Hello and welcome! I am Colin Bell, a novelist and poet, previously a TV producer-director of arts programmes, also known as the blogger Wolfie Wolfgang. My novel Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love was published in 2013, my next novel Blue Notes, Still Frames will be published in October 2016 - check them out on Amazon. I hope you find something here among my daily blogs. I write about anything that interests me - I hope it interests you too. Let me know.
I wrote a miniature Fibonacci poem five years ago on the gigantic subject of humanity's ideas of the Universe and religion - well, there's no need for humility if you're writing a very short poem. It was called The Music Of The Spheres and was published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review: http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue10/wolfiewolfgang2.html - I hadn't thought about it much since then until recently when the highly imaginative Joseph Nussbaum approached me asking to make a short animated film of the poem.
I was thrilled earlier on today to see the result. Wow! I think it's magnificent. See what you think:
David Bowie and Marc Bolan in rehearsal at Granada Television in 1977.
In the early years of my TV career at one of Britain's leading independent television companies, Granada, I came across many famous people and soon found out that celebrities, like people you meet in a bus queue, are usually no more extraordinary or unusual than anyone else you might encounter that day. Sometimes though, even a full-of-himself young TV employee could be impressed by a sudden explosion of star-dust. First it was Marc Bolan, the glamourously charismatic lead singer of the band T-Rex. Marc was making a series, called Marc, for Granada and I was working in the music department there. We met over some backing-track issue which is now long forgotten, but we hit it off well enough to go for a few drinks together while he was staying in Manchester. His days of mega-stardom were waning and, sometimes, a beer encouraged him to open his heart. We got on. For the final show in the series, he'd asked his old friend David Bowie to take part. This was a bit of a coup because Bowie at that time had just recorded the album Heroes, one of my favourites, and he performed the song for the first time in that programme.
I had been a fan of David Bowie since the Ziggy Stardust days and couldn't believe that the great man was actually in the Granada studios. Anyway, he was and, as I found out, he was as normal a bloke as the next man - charming and talented too of course. I was going for what is euphemistically called a bathroom break and it happened to coincide with a break in rehearsals for Marc. Without a thought, I walked into the male toilets situated under my office and next to the studio entrance. It was there, unglamourously no doubt, I found myself in glittering company. After, the call of nature, three guys washed their hands and Marc introduced me to Bowie, who was quiet, pleasant and remarkably low-key. We shook newly-washed hands and went our separate ways.
Many years later, wanting to make some commemorative gesture after David Bowie's unexpected death, I decided to write one of my Fibonacci poems about the incident. Today, along with two other new poems, it is published in the latest issue of the Fibonacci specialist journal, The Fib Review. I'm an enthusiast for this demanding short-form poetry style and I feel honoured and fortunate that The Fib Review has supported me over the last eight years by publishing my work - with these three new ones, they have now published 62 of my 'Fibs'.
David Bowie, of course, was not the only one of those two stars to have died since that meeting. I met Marc again for a drink before he left Manchester and we said, as you do, we should get together again the next time he was in town. That wasn't to be because a very short time later he was dead, within the month I think, but my memory is unclear about the dates. I was genuinely shocked and saddened after my first real encounter with the death of a celebrity.
So here's to Marc Bolan and David Bowie - it was an honour to have met you guys.
Here's that recording of David Bowie singing Heroes and then, a clip of the two of them closing that final show:
I have lived long enough now to have seen a transformation in the art of photography. Not that I'd call myself a photographer, but I been taking photographs since I was a child and I've always been entranced by the possibilities of even the simplest of cameras. As a schoolboy, I won a photographic competition once but that was a long time ago. Since then, I've just been using my various cameras for my own pleasure, mostly as a record of my family and friends but when that amazing digital revolution got to me, in 2007, I found new excitement with a great digital camera, the Cannon EOS 400D, bought in Hong Kong and loved ever since. Since living in Lewes, UK, I've been friends with a real photographer, David Stacey http://www.davidstaceyphoto.com/ who has not only inspired me with his own work but encouraged me to experiment more with my own camera.
David Stacey - I dared to take this photograph of the photographer, last year.
Dave even turned his camera on me a few times and this portrait now hangs on a wall at home - like it or not, I think it captures the spirit of my life here in Lewes.
Me by David Stacey
David Stacey at work in my study.
I spent a day with Dave recently when we went to an exhibition as the excellent Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and, over a boys' pub lunch, we discussed cameras and photography as we often do. It was there that Dave inspired me to give Instagram a go. He said he thought I'd really like this the most creatively challenging and excitingly instant of all of today's social networking sites. I said I'd have a go and, a month later, I'm still doing it and, yes, loving it too. I've been taking at least one photograph a day for the site and I'm gradually learning how to master the various editing options. You can see how I've been getting on by following the link below.
The other revolution in my on-line world is that those photographs taken for Instagram can be linked to various other sites - so I'm now an enthusiastic member of the photography site Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/16199705@N05/
Needless to say, these pictures also go directly to my Facebook and Twitter pages so after a relative silence here on my website, I'm suddenly all over the wonderful world-wide web and having lots of fun all of which I owe to my good friend David Stacey. Thanks Dave.
I haven't posted many blogs on here this year. Forgive me, regular readers, I've been busy finishing a novel for publication later this year and now I'm getting on with a new one so I've been heads down all year but plan to get back to blogging again very soon.
In the meanwhile you can follow me on all of the above sites as well as on Facebook and Twitter - I hope to see you around in cyberspace and, of course, here on this site.
