Lillian Hellman, author-playwright, born today in 1905... which cues the re-entry, even further stage left than Ms Hellman, of Vanessa Redgrave - she manages to win several Oscar-equivalents in my personal Academy of the Cinematic Arts, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I spent fifteen years on stage at least once a week, in various capacities (acting, directing, guitaring, debating or chairing school debates, and once, back in the day, introducing the speakers for a political debate about Europe, in which the new name on the block was one Nigel Farage), in the theatre named for her dad, Sir Michael, the Redgrave Theatre shared between Clifton College and the Bristol New Vic Theatre Company. The connection is with the film-version of Hellman's "Julia", in which Jane Fonda turned Hellman into a neurotic, and Redgrave explained the purpose of empathy with the most understated acting of her entire career.
To speak of Lilian Hellman is to call up the ghost of Dashiell Hammett too... but I am leaving him in Amber for the moment
And speaking of dads... my dad, born today in 1924
If there was a Nobel Prize for songwriting, and it wasn't given to Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Jacques Brel or Joni Mitchell, I suspect that BW would be considered one of the more serious candidates; there aren't that many who are truly serious candidates. Lots of good writers of nebulous pop songs, but innovation and creativity is required to get into Nobel class, and who but the aforementioned, and Pink Floyd, and BW, really can be counted. "California Girls" was simply revolutionary - its starting-point all that cliché-riddled surfing music of the most superficial kind, and then this, counterpoints, harmonies, all sorts of technical devices (listen to it with the maestro here)...
Neil Young doing "Broken Arrow", and the live version of "Mr Soul" (the studio version is very conventional) with Buffalo Springfield at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same place, might be another rival for the laurel crown. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. There really isn't much else besides "it's just another good Stevie Wonder number", or another Spice Girls piece, or Elton in his Bernie Taupin phase, or maybe Carole King jazzing up the clichés... but they're still mostly clichés.
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