Wake Up to The Next Day

I think one of the bravest things Bowie did in the last seven years was to perform “Wake Up” with Arcade Fire on September 8, 2005, during the televised “Fashion Rocks” awards show not 15 months after his heart attack.

It’s not that Bowie is more than 33 years older than Arcade Fire’s lead singer and founder, Win Butler, who, even though David is in two-inch or so heels, towers over his guest.

It’s that Bowie did not look like Bowie that night. He didn’t look well. I don’t think Bowie cares as much about his appearance as we do. But the Bowie who sang that night looked fleshy — and Bowie isn’t a fleshy guy. Maybe he had put on weight, but is someone with his bone structure likely to add the pounds to his face and neck? He was puffy, perhaps as a side effect of multiple heart medications.

So it is chilling when Bowie takes the lead at 4:10 into “Wake Up” — an incredible song in which the seriousness of its lyrics is matched only by the sheer joy and lust for life of its music — and sings these lines:

“With my lightnin’ bolts a glowin’
I can see where I am goin’ to be
when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand.”

(And if you don’t know the lyrics, it is very easy to mishear that first line as “When my life is over…”.)

Back to July 2004

One of the most widely quoted remarks Bowie made following his heart surgery was,

“I tell you what, though, I won’t be writing a song about this one.”

My thought was, then you won’t be writing much at all. We all wish otherwise, I expect, but there are some experiences that cannot be denied. And keeping silent about them means keeping silent. Period.

Today and The Next Day and the next

We had the title before we heard the song and some time to consider the difference between “tomorrow” and “the next day.” Tomorrow, we know, never comes. When it arrives, it is today. But the next day and the next day — that’s different, somehow.

“Here I am
Not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows
On the gallows for me
And the next day
And the next
And another day”

Is this about Bowie’s mortality? No and yes and no and yes. “Here I am/Not quite dying” — a great let’s-get-this-clear-from-the-start line.

It needed saying. And brilliantly Bowie delivers the news with great high energy in The Next Day’s title cut, a vibrantly vital upbeat melody with lyrics bleaker than “Wake Up’s.”

The not-quite-dead guy continues, “My body left to rot in a hollow tree.” That’s not Bowie: maybe it’s one of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, or Merlin who once was imprisoned in a hollow tree.

Is the tree the Old Norse Yggdrasill, the Tree of the World, which takes its name from “Odin’s horse”, meaning “gallows,” and where Odin, the wise old wanderer, god of wisdom and poetry, and master of the magical use of sound, sacrificed himself to himself ?

There are other mentions of death on The Next Day, and by the time you reach the eleventh track, “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die,” you aren’t worried about Bowie any longer, just wondering why he gave such a lackluster title to an interesting song and if there is a link between she who unseen moves “through the dark/Leaving slips of paper /Somewhere in the park” and he who “fashions paper sculptures. . . /Then drags them to the river‘s bank in the cart” (“The Next Day”).

Poor Hoggle

Nothing seems quite as inanimate as an animaton who will never again be animated. Such is the fate of Hoggle, the mischievious imp of Labyrinth, fated to stay encased in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Why? Where?

The Hoggle was lost and forgotten, never reaching his destination, on a flight from who knows where.

He turned up, the worst for wear, in Scottsboro, AL, when an old crate was pried open at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. A puppet surgeon was called to assess the case, and the rotting Hoggle was restored by Gary Sowatzka of Sowatzka’s Dolls.

The store is like a peculiar thrift store: all its merchandise is what its name says — lost baggage that was never claimed. Most is from the airlines and most from individuals. There’s a lot of what you might expect: hats, lightweight jackets, small electronics, souvenirs, and then again a lot of what you’d think someone wouldn’t leave behind by mistake or would surely be unique enough to be reunited with its owner: wedding dresses and snow skis, for example.

Unclaimed Baggage buys by the crate load (think the reality show “Storage Wars”) and then sets about getting what it has bought sight unseen in shape to sell.

Lots of forgotten caps at Unclaimed Baggage.

Unlike most things that land at Unclaimed Baggage, Hoggle was not put up for sale. He is the showpiece of Unclaimed Baggage’s two-case museum in the foyer to the store.*

If you’ve heard of Scotsboro, AL, it is probably as the site of one of the most widely publicized cases of injustice in the segregated South — the arrests, trials, and near-lynching of the Scottsboro boys.

Other than to pay homage to Hoggle, there is no reason to head to Scottsboro, but if you are determined, here’s a little 2-day tour you could take that would include three other spots with at least some tiny connection to Bowie.

View Larger Map

You could begin in Memphis and visit Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home. Presley and Bowie share the same birthday, January 8, and Bowie is said to have offered “Golden Years” to Presley, who rejected it.

From there take US 72 east to Huntsville, AL, and visit the US Space & Rocket Center. You can go looking for satellites and see a Gemini spacecraft, Astronaut Jim Lovell memorabilia (he had a cameo in The Man Who Fell to Earth), and moondust.

Downtown Huntsville offers this for contemplation: The Werner Von Braun Civic Center. No kidding. The city is still all gaga for the man who built the V2 rockets that reduced so much of Bowie’s hometown to rubble.

Resume US 72 East and drive 45 minutes into Scottsboro and follow the signs to Unclaimed Baggage.

After you pay tribute to the goblin, get back on 72 and go east til you hit US 24. Take that into Nashville, then go west on 40 and follow the signs to Vanderbilt University.

Take West End Avenue to 21st Ave S and stumble around until you run into Furman Hall. That’s where the Department of Philosophy is housed. You have now seen a building in which Duncan Jones once studied before ditching his doctorate.

What an inspiring road trip!

*Photos of Unclaimed Baggage and caps courtesy of The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The Man Who Fell to Earth in White Sands [Updated]

Updated: Since I wrote this, I got hold of the Criterion DVD with the extras, including interviews with Production Designer Brian Eatwell and Costume Designer Mary Routh. Additions in green.

Trying without success to figure out how astronaut Capt. Jim Lovell landed in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Hallo Spaceboys), I came across a number of interesting bits. The scenes depicting the home planet of Bowie’s character, Thomas Jerome Newton, and the hours before Newton’s lift-off in the rocket he had built to get home were shot at White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Perhaps Lovell just happened to be visiting the Missile Range or the New Mexico Museum of Space History. This is possible. After all, Lovell isn’t the only one playing himself in the film; novelist Terry Southern is also at the festivities preceding the non-launch of Thomas Jerome Newton’s spacecraft, but  Southern was involved in the film world, and was visiting Bowie’s co-star Rip Torn (Dr. Nathan Bryce) during filming in New Mexico.

Using White Sands as a set posed some problems, as crew member Alan Swain recalled recently:

“All of the cast and crew had to be cleared by the government,” he recalled. “There was even a time when we were filming that the military police showed up and made us stop filming. The range was doing a missile test and I think they remembered that there was a foreign crew on the ground. We had to wait until the missile was up and then it was fine.”

Here’s another picture making the rounds: our favorite visitor, having a look through the camera, on location in White Sands, New Mexico.

The film was shot in July and August, 1975. Temperatures average in the very high 90′s during these months in White Sands.

Newton comes from a planet suffering from severe drought. He and his family wear tight-fitting body stockings criss-crossed with plastic tubing attached to a tank on their backs.

While not all deserts are hot, the Newtons appear to be not just thirsty, but broiling, as Bowie must have been on the set.

So why this costume?

What we sort of have here is one layer of an Earth astronaut’s spacesuit, which would function as a personal air-conditioning system. The NASA version was a lot tidier, of course:

“Lunar crews also wore a three-layer Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCG) or “union suit” with plastic tubing which circulated water to cool the astronaut down, minimizing sweating and fogging of the suit helmet. Water was supplied to the LCG from the PLSS backpack, where the circulating water was chilled by an ice sublimator.”

Mary Routh says she was challenged by Nic Roeg to include in the aliens’ costumes what they valued most — water, and that she had in mind representing the veins of the body through lace when she came up with the circuits of hosing through which ran colored water. The apparatus was fragile, and forever having to be patched and adjusted, she remembers. Co-star Candy Clark added that the body suits themselves were quite thin, nearly transparent, in fact.

It took me a long time to find the next image. What words would you use to search for this thing? It’s a puzzler, isn’t it. Why would a society with the technology to get Newton to Earth with all those patents that made him a billionaire design their transit vehicle to resemble a Teletubbies’ playhouse? And why if their situation alone in that desert was so dire didn’t Newton’s wife and kids hop on? Anywhere had to be better than where they were.

Brian Eatwell remembers wanting the aliens to have a vehicle that didn’t look typically sci-fi shiny metallic. So he built an A-frame over a cart, covered it with a hay mulch mess, and spray-painted it orange. Then when it came time for the thing to move along the rail, the scrapyard engine powering the contraption failed. A man on the set solved the locomotion crisis by bringing in two white horses draft horses. The ropes were edited out, but horsepower is what moves the extraterrestrial train. While Eatwell didn’t mention this, there is a very brief shot of two white horses in a lush green field during the scene when Newton recalls his planet before its drought, and I bet those horses are the same two.

What does this have to do with White Sands? I can only think that it was the presence of rails in the desert that inspired someone to build this thing.

Here’s an example of a stretch of track, now moved to the museum in Alamogordo. Rocket sleds were used to test craft considered too experimental for launch, see how many G forces a man could tolerate,  perfect ejection seats, and test missile components. In 2003 a land speed record was set on Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo of  Mach 8.5 (6,416 mph / 10,325 km/h).

And poor Tommy, who had trouble with elevators, would complain when his chauffeur exceeded 35 mph.

Be sure to read the comment below regarding the tracks.

Hallo Spaceboys

Making rounds lately, including FB page “Transmitting David Bowie Songs to Outer Space”

How do things like this happen?

How does an Eagle Scout, US Navy Captain, and retired Apollo astronaut end up in a movie with David Bowie that initially was rated X for full frontal male and female nudity*?

What did they do, these retired astronauts, place ads?: “Wanted. Man who came closer to walking on moon than you ever will seeks a role in movies.”

Did they figure if rock gods could be movie stars, so could astronauts? Why not?

I refer, of course, to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Capt. Jim Lovell, who appears as himself in the scene where crowds gather to wish Thomas Jerome Newton [Bowie] well on his voyage alone in the spacecraft built by Newton’s company, Worldwide Enterprises. Newton tires of the excitement, and tells his chauffeur to take him home for the remaining hour before he needs to board. Big mistake. He ends up never making it off the Earth.

[Twenty years later, Lovell would appear in a movie again, this time as the USS Iwo Jima's captain in the film Apollo 13, based on Lovell's book, Lost Moon. Lovell himself would be played by Tom Hanks.]

Other than sharing a taste for jumpsuits, two men with less in common than Bowie and Lovell would be hard to imagine, as would their characters. However, of all the astronauts, in some respects, Lovell was one of the three who had the most in common with Bowie’s character, the reclusive Newton. With Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, on April 11, 1970, Lovell left his home planet in Apollo 13, headed for the moon. An explosion on board the Command Module ended the mission and could well have ended their lives.

Then they would have been in the same fix as poor old Major Tom in Bowie’s “Space Oddity,“

Ground control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?…

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do

which, oddly enough, the BBC used as a theme song of sorts for its coverage of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, the first moon landing.

But the three made it home, and the way they did so ended up giving them the distinction of having traveled further from Earth than any other people.

Prior to the Space Shuttle/Station era, Jim Lovell had spent more time in space than anyone else. His flight with Frank Borman in Gemini 7 in December 1965 lasted 14 days, which doesn’t sound so long now, but the Gemini capsules were small. Gemini means twins, and two babes in the womb would have more room to move around than did Gemini astronauts.

I wonder how David and Jim would have fared spending 14 days side by side?

Did you know, by the way, that The Legendary Stardust Cowboy [Norman Odam] sings his version of “Space Oddity” on his latest album or that his song “Paralyzed” was banned by NASA as a morning wake-up call for a NASA  mission after just one play?

Lost the plot?

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy was the source of Ziggy’s last name.

And on Heathen, Bowie paid tribute to “The Ledge” by covering Odam’s “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” but changed “spaceship” to “spacecraft.”

I wonder if anyone has brought this to Captain Lovell’s attention.  I think I will.

Here’s Bowie in 2002 on Top of the Pops. Enjoy especially the moves around minute 3.

——-

*Not to mention US government-ordered assassinations and a kidnapping or suggestions of incest (two of Dr. Nathan Bryce’s [Rip Torn] collegiate lovers comment on viewing his penis that he doesn’t look at all like their dads), etc.

Jimmy Gatz & David Jones

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…”

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick, for the first time meets the “very helpless and dismayed” Mr. Gatz, Jay Gatsby’s father, who arrives after reading newspaper accounts of Jay’s murder. Before the funeral, Gatz shares some memories with Nick:

“He pulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy.
‘Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.’
He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word Schedule, and the date September 12, 1906. and underneath:

Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	6.00 a.m.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . .	6.15-6.30 ”
Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . .	7.15-8.15 ”
Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	8.30-4.30 p.m.
Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . .	4.30-5.00 ”
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it	5.00-6.00 ”
Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . .	7.00-9.00 ”

General Resolves No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per week Be better to parents.
‘I come across this book by accident,’ said the old man. ‘It just shows you, don’t it?’
‘It just shows you.’
‘Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He was always great for that.. . ‘

Gatsby journeyed from turn of the century North Dakota to the inner circle of East Coast finance in the 1920s; Bowie from post-war Brixton to far beyond even a Gatsby’s boldest vision. What they shared: “some resolves like this or something,” and schemes for “improving”  their minds.

Gatz, in spite of his “extraordinary gift for hope,” never succeeded in becoming Gatsby. He lost the plot, mistook money for wealth, hung out with the wrong crowd and finally ran out of time, gunned down and unmourned, leaving only his acquaintance Nick “privileged glimpses” of the man who could have been great.

∞

“… and I’ve got to write it down/But I’m still getting educated but I’ve got to write it down”

–”Fantastic Voyage”

Did anyone (other than Michael Jackson, Madonna and MTV) have a good nineteen-eighties? What can be said of a decade that began with the election of Ronald Reagan one month and the assassination of John Lennon the next? Bowie  agrees with his critics that he didn’t do his best musical work during those years, especially around 1987. 

But I think that David Jones worked very, very hard in the 1980s — he just didn’t put all his energies into music. He had other priorities. Like Jimmy Gatz, he had a lot of self-creation to do.

I imagine Jones’/Bowie’s “General Resolves” for the 1980s as something like this:

1. Stay alive. End enslavement to drugs, then alcohol.
2. Raise son.
3. Make enough money so that it is never again an issue. Manage self. Trust no one.
4. Hang around bright people. Read widely. Take advantage of opportunities to learn from masters.
5. Paint. Keep visual arts as means of expression without pressure of judgment.
6. Prepare to love and be loved.

I think that Jones did what he needed to and in the 1990s  emerged as an authentic man who could claim his own past — all his own pasts. Bowie may not have had the greatest ’80s, but Jones spent those years well.

 

 

What’s on Bowie’s Bookshelves?

From Time Out, August 23-30 1995:

“As a teenager I was fairly traditional in what I read: pompously Nietzsche, and not so pompously Jack Kerouac. And Burroughs. These ‘outside’ people were really the people I wanted to be like. Burroughs, particularly. I derived so much satisfaction from the way he would scramble life, and it no longer felt scrambled reading him. I thought, ‘God, it feels like this, that sense of urgency and danger in everything that you do, this veneer of rationality and absolutism about the way that you live…’”

From The New York Daily News – 9th June 2002:

“David Bowie tosses around terms like futurism, generalism, relativism, 19th-century romanticism and existentialism. He alludes to Baudelaire, Matisse, Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess and George Orwell, and holds court on topics like the end of the music industry, the state of the novel, the role of the cult artist and the connection between identity and pop culture.”

∞

I’m always interested in finding out what people I respect, especially writers, are reading. One of the features available to members only on davidbowie.com, the official site now either defunct or soon to be revised was a list of books he recommended.

It’s as eclectic a collection as one would expect from a man of many talents and lively intelligence. He certainly had come a long way from the boy who left school at 16. Even well into his 20′s Bowie’s favorites were still the standard stuff of his generation: Kerouac, Orwell, Burroughs, a bit of Nietzsche. What you find below is considerably more sophisticated. But notice too that both Stephen King and theologian Elaine Pagels are authors who he’ll read anything and everything by.

The plan was to keep adding to the list. Unfortunately, as on the rest of the site, Bowie quit providing content around 2004.  This list is mostly compiled from davidbowie.com (some titles were  mentioned in his online journal rather than on the books page). (Note: * means named in video David Bowie: An Earthling @ 50.)

Fiction

• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy [novel]
• Barchester Towers  — Anthony Trollope [novel]
• Visions of Gerard — Jack Kerouac [novel]
• On The Road — Jack Kerouac [novel]
• City of Night — John Rechy [novel]
• Journey to the End of the Night  — Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine [novel]
• Hawksmoor  — Peter Ackroyd [novel]
• Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess [novel]
• White Noise  — Don Delillo [novel]
• Blue Afternoon  — William Boyd [novel]
• Cities of the Red Night  — William Burroughs [novel]
• The Viceroy of Ouidah — Bruce Chatwin [novel]
• The Insult — Rupert Thomson [novel]
• The Tetherballs of Bougainville — Mark Leyner (“Super pumped-up surrealist writing. Dope funny.”)
• Stephen King  [novelist] . “I’ve read everything Stephen King’s written. I love Stephen King. Scares the shite out or me.”
• Julian Barnes [novelist]
• George Orwell [novelist]
• Charles Baudelaire [poet]
• Christopher Isherwood* [novelist, memoirist]

Non-fiction

Memoir, Biography, Autobiography

• Iris — John Bayley [her widower writes of last years of Iris Murdoch]
• Big Mouth Strikes Again  — Tony Parsons [memoir, personal essay, opinion pieces]
• Personal Delivery — Duncan McLaren [memoir]. This is what McLaren says about his work:
  

  “Of the 12 books I’ve written so far, two have been published in full. I was 40 when ‘Personal Delivery’ came out, while ‘Looking For Enid’ appeared 10 years later. The call I got from David Bowie, an inspiration of my adolescence, congratulating me on ‘Personal Delivery’, just about balances the clutch of one-star reviews I’ve received on the Amazon.co.uk site for my book on Enid Blyton, the wonder of my childhood. What next? Books on Evelyn Waugh and my mother are in the pipeline. At least as far as I’m concerned they are. My ambition is to have three books in Amazon’s list of the top one million sellers by the year 2020. No, dammit, four!”

• The Life and Times of Thomas More — Peter Ackroyd
• James Dean, the Mutant King: A Biography — David Dalton
• Blame Me On History — Bloke Modisane [autobiography]
• Modern Nature  — Derek Jarman [memoir]
• Tom Paine: A Political Life — John Keane
• Duchamp: A Biography — Calvin Tomkins
• A Better Class of Person  — John Osborne [autobiography]
• Peter Cook — Harry Thomson [biography]
• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett — James Knowlson
• Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam — David Kaufman
• Experience  — Martin Amis ( “A man and his dentist !!”) [memoir]
• Black Boy— Richard Wright (“one of the great influential books for both the Panthers and Malcom X”) [autobiography]

Philosophy, Culture,  History

• Faith And Treason: The Story Of The Gunpowder Plot — Antonia Fraser
• Pandaemonium 1660-1886. The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers — Humphrey Jennings
• Illusion of the End -— Jean Baudrillard [cultural history]
• Strange People — Frank Edwards [just as title says]
• Cigarettes Are Sublime —  Richard Klein [cultural history]
• Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — Julian Jaynes
• Brain of the Firm — Stafford Beer [neurology x business administration]
• Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder — Lawrence Weschler [tour of Museum of Jurassic Technology]
• The Gnostic Gospels — Elaine Pagels. “I inevitably read anything written by Elaine Pagels.” [theology]
• Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan — Rem Koolhaas [architecture, cultural history]
• Modern Times Modern Places — Peter Conrad [cultural history]
• John Pilger [politics]
• Michael Gross [fashion]
• Melvin Bragg*
• Friedrich Nietzsche*
• Bertrand Russell*

Music

• Coming Through Slaughter  — Michael Ondaatje [biography x fiction; jazz]
• Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music — Gerri Hirshey
• The Life and Times of Little Richard  — Charles White
• England’s Dreaming — Jon Savage [punk]
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk — Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
• Incredibly Strange Music, Vols. One and Two —  RE/Search
• Lexicon of Musical Invective — Nicolas Slonimsky
• The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary — Francis Stillman
• Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed

Visual Arts

• Beyond the Brillo Box — Arthur C. Danto
• Jean-Michel Basquiat (2 vols.) — Jean-Louis Prat and Richard Marshall
• Blimey — Matthew Collings
• Shark Infested Waters:  The Saatchi Collection Of British Art — Sarah Kent
• A History of British Art — Andrew Graham-Dixon

∞

Looking Back:

A few of the 279 books on the occult  Bowie was reading in the mid-1970′s, according to Gary Lachman and cited by Paul Trynka in David Bowie: Starman:

• Spear of Destiny—Trevor Ravenscroft
• Morning of the Magicians—Pauwels & Bergier
• The Outsider— Colin Wilson
• A. E. Waite*
• MacGregor Mathers*

By 1996, Bowie had likely thinned out a lot of these 279 books: “‘Nobody professing a knowledge of the black arts,’ says Bowie firmly,`should be taken seriously if they can’t speak Latin or Greek.’”

-

Lambeth to Brixton, or Poetry and Painting, Sound and Vision, William Blake, and The Institute of Imagination

David Robert Jones was born within walking distance of the house where William Blake (1757-1827) did much of his greatest work.

London seems a remarkably small town in some ways: so much has happened there in so little space over so many hundreds of years’ time. South of the Thames River, at Hercules Road, London SE1, between 1791 and 1800, William Blake created the Songs of Experience, Europe and America (among other prophetic books), and Newton and Nebuchadnezzar.

The man who would be David Bowie was born about three miles down the road at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, London, SW9 9RZ on January 8, 1947.

View Larger Map

At age 10, in 1767, Blake started  Mr Pars’ drawing school in the Strand and then in 1772 became an apprentice engraver to  James Basire of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At age 11, David Jones went to Bromley Tech to study art, leaving five years later to start work at Hirst Advertising, 98 New Bond Street, London, not far from Lincoln Fields.

There the similarities end.

Blake scrambled for enough cash to maintain himself and wife and buy what he needed for his engravings and paintings,  unknown and unappreciated. But likely he came close to satisfying himself, creating his own system of belief, was never “enslav’d by another Man’s,” and preserved his visions in ways which honor both language and image, joining the sound of poetry and the meaning of its words and the sensuality and immediacy of his visual art.

Jones became Bowie and achieved fame and riches. I don’t mean to suggest that he is not a man who has achieved great things. But I think he never got to where he wanted to go. I think he wanted very much to join sound and vision, but it didn’t happen. He could imagine it, using elements of Kabuki or mime, costuming, and so on to add visual interest to the music, but one problem, of course, is that performance is fleeting. My choice, based solely on youtube snippets, of the most visually interesting tour is Sound and Vision. Even on my monitor, the interaction of the giantess Louise Lecavalier and Bowie is impressive.

For recordings, Outside came closest, perhaps, but appeared after the transition from 12″ by 12″ LP format with heavy cardboard opening out to a 24″ by 12″ canvas and capable, even unboxed, of including glossy 8″ x 10″ photographs and a 24″ by 36″ poster (I’m thinking of the Beatles’ White Album) to the shoddy little 5.5″ square CD case with the flimsy little booklets of thin paper. The artwork of Outside is essentially ruined by being so shrunk that even a magnifying glass doesn’t help with the lyrics.

Bowie’s Blakean Mind

Bowie thought in Blakean mode — Blakean in the synathesia sense (like one who hears or smells colors). In 1978, Bowie told Melody Maker‘s Michael Watts about his  “peculiar system of notation for the musicians”:

“I draw the music, the shape that it should look like. I have to draw the feeling because I can’t explain it. The musicians who have worked with me have now learned the language.”

Twenty years later he told The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman:

“I’d find that if I had some creative obstacle in the music that I was working on, I would often revert to drawing it out or painting it out. Somehow the act of trying to recreate the structure of the music in paint or in drawing would produce a breakthrough. . . .I’ll combine sounds that are kind of unusual, and then I’m not quite sure where the text should fall in the music, or I’m not sure what the sound conjures up for me. So then I’ll go and try and draw or paint the sound of the music. And often a landscape will produce itself.  . . . . Suddenly I’ll realize where things go in the music.”

So there we are. Except for one odd little connection.

The Institute of Imagination, Blake House, London

If you search “David Bowie” + “William Blake,” you are going to find an annoying number of hits for Bowie’s description of artist Tracy Emin as “William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh.” Keep going though and you’ll find a most peculiar invitation to join the Institute of the Imagination [IΟI]. Membership is limited to 100 people. The cost is £1ooo to join and then another £1000 each year for dues. Three patrons are listed: Bowie, Prof. Chris Orr RA, and Sir Stephen Tumim.

Tumim was a judge who campaigned vigorously for prison reform. He also oversaw the Arthur Koestler award for prisoners’ art, which he collected. The judge died in 2003.

Chris Orr is a visual artist who attended Ravensbourne College of Design, once the not so grandly named Bromley Technical College, Bowie’s old school. Of his work, Orr says,

“The basic physical nature of the print processes… allows one full control of the output. From the conception of an idea and the making of plates to their refinement through proofing and the printing of the edition, I was fully in control…I identified strongly with William Blake: being married to Catherine, having the press in the house, publishing and distributing the results. My homage to Blake also takes in his capacity as an inventor. In pursuit of my own poetic vision I have discovered, or re-discovered, printing processes such as counter-proofing and relief printing that can serve to liberate creativity.”

The closest connection with Blake is via the IΟI’s founder and director, Tim Heath, who studied math, practiced law, and is now a writer and designer. Heath is also Chairman of the Blake Society and owns the only building still standing where Blake once lived, Blake House, 17 South Molton Street, London — which also happens to be the headquarters for IΟI.

He is still active. In 1997 he was awarded a grant “to create the definitive Blake Website on the Internet.” I think the University of Georgia’s Blake Digital TextProject wins that prize. More recently, in 2009, Heath was involved with “Songs of Imagination & Digitisation, an illuminated book for the digital age,” a project of if:book or The Future of the Book national charity in the UK (you may also check out “magical musical graphical digital fiction”).

As for surviving Patrons Bowie’s amd Orr’s support of  Director Heath’s IΟI, or for that matter the existential status of the IΟI, I haven’t a clue or £2000 to find out. But maybe I’ll send in a membership application, accompanied by an imaginary £2000, just for fun.

You know what else is amusing: Philip Pullman, one of my favorites, is the president of the Blake Society, which sometimes meets in the same digs as does (or did) Bowie’s IΟI. How tidy life sometimes seems.