These are your favourite things…
The current issue of V magazine (July/August edition) has a Bowie front cover with twelve other new pictures by Mario Testino inside. Also inside, David guest edits the Heroes section of the magazine, from which we have reproduced snippets below. The original pieces are longer, and not as disjointed as some of my selected paragraphs would suggest.
So do try and get the mag if you can, it’s great stuff, and our man really is a very compelling writer. This isn’t the first time David has written for V. You may remember a piece called ‘Cosh Boys’ that he wrote back in May last year. (05/02/01 NEWS: BOWIE WRITES AND ROCK SHOOTS FOR ‘V’ MAG) I can’t wait for him to write some full length thing of his own someday.
Thanx to BowieNetters Leeza for the above cover scan, and breakingglass (Helen) for typing out ALL of the text…not just the stuff below, but the whole lot! Thanx very much ladies…I use the term loosely of course! };-)
Total Blam Blam – (BowieNet News Editor)
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The Legendary Stardust Cowboy at David Bowie’s
Meltdown last month. Picture by Total Blam Blam.
In early 1971, just before my departure from the States back to the U.K., Mercury executive Ron Oberman took me aside and furtively pressed a couple of singles into my hand. “Play these,” he said. “You will never be the same again.” Back home I choked on “Paralyzed” gasped in awe at “Down in the Wrecking Yard,” and fell all about the floor at “I took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship.” It was the laugh of love. I could not believe that such a talent had gone virtually unrecognized. If ever there was an equivalent to outsider art, this was it. The integrity, honesty, and innocent, brutal focus entranced me. I became a lifelong fan, and Ziggy got a surname.
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At Jennie Richee lost in the wilderness in the dark (detail)
Tracing and watercolor 60 x 276 cm. By Henry Darger.
In 1973, after Henry Darger had passed away, his landlord, the photographer Nathan Lerner, investigated his room and found it piled ceiling-high with religious artefacts (mostly kitsch), more than a thousand balls of string, corridors of papers, magazines and comic books; bizarre nine-foot-long double-sided scroll paintings; a six-volume daily weather journal, updated for more than ten years; and a five-thousand-page autobiography. The written works amounted to more than thirty thousand pages, all hand-bound. Something a little more special, I suspect, than familiar possessions of an old, poor and lonely man.
Moreover, in the place of honour in the centre of the squalor was something only a true outsider could have created. It was Darger’s life’s work, an obsessively epic nineteen-thousand-legal size-page, self-drawn and -written mythology called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glanderco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child State Rebellion. Oh yes! A tormented and gargantuan ramble, War and Peace as written by a demented Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Hieronymous Bosch, using the techniques of Rauschenberg or Warhol.
The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan has established the Henry Darger Study Center. All of his life’s work, including his materials and sources, is now available to the world’s scrutiny. May we judge him in the same light we would any ‘legitimate’ artist? Inasmuch as he quarried the mines of American junk culture and developed a handmade and prescient form of pop art, I think the answer has to be yes. This singular and highly worrisome voice is redolent of much that is humming in the depths of modern-day morality. At times both idealistic and perverse, childlike and knowing. Darger, like Bacon or Balthus, mirrors the shame, invention, individualism, and dysfunction that was a keystone of the last century.
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David Bowie wearing the British Union-flag jacket for the 1996
VH1 Fashion Awards show, designed by Alexander McQueen.
He decided in the mid 90’s that it was time to recover the idea of the long coat with its slight nod to eighteenth and early nineteenth century grace. From around 1995, Lee (His friends call him Lee) made me a series of these coats for television and road shows, culminating in the British Union-flag jacket for the 1996 VH1 Fashion Awards show. This appearance caused an eruption of British flag items and cemented the long coat as a completely acceptable garment for men’s evening wear. No Grammy Awards or New York soiree is now complete without half a dozen or so. The original now hangs in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
We’ve both worked in not a dissimilar way, Lee and I. We both wanted jobs where we could indulge our passions and loves without having to answer to anyone. To bring in from the outside the low-level, nagging fear that crouches in corners and invest our chosen fields with that starved anxiety. Only Lee could read the Marquis de Sade and come up with spring ready to wear.
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‘Valentine’ portable typewriter made by Olivetti, designed
by Ettore Sottsass in 1969. As used by Mr David Bowie.
It started with a red typewriter, a beautiful thing produced by Olivetti. I typed up many of my lyrics on that. The pure gorgeousness of it made me type as much as my need to get the songs down on paper. I couldn’t not look at it. I read that this guy Ettore Sottsass had designed it. Wow, he had designed the salt and pepper shakers in the kitchen, too. I must be drawn to his “thing”. 1982. A chair in the window of a so-funky furniture store in the West 30s. A trendy clothes shop called Fiorucci. All linked to Sottsass.
Boom. Then, the bomb dropped. Already sixty-two years old, Sottsass had energy to burn. He gathered around him a team of very young kids – some hadn’t graduated from design school even – and formed Memphis Design Milan and blood began to boil. It didn’t look serious. It looked like a prank. It mixed Formica attitude with marble diffidence. Bright yellows against turquoise. Virus patterns on ceramics. It couldn’t care less about function. How do you sit on that? It tabled the idea of the idea. Each piece of furniture offered a plethora of possibilities, options and inconclusive open ends. It sucked on the breath of pop culture with gusto and an enthusiasm that was delightful to witness. Within a short time, the street was overflowing with cheap and nasty spin offs. Everyone thought they could knock off a Memphis line and did. Oh, the horror, the ridicule. Except that nothing ever looked the same again.
Even now the jolt, the impact created by walking into a room containing a cabinet by Memphis – the Carlton, for instance – is visceral. It’s true that you can’t put another piece of furniture within the same space. There is just no aesthetic room. All networks of proposition are trammelled by this one item. Terrific. It’s a remix, rap, it’s hip-hop. Would all of the Starcks and Lovegroves of the world please stand and salute the greatest designer of the last fifty years? Your doors were opened by this man. Ettore Sottsass.
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Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Dressing Up’. David Bowie wants it for
Christmas. Click on the cover if you want to help him out!
An attribute that fascinates me about his work is his ability to work in the dual narrative, in two voices often separated by centuries. However, more that this, I sincerely covet his skill in creating place so vividly. His research is impeccable, his scholarship pronounced. His description of the banks of the River Thames in More’s time is nothing short of breathtaking in its orientalism. You can really smell the spices, feel the dirt between your toes, and see the turbans and gowns of the traders. It’s no longer boring Britain; It’s North Africa. Who would have thought?
On a lighter and last note, one of his least known works is Dressing Up, a history of drag and transvestism. I’ve not yet read it. You can get it for me for Christmas.