“We Were So Turned On”

I know exactly where I was the first time I heard all the Bowie albums before Scary Monsters and where I watched the Nomi/Bowie performance on Saturday Night Live and where I was introduced to T Rex and Eno, and so much else. I was in the dorm room of an artist, Jim Sanders, who […]

Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Concluded

Finishing this up. My days turned to weeks. 9. Nicolas Roeg allows viewers much room to intuit connections in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The first few minutes are among the most illogical. All you have to go on is the title. Something seems to explode in the sky and crash into a lake. […]

Some Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part 1

Each time I watch The Man Who Fell to Earth, I wonder anew. I have no thesis here, so these thoughts just roughly follow the chronology of the movie. Bowie’s character does not smoke cigarettes during the movie. Buck Henry’s Oliver Farnsworth does in the first scene in which he appears and at least once […]

Bowie Sighting: Ali Smith’s Winter

Ali Smith’s Winter (2018), the second of a quartet (Autumn appeared last fall) is about Christmases past and present, hearth and earth, the regenerative powers of winter, and the complexities of family life. It is also a very punningly funny and political Brexit novel. The references to Bowie work thematically — and continue the subtle […]

Bowie Sighting: Peter Robinson’s Sleeping in the Ground, An Inspector Banks Novel

If you read Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, you know that Banks has eclectic tastes in music and huge libraries of vinyl and electronic recordings for his home, car, and personal player. Some fans have assembled playlists to accompany a few of the 24 books that comprise this series of police procedurals. In Robinson’s latest […]

Playing Favorites: Bowie & Anthony Powell

This second “Plying Favorites” is just that – play, possibly of entertainment to no one but myself, a variation of Six Degrees of Separation. Anthony Powell is the author of a novel in twelve volumes, A Dance to the Music of Time, which I believe is primarily about how our minds make narratives of our […]

Playing Favorites: Bowie-Yentob-Pullman

Other than being two of my favorites, David Bowie and novelist Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust) have nothing much in common beyond having been born in post-war England within a few months of each other (1/47; 10/46). That, and having interesting minds and reading widely. Now I find that BBC One, […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar. David Bowie, Islander

David Bowie was an islander, born in England, died in Manhattan, his ashes scattered off the island of Bali. He had a lifelong interest in another island nation, Japan, and homes in Australia, Mustique, and Bermuda. Like Thomas Jerome Newton, his avocation could easily be described as Traveler; his moniker on his website was […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar: David Bowie, Cosmos-politan, 2

David Bowie died during the evening of January 10, 2016 in New York City, but much of the world was sleeping, and so woke to the news on the 11th, the news traveling like a cross-continental comet. He was cremated, according to the death certificate filed with his will, on January 12 in New Jersey; […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar: David Bowie, Cosmos-politan, 1

“He looks like a comet, his flame-like hair slicked back on entry into earth’s atmosphere.” Philip Hoare, on the fall to earth of alien Thomas Jerome Newton, aka David Bowie. RisingTideFallingStar (130) After a brief meditation on the fall of Icarus (this book is about risings and fallings and risings of tides and stars, and […]