David Bowie RIP

[JackRiddler]

^^^
Great pictorial Iamwhomiam!

On Broadway 1979, as Joseph Merrick in 'The Elephant Man'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK0NOofUarQ

People, please put the youtubes in as links too. It's been years since this board has displayed the yt frame for me on this browser.

Is there life on Mars? Is there an elephant man? Probably depends on how you count time.

With all the exotic ch-ch-ch-changes the bastard managed somehow to appeal in the way that "everyman" should mean: not a statistical average, but a broad play of very different projections. Everything from the narrow divides between sad eyed pilgrims, spacemen and junkies to horny Hollywood predators to horny fascist predators stumbling into town, just like a sacred clown, visions of swastikas in their heads and plans for everyone...

.

.

[Joao]

In September 1998, Bowie launched his own ISP. BowieNet was conceived as a proto-social network. There was 5MB of web space to share songs and creations. The pages used new technologies like Adobe Flash (then developed by Macromedia) to display content. Users even got access to concert streaming service Rolling Stone Network.

The star also launched his own online bank in the same decade. BowieBanc came with a year's worth of BowieNet service. Fans who banked their money with Bowie were rewarded with checks and bank cards displaying his image.

[seemslikeadream]

[quote="JackRiddler » Mon Jan 11, 2016 8:27 pm"

People, please put the youtubes in as links too. It's been years since this board has displayed the yt frame for me on this browser.

you know I have been doing that just for you since you first asked probably 3 ..4 years ago...and what do I get ...fucking bullshit from you...fucking bullshit.....and of course you have never noticed because you are always looking to find some piddly bullshit to call me out on ...... you really are something...even in this very thread I posted the link just for your ass...I'm done

[JackRiddler]

.

Here's a great fucking movie (spoiler) that spins Citizen Kane, an electroshocked Iggy Pop, Bowie, Toni Collette, Roxy Music, the London glam-rock scene, coming out and a pyramid of cocaine into the strictly fictional story of an insanely adored space-rock idol who stages his own public murder - "when the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band" - and later reappears in a fake identity as the slimy popstar-slash-Zeitgeist of Orwell's Reagan's 1984. Which Bowie also briefly incorporated. The man never missed a beat. Bowie supposedly hated it. I've long fantasized about one day interviewing him, broaching the subject, and convincing him that it's not really about him! It's a riff! Like his whole life was riffs, and all of them slingshot hits smack-landing on faraway asteroids. Now that won't happen in this life.

Velvet Goldmine - TRAILER (1998) [HD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqd8ChJ5xLk

And here's Bowie's rendering of the original song, which wasn't in the movie. Since he was mad about it and all...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfRgd9REzAs

[JackRiddler]

And this is pretty much it. Who's going to match this demise for our consensus? Jagger-Richards, not. McCartney, oh please. Patti Smith, for me personally, for sure. Biggest one since Lennon, I guess? Don't die yet, you bastards!

[Novem5er]

David Bowie might be unique in his ability to inspire young people across the 70's, the 80's, the 90's, the 2000's, and even the 2010's. I've talked to some teenagers online today who are heartbroken over Bowie's death because he gave their weirdness a place to be accepted and grow. He probably isn't AS popular with teens now as teens of the past, but he is recognized and loved by an alternative crowd. What's more, he's put out new music for the youth to listen to in each of these decades. David Bowie isn't the Beatles or Zeppelin with a vast back catalog of great music just waiting to be discovered by the next generation.

He was actively creating music for that next generation, who heard it, and then went back into that catalog. Or perhaps vice-versa, they discovered that back catalog from older friends and family and then realized DAMN he's still making music! He's still out there, being David Bowie and being generally successful.

Think about that. Five decades of active relevance .That's like never been done and will likely never be done again.

[seemslikeadream]

He was the nazz
with God given ass
He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar.

Ziggy Stardust 1972

"People aren't very bright, you know. They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler."
"Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars... think about it... I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And, boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years."
"I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad."
"I'd love to enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in Fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a rightwing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible."
[Bowie interviewed by Cameron Crowe: "A candid conversation with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch–hitter", printed in 'Playboy', September 1976.]

[MinM]

[seemslikeadream]

Bowie re–established contacts with his old associates from the 1970's, and started working out ideas for a concept–album once again. He entered the fray again in 1995 releasing '1. Outside' with a handful of new songs including Jacques Brel's 'My Death Waits There' in his Bing Crosby voice. This was unexpected.


"My death waits there between your thighs [does "death" mean the 11th sephira "Da'ath"?]
But what ever lies behind the door
There is nothing much to do
Angel or devil, I don't care
For in front of that door, there is you"

http://www.parareligion.ch/bowie.htm

[identity]

Simon Critchley,

MY FIRST
SEXUAL
EXPERIENCE

LET ME BEGIN WITH A RATHER EMBARRASSING
confession: no person has given me greater pleasure
throughout my life than David Bowie. Of
course, maybe this says a lot about the quality of
my life. Don’t get me wrong. There have been nice
moments, some even involving other people. But in
terms of constant, sustained joy over the decades,
nothing comes close to the pleasure Bowie has
given me.

It all began, as it did for many other ordinary
English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance
of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on
July 6, 1972, which was viewed by more than a
quarter of the British population. My jaw dropped
as I watched this orange-haired creature in a
catsuit limp-wristedly put his arm around Mick
Ronson’s shoulder. It wasn’t so much the quality of
the song that struck me; it was the shock of Bowie’s
look. It was overwhelming. He seemed so sexual,
so knowing, so sly and so strange. At once cocky
and vulnerable. His face seemed full of sly understanding—
a door to a world of unknown pleasures.

Some days later, my mother Sheila bought a copy
of “Starman,” just because she liked the song and
Bowie’s hair (she’d been a hairdresser in Liverpool
before coming south and used to insist dogmatically
that Bowie was wearing a wig from the late
1980s onward). I remember the slightly menacing
black and white portrait photo of Bowie on the
cover, shot from below, and the orange RCA Victor
label on the seven-inch single.

For some reason, when I was alone with our tiny
mono record player in what we called the dining
room (though we didn’t eat there—why would
we?—there was no TV), I immediately flipped
the single over to listen to the B side. I remember
very clearly the physical reaction I felt listening to
“Suffragette City.” The sheer bodily excitement of
that noise was almost too much to bear. I guess
it sounded like . . . sex. Not that I knew what sex
was. I was a virgin. I’d never even kissed anyone
and had never wanted to. As Mick Ronson’s guitar
collided with my internal organs, I felt something
strong and strange in my body that I’d never experienced
before. Where was suffragette city? How
did I get there?

I was twelve years old. My life had begun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v342TST9tFw

[identity]

Critchley again (in a piece that reads like it could have been an RI post):

A F T E R A ND Y WA RHOL H A D B E E N SHO T B Y
Valerie Solanas in 1968, he said, “Before I was shot,
I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching
TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.” Bowie’s
acute ten-word commentary on Warhol’s statement,
in the eponymous song from Hunky Dory
in 1971, is deadly accurate: “Andy Warhol, silver
screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” The ironic
self-awareness of the artist and their audience
can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated
at increasingly conscious levels. Bowie repeatedly
mobilizes this Warholian aesthetic.

The inability to distinguish Andy Warhol from the
silver screen morphs into Bowie’s continual sense
of himself being stuck inside his own movie. Such
is the conceit of “Life on Mars?,” which begins with
the “girl with the mousy hair,” who is “hooked to
the silver screen.” But in the final verse, the movie’s
screenwriter is revealed as Bowie himself or his
persona, although we can’t tell them apart at all:

But the film is a saddening bore
’Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again.

The conflation of life with a movie conspires with
the trope of repetition to evoke a melancholic sense
of being both bored and trapped. One becomes
an actor in one’s own movie. This is my sense of
Bowie’s much-misunderstood lines in “Quicksand”:

I’m living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality.

Bowie displays an acute awareness of Himmler’s
understanding of National Socialism as political
artifice, as an artistic and especially architectural
construction, as well as a cinematic spectacle.

Hitler, in the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, was
ein Film aus Deutschland, a film from Germany.
As Bowie put it, Hitler was the first pop star. But
being stuck inside a movie evokes not elation but
depression and a Major Tom–like inaction:

I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore.

In “Five Years,” after having received the news
that the Earth will soon die, Bowie sings, “And
it was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor.”
Similarly, in one of my all-time favorite Bowie
songs, “The Secret Life of Arabia” (outrageously
and ferociously covered by the late, great Billy
Mackenzie with the British Electric Foundation),
Bowie sings,

You must see the movie
The sand in my eyes
I walk though a desert song
When the heroine dies.

The world is a film set, and the movie that’s being
shot might well be called Melancholia. One of
Bowie’s best and bleakest songs, “Candidate,”
begins with a statement of explicit pretense, “We’ll
pretend we’re walking home,” and is followed by
the line, “My set is amazing, it even smells like a
street.”

Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way
down, a series of repetitions and reenactments:
fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in
which we live and confront us with the reality of
illusion. Bowie’s world is like a dystopian version
of The Truman Show, the sick place of the world
that is forcefully expressed in the ruined, violent
cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs”
and, more subtly, in the desolate soundscapes of
“Warszawa” and “Neuköln.” To borrow Iggy Pop’s
idiom from Lust for Life (itself borrowed from
Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might
well be its implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger
who rides through the city’s ripped backside,
under a bright and hollow sky.

[identity]

And again:

BOWIE INCARNATED A UTOPIAN SOME THING:
some other way of existing in the suburban
shitholes of Bromley, Beckenham, Billericay,
Basingstoke, Braintree, or Biggleswade. It wasn’t
some reflection of life on the street. Why would
we have been interested in that? Life was routine,
gray, cramped, and dull. Our parents were deeply
morally confused by the 1960s, having affairs,
getting divorced, and wearing flared trousers. We
were just bored. BORED. Let the upper-middle
classes celebrate street life after their winter skiing
trips with their parents or taking the Volvo on a
tour of the Dordogne. Bowie represented something
else, especially for intelligently disaffected
ordinary boys and girls. It was something impossibly
glamorous and strange. It rejected the street.

As Jon Savage rightly puts it, Bowie was not about
any sort of realism. His success connected with
a latent, low-budget science-fiction exuberance
(more Michael Moorcock than Isaac Asimov; more
Quatermass and the Pit than Star Trek) that was
a template for the ruined landscapes through
which the spaceboys and girls of glam, punk, and
post-punk would run wearing outrageous, often
homemade and slightly crappy outfits. It was what
Nicholas Pegg calls, in a choice phrase, a “Home
Counties apocalypse,” complete with milk floats
and the mental hospitals that encircled London at
the time. As others have pointed out, Bowie spoke
to the weirdos and the freaks. But it turned out
that there were a lot of us. It left you wondering:
who exactly were the insiders? Much, much later,
Bowie found a new word to name them: heathen.

We simply didn’t want to be heathen.

[identity]

and finally:

One final, recent memory: the other big Bowie
event in 2013 was David Bowie Is, an exhibition
at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,
which ran from March 23 to August 11 and
which is now on tour in different parts of the
world (Toronto, São Paulo, Berlin, Chicago,
Paris, Groningen). The crowds in London were
massive. When I turned up at the V & A one
morning in early June, the line was so long that
I eventually gave up trying to get in. But then
I found a way of sneaking in without paying
by following closely behind a couple of special
guests (I don’t know who they were, a woman
and her child), who were being escorted past
the guards into the exhibition space. We looked
like a rather older version of the Holy Family
as I tagged along slowly behind, keeping my
head down. I got in. Inside I was amazed by the
amount of stuff Bowie had preserved, even the
keys to his apartment in Berlin. I mean, who
does that?

The climax of the exhibition was a huge room with a
plethora of video material extending around three
walls, featuring fragments of live performances
going back to the 1970s. The place was packed.
Luckily, I found a seat and sat there for about forty
minutes soaking in the end of one cycle of videos
and the entirety of the next. It finished, appropriately
enough, with “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” maybe
from the Hammersmith Odeon performance in
July 1973. The song ended. The lights came up.
Around me, people were just smiling. Just happy.
Wonderful. Oh no love, you’re not alone.

I don’t want Bowie to stop. But he will. And so
will I.

[justdrew]

I wonder if Critchley's ever heard of something called 'Buddhism' ?

fine stuff other than the seeming omission.

anyway, nowadays the kids are all stuck in video games more than films. Of wait, Bowie's done that in '99... The Nomad Soul

possibly my fav...

yt -> In the heat of the morning


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kx9o1idWrE

[identity]

Low, indeed. A low point in DB's musical career. (Note: They refer to DB below as "gender-bending glam rocker David Bowie" in the commentary on the clip for their little study in contrasts, but DB was hardly a glam-rocker any more in 1977, the year his first austere Berlin collaboration with Eno, "Low," was released.)

At the time, it was about the most unlikely pairing imaginable: gender-bending glam rocker David Bowie and stodgy crooner Bing Crosby. And yet, when the two got together to sing a duet on the 1977 TV special Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas, they made holiday magic.

In the clip above from PBS's American Masters: Bing Crosby Rediscovered, Merrie Olde Christmas writers Larry Grossman and Buz Kohan recount the tale of how Bowie balked at singing the traditional Christmas carol "The Little Drummer Boy" on the special. Grossman recalls, "He said, 'I won't sing that song. I hate that song… I'm doing this show because my mother loves Bing Crosby.'"

Scrambling to find a solution, Grossman and Kohan hit upon the idea of introducing a counter melody to "Drummer Boy" that Bowie could sing while Crosby sang the traditional arrangement. "It all happened rather rapidly. I would say within an hour, we had it written and were able to present it him again," Kohan remembers.

The result: "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy," a tune that pleased both Bowie and Crosby and went on to become a holiday-music standard right alongside the original "Little Drummer Boy." It was a win-win: Bowie toned down his outrageous theatrics to sing with a legend, Crosby widened his palette to collaborate with a hip young artist, and the two produced an enduring holiday staple we're all still enjoying 37 years later. Not bad for an hour's work.

On edit: One notes with some amusement that the writers of Merrie Olde Christmas are Larry Grossman and Buz Kohan, not the most Christian-sounding of names, but I guess since Xmas has been primarily a celebration of consumerism, and not of the birth of the Christian Messiah, for many, many decades, it makes not a whit of difference, really. (Looking forward to future installments of Merrie Olde Christmas written by Abdel Hamid and Muhammad Mahmoud...)