DE: RIP David Bowie

[yakalskovich]

 Talking to my friend the Nazgul last night (she is a big fan), I realised I had come to study and get a degree in Japanology happened only because I'd seen "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" at an impressionable age and had become fascinated by all things Japanese.

What is your most important or favourite memory of some David Bowie song or role during your life? Memorable ear worms? A song playing at some specific moment? The first time you saw "Labyrinth" when you were young? Something like that.-

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Caveat: I learned some stuff about Bowie yesterday that makes me feel less enthusiastic about him. As is so often the case (especially with rock stars), someone can be at once a great, even transcendent, creative talent and also be a less-than-great human. (Wish I had learned it ten years ago so that I could have made peace with it instead of grappling with it when he had just died.)

Anyway, I wouldn't say I have a distinct memory of him so much as an impression. Did you know he's in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle? And why not? The Man Who Fell to Earth is regarded as a seminal film. (I haven't actually seen it for no good reason, but the ads for it from my youth are burned into my memory. And I think they ran during the '76 Olympics, so how is that for weird?) "A Space Oddity" is one of the best songs anyone ever wrote about space travel, found filk if anything is. He was in some odd way the man of all the tomorrows, morphing without a computer program. And while many of those faces don't resonate for me - and how could they since I am as Straight as he was Weird? - he was living in a Sci-Fi world. And that DOES resonate with me, no matter what else I think of him or his music (and in general, I like his music).

PS: Who else had his music used more in TV and film, especially SF/fantasy? For starters, two series named from his songs, and whenever I hear "Golden Years" I remember the gonzo SF miniseries, "Stephen King's Deadly Years."

[paceisthetrick]

Heroes! Or Low. But I was addicted to Scary Monsters the year it came out.

Happy New Year, btw

[yakalskovich]

Ohai -- you exist! Happy New Year!

[bjornwilde]

I'm with Alex with the problematic history of Bowie and working to balance the good with the bad.

Still...Labyrinth was probably my first movie exposure to Bowie. I loved the songs and still do, but I was more impressed with the puppets and Jennifer Connelly.

Next would have to be Breakfast Club, though that was a quote from his song Changes and not an actual role. That quote, and the movie, likely started me thinking for myself, beyond what my parents and other adults thought of me.

The role that really put him on the map for me was John Blaylock in The Hunger. I remember being floored by this strange vampire tale that showed that vampires don't always get to be glamorous immortal beings.

Other notable roles I loved him in were SA Philip Jeffries in Fire Walk With Me and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige.

As to ear worms, Heroes and Putting Out Fire (With Gasoline) from Cat People.

And I really need to see Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I had always meant to but never got around to it.

[yakalskovich]

I found 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' on Amazon Prime -- might be watching that tonight.

[sdelmonte]

Alas, I would have to move to Germany to use my subscription to see it.

[bjornwilde]

And Netflix doesn't have either, as well. :/

[camwyn]

There was a rendition of the incredibly overplayed Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy" that involved two men mixing the original words with something else that sounded like original material, and made it much easier to listen to. As a kid I only recognized one of the men's voices, because my parents had an 8-track tape of one of Bing Crosby's Christmas albums.

One day I asked about the song. My dad said the other voice was David Bowie, and told me about the extremely weird TV special where he and Bing chatted about their families for a bit before singing together.

It's still one of my favorite Christmas songs.

[sdelmonte]

You would never see someone as relentlessly old school as der Bingle and someone as new wave as Bowie work together now, would you?

[camwyn]

Only if one of them were Tony Bennett.

[athelstanthescribe]

Starman and Changes, I think, were the first Bowie songs I was exposed to. I came back to both of them as a confused teenager when there was something deeply comforting about them.

And I watched Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence when I was probably a bit too young and found it very unsettling.

As for the less savoury aspects of his past, I can remember being about thirteen and watching footage of him sitting in the back of a car in the Thin White Duke era, strung the hell out on cocaine and talking about only consuming milk and mashed potato. But what I think has helped me come to terms with the problematic things is that he kicked it. By the time he died, he was happy, he'd been clean for a long time, and to all appearances his current wife and children loved him. And so did we.

[yakalskovich]

It is very unsettling, and meant to be, something of a cross-cultural love story with an extra helping of Japanese weirdness and truckloads of cultural misunderstandings; these people not so much hated each other but simply failed to get each other at all, each side so totally convinced of their superiority in painfully similar ways.

If one were to consider apping Celliers and Yonoi to Milliways, one would probably be in for a short run only, because Milliways would deal with those cultural concepts and deep-running personal misunderstanding in a rather short manner.

[onceaviking]

I watched The Labyrinth at an impressionable age and once, in London, we went to see the moving exhibition at Rock Circus and Space Oddity was one of the best parts.

As a Dane, I have of course read and watched Christiane F back when I was in school (it was a part of our curriculum in German) and as far as I recall, the scene with the heroin in the public lavatory happens during the Bowie concert.

And then there was the interview.

One of the best interviews I have ever seen - and one I remember thinking ought to change the way people were interviewed - was a Bowie interview. Or rather a conversation between Bowie and Thomas Vinterberg, a Danish movie director. He was part of the Dogme Movement and for the interview they'd both been told to show up unprepared apart from a stack of cards with questions to get a conversation going.

And that's what they did. They had a conversation. And it was so much better than someone answering often pointless questions.
I think it's accessible from foreign IP addresses.

[leeshajoy]

I was never a big David Bowie fan--most of my impression of him is based on his portrayal of Jareth in Labyrinth--but I wanted to share this: a 21-minute video review of The Man Who Fell to Earth, made up of filks of various Bowie songs.

[yakalskovich]

Thank you for linking this! I tried to watch the film last night, but this is way more entertaining.

[chanter1944]

I saw part of, though not all of, Labyrinth when I was a kidlet. I remember being intrigued, but not quite grasping a large amount of what was going on - too little, and I'd walked in, as it were, part way through. I really should watch the entire thing someday. I hadn't a clue who Bowie was then, so that may or may not count for the DE.

My first exposure to Bowie's music came through a neighbor down the street. I was... maybe fourteen, somewhere in there, weird to my core, loud about it, and very much on my own and lonely in the majority of my oddity. I was also *desperate* to believe that I was heterosexual; where I grew up, you were straight, or you were damned. Enter an unabashedly geeky, quirky, scholarly husband and wife - she was more down to earth, he was more outlandish - and their toddler-aged daughter, stage... house on the corner. :) There were quite a few conversations between burgeoning geeklady me and one or both of those neighbors. Not that we spent a ton of time together, but even sporadic interaction with people who knew some of what in the world I was talking about was a delight, at that point. There was no small amount of shared laughter over A Prairie Home Companion, for one (pretty sure I still have the cassette of one year's joke show that was gifted to me with zero ceremony whatsoever), my first positive exposure to concepts surrounding transgender identity*, musing over societal oddity, and a lot of general reveling in wordiness. This is going somewhere, I swear. I distinctly remember, during one conversation, the male half of that couple quoting a lyric I'd never heard before: "Put on your red shoes... and dance the blues." I had no idea where it'd come from, then. Only later, after the scholarly folks down the block had moved to the Twin Cities, did I figure it out. On the back end of a family road trip to West Virginia, a song with matching lyrics just happened to hit the radio. OOOHHH aha! So *this* is where Dan got his quotation! Looking back, I'd say it's fitting.

I still wonder whatever happened to that family. Their daughter's college age, now. If nothing else, I'd love to tell them I finally stopped denying I was queer. Still hooked on public radio, too.

*I'm cisgender, but that particular conversation stuck in my mind for a level of acceptance I otherwise didn't see until college or later.

[thewidewideworld]

Labyrinth. Always. When I think of David Bowie, it will always be in those very tight white pants.

Growing up openly bisexual, David Bowie was always one of my cultural touchstones.