Bowie

Bowie 1979

(click for larger)

I like Bowie, though I am not a super-fan. I like a lot of the work he did with Eno in the 70s, and also a few of his really early songs. I think this is a great photo, and, as I haven’t seen it elsewhere, I thought I would post it.

Further cool Bowie (and other) pics here.

Neat Bowie-oriented blog here.

I recently lent a DVD of The Man Who Fell to Earth to a colleague. This is one of my favourite films, though it is a bit difficult to say exactly why. I think I just love the questions it poses. My colleague, a movie buff (I am not), liked it, but not especially. One thing she found odd was the nudity. When I asked her for an example of the nudity she found overly gratuitous, she gave that of the guy diving into the swimming pool.

I have thought about this since. The film was made in 1976 or thereabouts. Showing a black guy living in what is clearly affluence and holding a high government position would probably have been quite radical at the time. But Nicolas Roeg did not stop there. He showed this man as a sexual being, though not in an exploitative way, but, rather, diving luxuriantly into a glistening swimming pool, swimming underwater to his white wife, showing his sheer physical power by lifting her from the pool,

getting out from the pool himself, and embracing her with love.

Later this government official asks the question along the lines of ‘I wonder if we do and say the right things?’ In the movie he is engaged in the program of establishing the correct ’social ecology’ in American society. When he asks this question he is questioning his role in that program, uncertain of his place and what he is doing - what he’s creating for his children. (He asks the question while he is putting his child to bed.)

The multiple questions raised by Roeg seem to me to cut across a dozen paradigms of what I imagine to be aspects of American society. Of course, other aspects of American society include just that ability to ask the questions, and to seek answers.

What I particularly like about Roeg’s treatment is that he presents the life of his black official as unexceptional. He does not make an issue of it. Similarly, without any comment, he has a gay couple as central characters in the film.

This very lack of comment is, in fact, the comment itself.

For more info on Nicolas Roeg, see pHinnWeb. And Donald Sutherland talking about Roeg and his film Don’t Look Now. Try checking You Tube for the love scene - I did have a link here but it is dead now. Here is a trailer to MWFTE. And another here. And this, well this is just nice. Oh, and more 1 and more 2 - brief doco on the music. Golly, it goes on; here is Big Audio Dynamite - E = MC2, a tribute to Roeg. (Songfacts)

Other relevant posts:

Pancime - MWFTE revisited

Pancime - Icarus (the poem in Bryce’s WE book)

Pancime -  One hand

Lichanos - I wonder if we do and say the right things