Month: October 1998

SONGWRITING CONTEST, IN WHICH WINNER CO-WRITES NEW SONG WITH DAVID AND BOWIENET MEMBERS TO CREATE COVER ART, PACKAGING GRAPHICS AND LINER NOTES FOR FIRST VIRTUAL CD

OCTOBER 30, 1998 — DAVID BOWIE has announced that he is hosting a songwriting contest, whereby contestants compete to become co-writer on one of his new songs, titled “What’s Really Happening.” BOWIE has written the music and chorus for the song and participants are asked to submit three verses. BOWIE will pick the winner (from a list of finalists chosen by the public), who will not only receive co-writer credit, but a $15,000 publishing contract compliments of international music publisher Bug Music, a trip to New York to be present when the song is recorded and a three-year subscription to Rolling Stone, along with gift certificates from Cdnow (www.cdnow.com) and BarnesandNoble.com (www.barnesandnoble.com). The grand prize winner will also receive a free one-year subscription to BowieNet, the music industry’s newest Internet Service Provider. Contest voters are eligible to win daily prizes awarded for their participation. The contest, which begins November 2 and is open to anyone world wide with access to an internet connection, can be found on www.davidbowie.com. Click on button for “cybersong contest,” where you will be able to hear the song and submit your verses.

As for the big news for BowieNet subscribers, BOWIE has announced that with the help of BowieNet members, he will create the first online virtual CD to be titled liveandwell.com. Starting now, members of BowieNet will be given three songs recorded live during BOWIE’s 1997 “EARTHLING TOUR” and asked to create the cover art and a 48-page insert. Every month, two additional tracks will be posted in order to create two pages per track for the insert. Members are encouraged to post their reviews of particular shows, submit ticket stubs, photos, as well as any anecdotes from their adventures during the tour. To help with the process, BowieNet will make pictures, set lists and other clip-art available. Submissions will also be accepted via post office box for members with oversized materials or those without scanners. Plans for the finished product’s future accessibility to the general public are probably in the hands of BowieNet members. BowieNet–which Ziff Davis, publisher of PC magazine, calls “The coolest ISP on the planet”–is located on the world wide web at www.davidbowie.com. Launched September 1, the network had over 5,200,000 hits in its first two weeks. Full ISP service is available for $19.95 per month or fans can stay with their existing ISP and become a VIP member for only $5.95 per month.

STAY TUNED FOR ADDITIONAL BOWIE NEWS TO BE ANNOUNCED NEXT WEEK.

10/27/98 NEWS: BOWIE MINI FEATURED AT BRITISH MOTER SHOW Paul Smith, Kate Moss and David Bowie are featured designers at the MINI exhibit at this weeks 1998 British International Motor Show. Read David?s 8.31.98 journal entry for additional details.

Here is the invitation to the Museum Ludwig “I Love New York” Exhibition that David has been writing about in his journal. Click the image above to view a larger version of the entire invitation.

One of the highlights of Friday’s VH-1 Fashion Awards Show (airing tonight on VH-1) was the screening of David Bowie’s classic video “The Jean Genie” directed by Mick Rock. The video was used as a backdrop to the Lenny Kravitz/Iggy Pop performance of “Rebel Rebel”.

Tonight at 1:00 a.m.-2:00 a.m.(EST) VH-1 will air VH-1 Most Fashionable Performances. Highlights include David Bowie’s appearance at the 1996 VH-1 Fashion Awards Show. This show will also be aired on Saturday, October 24th 11:00 a.m. – noon (EST)

Other upcoming David Bowie TV appearances include VH-1 Legends, to be aired on Thursday, October 29th, Noon – 1:00 p.m. (EST) (subject to change)

Considering Rock’s uneasy relationship with visual art down the years; it’s to the benefit of this show that the music used as the spur to the various exhibits- guitar noise by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore – is about as far from mainstream rock as it gets.

Packaged in vacuum- cleaner bags, these pieces were sent out as cassettes to a variety of artists and musicialns, whose responses comprise the exhibition and its accompanying CD. At their most basic, some of the pieces simply illustrate the difficulty many visual artists experience dealing with a form as amorphous and intangible as music. Perhaps each of those who just sent back the vacuum- cleaner bag, painted over or otherwise treated, thought their item a tartly miminalist comment on the proceedings; but together, they speak more loudly of artistic impotence. Only the more inspired – Bruce Gilbert’s Untitled featuring a DAT tape cocooned in the bags padding like a gift from Joseph Bueys; and Tim Head’s Deep Froxen/Defrosted, in which the package was frozen until its return – have the resonance beyond the purely rhetorical.

Those exhibits which make scatalogical musical jokes – Keith Ball’s chamber-pot of plaster ears; Alexie Politov & Lilya Orlova’s out-sized model of the cassette as toilet paper dispenser – are wounded by their punch-line status. The music’s shit – so what? More impressive is Martin Fletcher’s Sound Master, an oddly troubling sculpture of personal-stereo headphones rendered in gigantic Claes Oldenburg scale. There’s an indefinable magic too, to Phil Holmes’s Parellel Dustbin, a galvanized dustbin with a pool of mercury in the bottom, set atop an amplifier so that the sounds send patterns rippling through the mercury.

Meanwhile, David Bowie attempts to fulfil the exercise with measured equation of wit and style, with an image of joke chattering dentures topped with deeley-bopper eyes. Echoing Jasper Johns’s The Critic Smiles and Richard Hamilton’s The Critic Laughs, it’s called d&b, and if it’s intended as a self-portrait, it carries seriousness and ironic self-deprecation in an equalibrial balance that few others here can equal.

ANDY GILL

Thurston Moore Exhibition
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ
England
15 October – November 1, 1998

In October 1997, independent music label Lo Recordings received a tape containing 30 different one-minute guitar pieces by Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth. Lo Recordings teamed up with Commercial Too, an independent art venture borne out of Commercial Gallery, copied the 30 guitar pieces onto individual one-minute tapes and sent them out to a wide cross section of artsts and musicians enclosed in a custom designed vacuum cleaner bag. The exhibition and accompany music CD, CD ROM and catalogue are the results of that request. The artists and musicians have all made new works, some incorporating the guitar sample into their work, some taking it as the inspiration to make an entirely new piece. David Bowie has contibuted a piece entitled d&b 1998, mixed media construction, signed and dated on the base, 4 inches high. There is also a digital print from email message, also entitled d&b 1998, 8×10 inches, that appears in the catalogue and the CD. Other artists participating in this exhibition are Bruce Gilbert, Gavin Turk, Gilbert & George, Martin Fletcher and Tim Head.

DAVID BOWIE AND LAURIE ANDERSON COLLABORATION David Bowie and Laurie Anderson are to show their twenty drawing collaboration at the Luwig Museum starting in November this year. Read more details in David’s journal for the 16th of October.

Rock idol David Bowie’s interest in computers – he is setting up his own Internet provider service – is turning into an obsession.

At the launch this week of a vodka ad, created by controversial artist Damien Hirst, 51-year-old Bowie – part-time Bermuda resident – spent the evening of Notting Hill’s Pharmacy restaurant taking photographs of fellow partygoers.

Explains the computer freak formerly known as Ziggy Stardust: “I’m going home to put them onto my web page. I download everything at midnight.”

“I take pictures with a digital camera, and it takes only a couple of seconds to put them on my computer.”

To what purpose? “It’s like a daily diary,” Bowie says. “But instead of just one reader, everyone can see what I am doing.”