Month: February 2002

If you’ve been reading the BowieNet News, then you know that David will be performing tomorrow night in NYC at the twelfth annual Tibet House Benefit at Carnegie Hall. And since we know that many of you are making the trek from across the globe to see our man in action, we thought we should host a little get-together…

SO:
Why don’t we meet up at the Heartland Brewing Company, which is at 1285 6th Ave (btwn West 51 & 52) tomorrow night around 6:30 PM. We’ll be buying some beers with Howard’s credit card and giving away some posters and stuff. We’ll carry the goodies over there but we expect to leave empty-handed…

If you’re not going to the show, at least swing by and show your face. Make sure you bring a camera, take some pictures and post them on the site…

And if you are going to the show, we’ve got some special stuff tucked away for the first person to post their review and pictures on the site. We’re not going to tell you exactly what, but if you’ve been following the eBay auctions you’ll have an idea…Bottom line: free beer, free stuff, fun times, the show, the cause, did we mention free beer?

Hope to see you all there.

Aladdin Sane
1973

The dichotomy suggested on the cover of Aladdin Sane — an image of Bowie’s face bisected by a lightning bolt — had deep roots in Bowie’s personal life. Indeed, his schizophrenic brother was the inspiration for the album’s title. But Bowie himself felt increasingly divided by the success Ziggy Stardust had brought him, simultaneously indulging in his newfound fame and feeling consumed by his creation. Of course, this all probably escaped the legion of space cadets who followed Bowie/Ziggy’s every move and were soon to be sporting this glam-rock totem on their own mugs.

MICHAEL ANSALDO

click here for the full article.

As the merchandise exchanged and money roared…

Another piece in the February edition of Q magazine headed “Bowie Bonds Mature!” and illustrated by the graphic above, explains how investment in Bowie Bonds is a wiser choice than investment in UK Government gilt. Here’s what they say:

“Issued in 1997, and based on the future royalties from David Bowie’s 25 pre-90s albums, the “Bowie Bonds” are currently halfway through their lifespan. As our city editor reveals, they’ve turned into a decent nest egg.” And the explanation under the graphic reads thus: “Figures based on subsequent re-investment of yield. “Bowie Bonds” issued in January 1997 and bought as a block by the Prudential Insurance Company for $55m. They have a 10-year lifespan and pay back their yield at 7.9 per cent. The yield of the equivalent 10 year UK Government gilt issued in 1997 is 7.3 per cent.”

While we’re on the subject of good earners, according to the Guardian Unlimited website, David Bowie was Britain’s eighth highest earning pop star in 2001. Not bad considering he released no new material last year. The £8.3m he was purported to have earned, had him biting at the heels of The Rolling Stones, (who earned £8.5 between the lot of ’em!) but fairing a little better than the Bee Gees and Sting. Here’s the Top Ten from that list:

1 (1) The Beatles – £65m
2 (2) U2 – £60m
3 (3) Sir Elton John – £27.5m
4 (16) Pink Floyd – £16m
5 (-) Dido – £12m
6 (13) Enya – £9m
7 (4) Rolling Stones – £8.5m
8 (5) David Bowie – £8.3m
9 (-) David Gray – £8m
10 (-) Bee Gees – £4.7m
10 (-) Sting – £4.7m

In the words of one of David’s early songs, ‘Uncle Arthur’, I think we can safely say: “He gets his pocket money, he’s well fed…”

Thanks to Spaceface for the pointer to the Guardian piece.

Take me to the art, to the art, to the art…

The February edition of Q magazine has an interesting review of Rock Star Art, by author and “TV art pundit” Matthew Collings. You will have heard of Matthew via his trilogy of books for 21 Publishing; ‘Blimey!’, ‘It Hurts’ and ‘Art Crazy Nation’, and through two excellent series for Channel 4 here in the UK; ‘This Is Modern Art’ and ‘Hello Culture’. (08/18/01 NEWS: BOWIE, BYRON AND EMIN ON TV TOMORROW)

In the feature, entitled ‘Sheer Art Attack’, Matthew looks at the work of Jerry Garcia, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Graham Coxon, John Cougar Mellencamp, Captain Beefheart, Ronnie Wood, Micky Dolenz, Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan and Tico Torres. Here’s what he had to say about Paul McCartney and David Bowie:

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PAUL McCARTNEY
“Bowie Spewing”
It does what it says – see wonky eye for proof.
“The energetic mark making is a good thing, but everything else about it is bad. The horrible colours, the drawing, the banal arrangement, the half-arsed surreal eye in the middle with a load of messy blobs coming off it… all empty attitude, like any one of these bullshit curly marks. I think they’re just posing. And as for Bowie Spewing… that’s just stupid. It looks like it’s from 1980, and gives the impression of someone trying hard to seem like an artist, which is as embarrassing as someone trying to be like a rocker.”
Musical equivalent: “Something really bad by Wings. I respect Paul, but I’m going to have to give this the thumbs down.”

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DAVID BOWIE
“Portrait Of The Artist In Four Parts”
A set of gurning self-portraits.
“Who is this by? Either a portrait of David by his wife, or some self-portraits by David Bowie. As he’s the publisher of some of my books, I can’t say anything other than it’s extremely interesting work by a great man, ha ha ha! I would say they are paintings by someone who likes Egon Schiele [Austrian expressionist] and Francesco Clemente, who paints these intense stares.”
Musical equivalent: “Pass”

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21 Publishing have very generously given us ten copies of Matthews most recent publication: ‘Art Crazy Nation: the post-Blimey! Art World’. I’ve just finished reading this hilarious 220-page book, best summed up in the blurb from the 21 Publishing site:

“…at last a book about the British art world, which is sympathetic and informed but not at all afraid to be incredibly rude. How has the art world changed since Blimey! first hit the bookstands five years ago? Is London’s new Tate Modern good or a plastic tourist attraction with religious mumbo jumbo sprayed on, like magic fairy dust? Is being a Marxist in today’s art world little more than a market choice? Curators: anaemic zombies or twenty-first century Easy Riders, art’s answer to Sly and the Family Stone? Is it right that art must be sanctimonious to be good? Why are we like this now and how long will it last?

In Art Crazy Nation Matthew Collings doesn’t set out to provide black-and-white answers to these questions. Instead he describes what art in Britain has become and how the art world is thinking. He offers a slice of the contemporary art zeitgeist.”

For your chance to win one of ten copies of ‘Art Crazy Nation’, just tell us which of Matthew’s three books David wrote the following about:

“So which artist used to paint naked at his easel with pins stuck through his penis? Is it possible to walk out from a warehouse art-show and plunge to your death? Matthew’s wired and rushy art history, alternately irritating and insightful, gives late 20th century Britart what it needs – a confusing, loony relevance.”

Clues can be found by clicking-through from the shortcuts on this page, remember the images here also have click-throughs to other relevant sites, including a click-through to a BowieArt page where you can purchase a set of postcards of the above Bowie self-portraits.

Once you’ve worked out what book David is talking about, send your answer to TotalBlamBlam@DavidBowie.com with a subject line of “Art Crazy Nation”. As with all BowieNet competitions, you must enter from an @davidbowie.com address. The randomly selected winners will be announced this time next week, or thereabouts.

An exhibition based on ‘Art Crazy Nation’ here in the UK, is currently well under way at the Milton Keynes Gallery in Milton Keynes, and it runs until 3rd March 2002.

I wish you’d tell

Just four more days to go until David’s first live appearance of 2002! It seems that quite a number of our members will be attending the concert, and we know that many who cannot attend will be looking forward to hearing as much as possible about the evening’s events.

Last year’s concert attracted some moving and exciting submissions, which you can see here, so let’s join together and fill up the pages again this year. All contributions will be gratefully received, so send us your journals, snapshots and details of any articles you find in the press, both printed and online.

You can see the prepared pages here, and there is a button on the main page to submit whatever you wish. As always, we will show the pages as soon as possible after the event, and then again when they are completed.

See you there!

They pulled in just behind the bridge…

As auction number five ends, the sixth BowieNet eBay auction is now live. The three new items are listed below, with the relevant shortcut to each page.

1996 Bridge School Benefit Shirt

Earthling All Access Pass

Tin Machine All Access Pass

As ever, you should keep your eye on the BowieNet Auctions Page to view all of the current items.

Greetings All,

We are very sorry for the technical difficulties yesterday. We experienced some Database hardware failures, which in turn generated SQL (stands for Structured Query Language) problems. We are still working to correct them. We expect that these issues should be fixed by mid day Friday (2/15/02).

We are currently working on significant upgrades to the email, billing and other critical systems, that are known to have caused problems in the past. More details about these improvements and the scheduled rollout will follow soon. We are confident that the system and hardware upgrades will stop problems like this from happening again in the future. Please know that this was NOT a scheduled happening, but a systems failure. It took us by surprise as well.

Again, we are very sorry for any inconvenience that you experienced with yesterday?s tech problems. We are doing everything we can to ensure that these unscheduled down times never happen again.

Sincerely,

The UltraStar Staff

Became the special man…

Following on from yesterday’s MOJO piece, the March edition of UNCUT has a piece that is equally glowing in its appreciation of David Bowie. In a regular feature entitled ’20th Century Pioneers’, a two thirds of a page Ziggy pic shares a page with Kraftwerk and William Gibson. Here’s a couple of lines edited from the Bowie entry:

“Bowie was the first rock star to use his persona as a songwriting tool. Ziggy Stardust launched a million daydreams of sex and space travel. Through the Seventies Bowie made epoch defining, exuberant music such as Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, heroically killing of each new image as it stuck.

He became white soul boy for Young Americans, introverted iceman for the monumental Low trilogy, perfectly cast movie alien and consummate Eighties disco rocker. He remains charmingly unpredictable, music’s most articulate survivor, always stretching the vocabulary.”

Powerful stuff eh? The piece concludes with echoes of an old RCA slogan coined to promote ‘Heroes’ in 1977: “There’s new, there’s old, there’s Bowie.”

Who’ll love Aladdin Sane?

MOJO celebrates its centenary with the March edition of the magazine, and they’ve marked the event by asking 100 celebs to “name their hero and tell of the effect they’ve had on their life.” Here follows excerpts from the entries of three people who chose David Bowie as their hero.

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Echo & The Bunnymen, front…erm…Bunnyman, Ian McCulloch

“Bowie changed the face of music and the world. Everybody’s got dyed hair or mad clothes now, but until he kicked in in ’72, it was rare to see that kind of flamboyance. I was 12 when ‘Starman’ came out and I remember hearing it on the radio before going to school. It connected with me in a way no other ever had.

I saw him on Top Of The Pops, it was like “bloody hell”. The presence of it. I’ve met loads of people since who say it changed their life as well. He met me a few times (laughs). We supported him as Electrafixion. He was lovely…looks amazing, I preferred his old teeth though.”

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Ian Astbury of The Cult

“My musical hero is David Bowie. I’ve consistently bought every album he’s made since I was 11 years old and he’s just made my favourite records, records I keep going back to. He’s one of the most progressively-minded artists, the one with the most vision, and he’s done everything.

I love him so much, it’s been like a rite of passage. Every single major event in my life has been around a Bowie record coming out. I got to meet him in ’87 – we played on his Glass Spider tour…and he was one of the most eloquent, gentle people I’ve ever met and he gave me a lot of inspiration. Bowie was a real gentleman.

And I even like stuff from his last album, ‘hours…’ is a really good album. So I consistently go back to him as a major influence. I like the fact that he’s English and he’s had international success and influenced so many people around the world.”

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Travis Bassist, Dougie Payne

“When I was a kid my sister Jill got em into ‘Hunky Dory’ ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ terrified me; all those squeaky voices. ‘Kooks’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ are amazing, too. His version of ‘Port Of Amsterdam’ on ‘Pin Ups’ (Blammo note: must have been the Ryko re-issue) turned me on to Scott Walker and Jacques Brel, and he also made me check out the Velvets. Then ‘Low’ led me to Kraftwerk. He sent me off on tangents.”

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There ya go….Well we all knew about Ian McCulloch and Dougie Payne, but Ian Astbury? Who’d have thought it, eh Susans? Good stuff!

Scary Monsters…

Those wonderful ladies over at BowieArt have unearthed a copy of one of the very rare Minotaur box sets of 14 prints that was published in 1994. I don’t really want to tell you much about the set as, frankly, I want it for myself, and you probably wouldn’t like it anyway.

But, if you’re really determined to find out a bit more you should nip over to BowieArt news and look for an item headed “12-02-02 Rare David Bowie print set for sale.” Best leave it for a few days though as the network traffic is really heavy at the moment…Now, where did I put my bank manager’s phone number?….