkindness and cruelty and we become inured to it; it is the way of the world, we say. It is too firmly entrenched in our pstche, a habit hard to break. Yet the enduring legacy and popularity of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Cathy and Heathcliffe, Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel, Harry and Sally, Wesley and Buttercup, Rick and Ilse, Wall-E and Eve demonstrate that we have decidedly not become inured to it all.. For if that were so, these things would have no effect on us, we would not pay good money for the experience, we would not waste our time.
Both you, the reader, and I know that the world is often more wondrous than we can imagine, more magical than we can ever hope for, that kindness, friendship, love exist despite ourselves; we do not hanker after the so-called idealised representations of these things, we recognise them from our own experience. If this is true, why then are we so pessimistic as a general rule because if you and I think like this, why should the rest of the world be any different? Why don't people smile on the London Underground at perfect strangers; why does it take a disaster, like 7/7 to make us even vaguely garrulous; what is wrong with half decent buskers actually performing on the tube instead of just in the station in some out of the way access tunnel; everyone immediately cheers up when the medical students' rag week comes to rush-hour tube rides despite the fact the burly rugger types handing the bucket around dressed in hackneyed and skimpy nurses' uniforms is, after about fifty years, beginning to show signs of its age.
Just a little factoid regarding 'Once'; it garnered critical acclaim, won a Oscar and recouped more than 130 times its original budget at the box-office. You see; I told you that it was good. (I don't know if the Irish Film Board who stumped up 75% of the initial budet actually got 75% of the profit. Budget approx £150,000, takings, approx £20,000,000. Even if they did, it was still a tidy sum for the producers and backers.)
PS
Sometimes you have no idea why someone reads a page two or three years old, except that it must have appeared in a search engine somewhere. I was puzzled by a post which someone had read and I thought it was merely a spider crawling through my back catalogue. It wasn't; the originating page? "http://www.google.com/m?q=naked%20zulu%20woman%20blogspot&client=ms-opera-mobile&channel=new" I imagine that he (or she) must have been terribly disappointed!
PPS
And no, I am not suddenly madly, deeply, truly in love. Occasionally I have a good day when the heavy weight of the world on my shoulders does not seem so unbearable; Graceland helps. :).
PPPS
At one stage in the movie, the singer asks the Czech girl (we never learn her name) whether she still loves her husband. She replies in Czech: 'Miluju tebe'; and I am no more going to translate that for you than the film did.
* Great word. It has come in certain circumstances to mean the exact opposite of its original meaning, officially approved. It also means condemnation. The true opposite is reprobation but that appears to have fallen by the wayside except in the noun, a reprobate, to describe a not particularly nice, well wicked actually, person. (I am aware that it has quite a specific meaning in Scots law, in case you think I am ignoring the independence issue. Trust the Scots to enshrine in statute the negation of the right to pick and choose which evidence you are going to offer or accept. Must have been fairly common to have to legislate for it. Mr Salmond, methinks, has forgotten that little bit of the law.)
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