Gifts my father gave me

My father and I, a million years ago,
in Carl Schurz Park.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thus far writing and talking about my favorite movies and other pop-culture phenomena. My first great influence (besides my mother, who got me interested in modern art and movie musicals — and yes, I am a straight man who loves musicals) was my father, who died last Monday. In one of our last conversations in the hospital I was able to thank him for introducing me to great b&w and foreign movies as a kid, so I can think of no better way to celebrate his life than to assemble a little list of the things he got me hooked on, which became some of the cornerstones of the Funhouse TV series.

Sure, there were things my dad loved that I never got interested in: the American Civil War, WWII (both the military strategy and them crazy Nazis), British mystery series. There are also things I am deeply obsessed with that he didn’t have the slightest interest in, naturally — and things like team sports that we disliked in tandem. But the sheer amount of things he exposed me to as a young child, things that just blew my tiny mind, are worth mentioning because… well, I miss him already (he had not been well for several weeks before his death) and I couldn’t thank him for everything, so this blog entry will serve as a sort of an addendum, a cosmic thank-you note.

Firstly, the comics. My dad was a devotee from the Thirties through the Fifties, and was one of those many seniors who had a story about how his mother threw all his comics away (in his case while he was in the Navy — my grandmother considered them “dust-gatherers”). He later took me to the Phil Seuling NYC comic cons (where we got autographs — free autographs! — from Kirby and Steranko) and would often do the old-comic-fan thing of noting that “I had that comic!” when he saw something hanging up on display for sale for several hundred (or thousand) bucks.

Of course, I don’t think he kept his stash “bagged and boarded,” so they probably would’ve disintegrated over the years; one of my most vivid collector-memories is us receiving a package of Fifties-era Will Eisner comics that literally did disintegrate on us as we opened and attempted to read them.

So, first on the list is the work of Jack Kirby. My father worshiped Kirby — he had taken drawing classes at the Phoenix School of Design and appreciated the Old Masters (and modern abstract artists), but he was never ashamed of reading comics. He raised me to respect the fertile imagination and endlessly vibrant work of “the King” of comics. As many parents do, he decided to buy and read me comics as a way of getting back into them himself. Among the first I have memories of are the reprints of Kirby’s Sixties output  — the seminal Marvel stuff. Dr. Strange, a Steve Ditko masterwork, became my own personal favorite, but I shared my Dad’s enthusiasm for all of the Kirby creations.

I was really young when the D.C. “Fourth World” titles from Kirby were released (and failed, and are, as with all great pop artifacts, now looked upon as touchstones for so much that came after). Kirby’s psychedelic explosions, his use of photos in his comics, his amazing futurism (mixed with a heavy regard for ancient mythology and modern urban living) was mind-blowing and — what’s best for a kid — the colors were sensational (to this day I can’t even look at b&w reprints of Kirby or Ditko’s color work).

My dad’s steeping me in these wildly imaginative comic books ruined me for the current generation of Marvel (and D.C.) movies. There is so much vivid color in those comics that is not duplicated in the current blockbuster feature films (for both the conventional characters and even in something like The Watchmen — a reverent adaptation, but where was the brightness of the colors from the comic?) that we wound up disappointed whenever the films came out. The last film I saw with him in a theater was the first Avengers feature, which we enjoyed (mostly for the Loki character) but both thought was less than meets the eye, and nowhere near the wildly imaginative work of Jack Kirby.

Still on the topic of comics, my father did have a love for noir comics, which brought him to the work of Steranko in the Sixties. He got me interested in that surprisingly small handful of Steranko’s SHIELD comics and, through the comic book history books he bought for us to read (mainly Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes — the original version with the full reprints in it — and Steranko’s own, unfinished History of Comics), he introduced me to the noir world of the master, Will Eisner.

He enjoyed buying all kinds of heroic comics as a kid, but I think he spoke the most about the experience of getting the Eisner comic inserts in the Parkchester Press that contained the Spirit, Lady Luck, and other Eisner creations. As a kid, I thought the Spirit was surprisingly non-heroic and kinda silly (I still marvel at how many times Eisner depicted him getting his ass kicked by villains), but I grew to love the character. 

The first pages were stunning — the splash-pages where Eisner basically drew on the cinematic language of both the German Expressionist silents and the then-flourishing crime films that were later (in the Fifties) labelled “noir” by the French critics.

Years later I was able to return the favor and turn my dad on to Frank Miller (whose debt to Steranko and Eisner was constantly in the forefront, and much-acknowledged) and the comic book genius of Alan Moore. (I also got him to read the Vertigo titles by Neil Gaiman and Garth Ennis.) Of course, his talk about how much he loved Laura, Gilda, and The Big Heat led to my own teenage and 20-something deep obsession with all things noir. Even when he and I were out of my touch, I kept moving in the directions he had led me (and, as I often do with fascinations I’m introduced to by others, I dive in headfirst and want to see everything associated with the artists).

Robert Ryan in The Set-Up.

 As for Hollywood stars, he had had a teenage fascination with the stars of the above-mentioned films — he had crushes on Rita Hayworth and Gene Tierney, and wanted to be like Dana Andrews and Glenn Ford. (No John Wayne for him.) His noir leanings were evident when he also went off on speeches about the under-appreciation of Edmond O’Brien and Robert Ryan. He also introduced me to the icon of icons in the Sixties and early Seventies, Bogie. Rita was sexier, though:

Speaking of that period of nostalgia (which is best illustrated in Harry Hurwitz’s The Projectionist, which I got the privilege of showing my dad — he loved everything associated with that film, but had never gone to see it in a theater for some reason), he also fostered my interest in Karloff, Lugosi, Price, and the Hammer Horrors. One of the touchstones of my childhood was Famous Monsters of Filmland (and its short-lived competitor The Monster Times). This was a regular purchase that was acquired where comic books were sold.

At times my father realized this stuff was potentially terrifying (I never admitted it, but I had insane nightmares after seeing an R-rated double bill with him of Tales from the Crypt and The House That Dripped Blood), so he would remove pages or — this horrifies me as a diehard collector — “X” out with magic marker any offending pics of really odd, scary-ass creatures. (Thankfully, this was done on an infrequent basis.)

That period of nostalgia had other icons, and my dad was also instrumental in me winding up becoming a Marxist, “of the Groucho sort” (as a French radical once put it). b&w comedies still aired regularly on television when I was young, and thus I became utterly fixated on the Marx Brothers’ Paramount films and the first two MGM titles. My father also introduced me to Laurel and Hardy , whom I love (the Three Stooges I found on my own, on daytime TV), but the Marxes were especially amazing to me as a child.

Harpo is often spoken of as an id in human form, but Groucho and Chico were as well. Their humor was not only smart, literate, bizarre, and rambunctious, it was also fast (the best cartoon equivalent being Looney Tunes). Groucho became a personal hero to me as a kid, but I was mesmerized by the uninhibited humor of all three Marxes throughout my early years.

I have a dark sense of humor that was more than likely inspired by seeing Dr. Strangelove as a kid. My father had taste for grim, black comedy (now called “dark” to be p.c.). He was also fascinated by comedians who did different voices (a product of his growing up in the radio era) so Peter Sellers was one of his big faves in the Sixties and early Seventies (yes, he also introduced me to the wonders of the Milligan, chief Goon and bottle washer).

Enjoying Strangelove naturally led to my fixation on all the black humorists of the Sixties as a kid in late grammar school (my friends and I were “precocious” when it came to reading matter): Kurt Vonnegut led to Joseph Heller, which led to Bruce Jay Friedman and Terry Southern.

The love of British humor (which I have taken in one direction with Stewart Lee, and my dad took in another with Rowan Atkinson) continued with my dad sharing Python and Fawlty Towers with me. As regards British TV, though, I have to focus on the first two series he introduced me to that were completely mind-warping, The Avengers and Patrick McGoohan's blissfully brilliant The Prisoner.

Although it's an incredibly “Sixties” show (especially its final episode), The Prisoner still stands as a TV landmark. A spy saga that indicted “the System” in general; a rebellious hero who faced a nameless, dangerous bureaucracy; a series that defied the rules of series TV by not explaining its key mysteries. It remains a prime example of what television can do when the creators don't talk down to their audience and don't feel the need to extend their creation beyond a handful of episodes (McGoohan was forced to extend it to 17 episodes; he initially planned only seven).

Another cornerstone of my fascinations has always been radio — the medium that is now is dominated by awfully cramped playlists and conservative talk (and that one topic no one in my family has cared about, team sports). My dad was a product of the “radio days,” having grown up in the Thirties and Forties. His personal faves were The Shadow and I Love a Mystery, but he also had a passion for Inner Sanctum and comedy shows (Benny, Burns & Allen, etc). He even liked soap operas as a kid (he had fond memories of staying home sick and hearing things like Portia Faces Life), but could never stand Lum and Abner or Vic and Sade (now considered the greatest comedy of old-time radio; my father begged to differ). 

The Shadow is pretty much the old-time radio show that draws newcomers in, since the one super-power that Lamont Cranston possessed — “the ability to cloud men's minds” so he became “invisible” to them — was ideal for an audio medium. The show remained on the air for a long time and still has a very strong following among those who love old-time radio.

Now we come to the movies. I suffer from cinemaddiction — not for mainstream product, but for the old, the foreign, the independent, and the work of the great auteurs and the showcases for the great screen performers. At a very young age (somewhere in the early grammar school period) I first saw Citizen Kane, because my dad sat me down and watched it with me, thereby sparking my interest in, and passion for, great cinema.

He followed this a short time later by telling me I *had* to see this French movie, Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. That one was (like The Prisoner) a mind-fuck for my young noggin. He sat with me watching it when it aired on Channel 13 (our local PBS channel) one evening. It was (and will always be) mesmerizing. The chandeliers held by arms, the characters gliding along, the gorgeously composed fantasy elements, as well as Jean Marais' awesome lion make-up (everyone knows the Beast is a much more charming and interesting character than Marais' prince).

The films he would tell me about that he had seen on his own (I was way too young to go to these rated-R movies) were political thrillers by this guy named Costa-Gavras. When I interviewed C-G some years back, in conjunction with the opening of his film Amen, I did something I haven’t done on any other interview, thankfully — I had a false first take and had to start over as I re-phrased my first question.

The reason? I was flashing back to hearing about his films from my dad, and also the fact that my father had interested me in the script of State of Siege (which came out as a pop paperback — ah, the Seventies). I had no idea what it was about (although Yves Montand looked very cool in shades), but understood it all later on. The music from Z was a particular favorite of my father’s. We, in fact, had the album by guitarist John Williams, in which he performed a bravura performance of the piece:

Returning to comedy, I have to note that another film I heard about long before I saw it was The Producers. I now have the whole thing memorized, but still enjoy watching it every so often. My dad loved Jewish comedy, and Nazi humor — thus, the fixation on Sellers, who declared The Producers his favorite movie on more than one occasion, including his liner notes for the LP, which I bought to help remember the lines, not knowing it also included the cheesy go-go music (“Ulla, go to work!”).

My father and I could talk for endless amounts of time about character actors and comedy supporting characters. His preference for comedy was decidedly Jewish (although he grew up a Catholic and left the faith early on, as I did). Thus, he found this scene from Little Murders endlessly funny (as of course it is). The movie both made me laugh and really did creep me out as a kid: I thought that I, or  someone I loved, would get shot through a window. And of course the film’s message about urban violence and the American sense of delusion (and love of firearms) never, ever ages….

He also turned me on to a bunch of humorists who have sadly been mostly forgotten, or identified with only one thing they wrote. In the latter category is the great Max Shulman (whom I wrote about at some length here; he is of course best known as the creator of Dobie Gillis). Shulman’s work was wonderful to read as a kid — since a good deal of his output was written from the point of view of an innocent, who even a kid would realize is insanely naïve. Some of the basic elements of his work were time-bound to the era in which he was writing (the late Forties and Fifties), but the comic situations he crafted were timeless.

On a more somber note, one of the people my dad was a major fan of was John Cassavetes. He would tell me much about the TV series Johnny Staccato, which he had loved (and which offered John’s first directorial efforts after Shadows). He also raved about Husbands. I finally saw the film as a teen (I delved deeply into middle-age crisis movies as a teen, which was rather odd by the time I became a middle-aged person — although I did know what to rewatch….).

As the Seventies wore on, he wasn’t seeing many movies in theaters, except for the items that he and I saw together (Planet of the Apes pictures, James Bond outings, Bruce Lee vehicles, etc). One of the films he *loved* on TV that I thought seemed fun but didn’t seem to have a plot or any coherence at all was Mean Streets. My father recognized the characters from the Sicilian part of his family (he grew up in the Bronx and was often brought to Arthur Avenue, the “Little Italy” of upper NYC); to me the film just seemed a jumble of good scenes and funny performances with no plot.

When I began seeing films in repertory theaters, I realized that the Mean Streets I had seen was — much like my other teenage faves, Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver — absolutely destroyed for television. “Strong language,” violence, and any kind of sexual content were removed, and so the film seemed to be about nothing at all. The film I saw in theaters was indeed a masterwork, one that Scorsese created variations on for years to come (Goodfellas, Casino, etc).

I end up back where I started, with nostalgia for the Thirties. When my father lost his mobility and needed a walker to get around, he stopped seeing movies in theaters. I kept trying to convince him that they make accommodations for handicapped folks (I know that’s not the politically correct term, but my dad was not a young gent by this point). He still refused, and so we watched movies on his VCR that I had on SP speed (he didn’t want me to wire up a DVD player, more stubborness), ones we both could enjoy that I hadn’t seen in a while.

The films we ended up watching were almost all W.C. Fields vehicles. My dad loved Fields above all others (well, Mel Brooks, Groucho, and Carlin were high up there as well). He had had me watch his films whenever they appeared on TV when I was but a wee nipper (the kind Bill Fields would’ve kicked in the ass). I thus have always had a major soft spot for the ultimate comic curmudgeon.

My dad in fact appeared several years ago on an episode of the Funhouse TV series to talk with me about his love of Fields, and the Thirties moviegoing experience in general. I shot it to air in June, the month of his and my birthdays, and (naturally enough, given Fields’ emphasis on dysfunctional family humor) Fathers Day. In that show my dad defended Bill F. against charges that he loathed children (it supposedly was an act, but then again I’m sure his alcohol intake used to determine how he felt about people he encountered; one of his salutations for his close friend Eddie Cantor was “Christ-killer”).

Fields does come from an era when un-p.c. humor was not just tolerated it was encouraged, and yet (like Groucho) he seemed to exalt the con man who could take down the rich, arrogant bastards in society. As a put-upon husband and dad he had no equal, and he definitely spawned Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, and Al Bundy (and, methinks, the “Battling Bickersons” on radio); John Cleese has gone on the record saying that Fields was one of the key inspirations for Basil Fawlty.

My dad shared all of these items with me, and I had the pleasure later in life to share many things with him. We spoke on the phone on an average of once a day, sometimes more depending on whether one of us had a trivial item to impart about some individual whose work we loved or hated in common (this included a lot of celebrity deaths, but also some celebrity birthdays).

He was sick and in pain for three months before his death last week. The calls that we normally shared were replaced with calls from the hospital, updating me on his condition, and lifeless calls to and from him in which he didn’t want to talk at all. I had one final amazing in-person conversation with him three days before he died, where he was “opened up” for chat by a friendly nurse, and we were able to talk about the past (his relatives, our attending the Seuling comic cons) and the present (the usual silly trivia we shared). I made him laugh when I told him about something Joey Reynolds had done on YouTube, and we talked about the new Shatner book about Nimoy (my dad was a massive “classic Trek” fan).

That was the last time we spoke like that. The next two days he was in terrible shape, and on the following morning he was gone. I miss him incredibly — most especially the long, sprawling phone calls.

“No spoilers!!!”: the infantilized audience and un-cinematic cinema

[Note: This piece was written in early January, but it wound up taking a back seat to my ongoing tribute to David Bowie. I herewith present it because I remain stunned by the sheer terror some people have for “spoilers.”]

When I first started getting seriously into film, my film teacher (who said many wise things) reacted to my asking him if it was "okay" to tell him about the plot of a movie he hadn't seen by saying, "it shouldn't matter if you know the end of the movie... it's how the director gets there that counts." I've heard his voice in my head for the past two decades each time I've seen/read/heard the Internet-spawned phrase "no spoilers!" Cautions about spoilers now even appear in essays in Criterion Collection booklets, where one *should* be able to safely assume the reader knows the end of the film they've paid for and are now reading an essay about — or do people read critical essays in DVD sets before they watch the classic films on the discs these days?

The fear that reading/hearing “spoilers” will ultimately ruin one’s experience of a film, TV show, or book (you rarely hear people complaining about books these days — more’s the pity) is, I believe intimately connected with the “trigger warning” idea that exists today. There always have been people who felt compelled to discuss plot details with people who haven’t seen the work, and there have always been people who wanted to exist in a bubble of innocence before they watched or read something.

Today, though, because of technology, the spoiler-shy individual can go around social media pleading with acquaintances not to “blow” a plot twist. Recently there was even talk of a filter that would block out any Web content that mentioned any item a person didn’t want “spoiled.”

There is an incredibly childlike aspect to the issue of spoilers. It’s as if the person avoiding them is a kid, not wanting to know that Santa and the Easter Bunny aren’t real. The more the person protests against spoilers, the more I have to wonder — is it really going to make that much difference in your life if you find out a plot twist, even a “major” one? (Almost invariably this twist involves the “surprising” death of a character.)

I spent three years editing a reference work (The Motion Picture Guide Annual) that provided the full plots of the movies reviewed; the esteemed British magazines The Monthly Film Bulletin and now Sight and Sound have provided full write-ups on movies that include the finales of the films discussed. It's a practice that serious movie buffs can deal with — the one genre I'd make an exception for would be whodunit murder mysteries, which are pretty much entirely predicated on their conclusion, so if you know the finale in those instances you have lost some of the goofy charm of the genre (I'd throw "twist" items like Homicidal and The Crying Game in there). With most of the filmmakers I deeply love, though, you can't ruin their films by telling me the end. A Godard film is like a poem — whoever had a poem ruined by knowing the last line?

The spoiler phenomenon applies entirely to the storytelling aspect of cinema. With TV, that winds up being the central aspect of a program — since the fervent cries that “modern dramatic TV is the new cinema!” and “…is better than literature!” are both incredibly wrong. Cinema and literature are about content *and* form, whereas 98% of television, including the hands-down best-written and acted shows of the last 20 years, pay no attention to form, they are simply concerned with storytelling. Many viewers in turn confuse superb production design with a program being “cinematic.”

These shows are in fact exceptionally good TV, not cinema or literature — is it not enough for something to be exceptionally good TV? (I’ve always felt that the cinema/lit references indicate that the speaker doesn’t feel television deserves admittance into the Pantheon of important media.) Truly radical and superior television would encompass the few shows that toyed with the medium itself (Ernie Kovacs’ video comedy, The Prisoner, Dennis Potter’s teleplays). Although you will rarely hear those who holler “no spoilers!!!” being disturbed by knowing ahead of time that a program will be playing with their senses.

So what occasioned this meditation on the “don’t tell me ANYTHING — you’ll ruin it for me!” panic-culture that proliferates on the Net? Why, the fervor (now past —but it will recur) over the latest Star Wars blockbuster, of course. My reaction to the SW series is apathy bordering on narcolepsy. I saw the first as a kid and enjoyed it, to a point (the point where I still preferred Star Trek and knew that Lucas was playing with characters and situations from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers).

The deeply beloved second film I saw in a theater and thought was okay. I saw most of the third movie on TV and have never gone near the prequels (an extraordinary act of indulgence by the formerly talented gent who gave us THX-1138 and American Graffiti, and then never, EVER felt the need to make another non-benign film for adults).

So I had zero interest in The Force Awakens but knew that it would be overhyped to the max, and it was. The “no spoilers!!!” fever pitch fascinated me, though. Consider this: the one (and only?) *really* big revelation in the initial trilogy was one that was hoary and hackneyed by Dickens’ time. (“I’m your father! Oh, and by the way, the only important female character in this thing — she’s your sister!!!”)

What exactly could a “spoiler” be in the context of that kind of pedestrian, unimaginative (and downright irritating) mindset? Would someone important die? (Given the advanced of age of half-asleep action hero Harrison Ford, that’s not an unlikely scenario.) Would someone be revealed to be someone else’s aunt? Would one of the cutesy robots or Muppets or hairy sidekicks attempt a dry hump on another? Would the ghost of a talented sci-fi writer materialize to kill off the whole wretched series? Would one of the kids dressed in their cosplay finery puke up his popcorn in your local multiplex? Whatever happens, it surely won’t be original or innovative, or anything other than a sly move dreamt up to resurrect this moribund series of kiddie fantasies, of which so many adults have fond adolescent memories.

I hope that no one reading this blog entry had their experience of the SW movie ruined by an Internet reviewer, commenter, or troll who gave away the super-secret plot twist that I’m sure was super-fantastic. If that happened to you, may I suggest one of two things:

1.) Seriously consider avoiding further disappointments and life-ruining traumas by starting to attend (in a theater) films made by true artists. I guarantee that you will NOT be able to predict what’s going to happen next in a film by Godard, Greenaway, Maddin, Lynch, Herzog, Von Trier, or Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

2.) Aim to only watch the genres that the abovementioned Werner H. — who likes to make anti-arthouse cinema proclamations, even though his own work fits snugly into that category — has earmarked as “ ‘essential’ films: kung fu, Fred Astaire, porno. Movie movies, so to speak.” (Further thoughts from Werrner: “I love this kind of cinema. It does not have the falseness and phoniness of films that try so hard to pass on a heavy idea to the audience or have the fake emotions of Hollywood films.” Herzog on Herzog, p. 138). In this way you’ll never have your life ruined by finding out a spoiler.

Has Werner Herzog seen many Russ Meyer movies?
(The two sit here on a panel at a film festival.)

The genres that Herzog cites (I’m going to assume he means musicals in general when mentioning Astaire) won’t disturb you by acknowledging the medium you’re watching, or offering any stylization that calls attention to itself (unless you’re watching a Dennis Potter-derived musical, a Jackie Chan action vehicle [with repetitive Eisensteinian edits used for Jackie’s stunt scenes, to show he’s really doing the stunt], or a stylishly deranged “Rinse Dream” porn movie). No one will be able to spoil the plot for you, and you’ll have a lot of fun in the meantime.

To put it plainly, life is too short to be terrified that you’re going to find out that some ridiculously lame, poorly sketched character in a half-baked space opera is gonna kick off (or be brought back, or turn out to be someone’s son/father/uncle/pet ferret). Sit back, calm down, and enjoy some truly entertaining formulaic entertainment. Disney, J.J. Abrams, and other corporate forces behind the SW franchise will do just fine without your 15–20 bucks.

“Knowledge comes with death’s release”: the “later” music videos of Deceased Artiste David Bowie (part 3 of three)

“We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression/And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression/We’ll get by, I suppose…” — “Fantastic Voyage”

To close out my tribute to Bowie, I wanted to discuss his music videos (and by extension his music), post-1980. I do this in response to the notion that everything he did up to and including Scary Monsters was terrific, and all that came after — with the exception of a handful of songs — isn’t worth listening to.

Before I get into the best of “late Bowie,” I should spotlight three items that underscore Bowie’s eclectic musical interests. The first is a disc that was given away with an issue of Mojo magazine. The disc, titled DavidHeroesBowie, is a wonderful assortment of tracks from Bowie’s many heroes, from Little Richard and Chuck Berry to Jacques Brel, Anthony Newley, and Nina Simone. It can be found here.

Bowie was asked by Vanity Fair to compile a list of his 25 favorite albums for the Nov. 2003 issue of the magazine. One helpful soul has reprinted the piece — with links to most of the albums — here. His choices range from the obvious ones (a Little Richard compilation, the first VU album, Syd Barrett), to soulful icons (James Brown, Toots & the Maytalls), to higher-toned items (Steve Reich, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well..., Harry Partch, Mingus, Stravinsky), time capsules (The Last Poets, The Fugs, The Incredible String Band), largely unknown artists (Koerner, Ray & Glover, Daevid Allen, Tom Dissevelt, Tucker Zimmerman, George Crumb) and wonderful trash (Florence Foster Jenkins).

The third item is a 1979 radio show called “Star Special” in which Bowie was asked to play whatever music he wanted. He slid in a few of his own songs, but for the most part he played artists that had inspired him (Elgar, Philip Glass, the VU, Iggy, King Curtis, and even Danny Kaye!), were his contemporaries (T. Rex, Roxy Music), or newer acts whose work he loved (Talking Heads, Blondie).



I noted in the second part of this blog entry that I became a Bowie fan when I saw the trio of Lodger videos. His command of that medium was sublime. He had been doing “publicity films” (the original name for music-vids) since Love You Till Tuesday and always seemed to be a frustrated filmmaker; we know from my interview with Howard Kaylan that he definitely was an aspiring screenwriter. He discussed his interest in wanting to direct a film starring Susan Sarandon as Diane Arbus (!) here.

David Mallet's music-vid collaborations with Bowie did what good cinema (and video-art — think Ernie Kovacs' final ABC specials) has always done for music — it redefined the songs, confronted the viewer with a steady flow of memorable imagery, illustrated (or played against) the lyrical content of the songs, and, in the really top-notch work, played with the form itself. The notion of a work that acknowledges itself is as old as Don Quixote (and, later, Bowie's fave Herr Brecht), but to today's audiences that self-referential quality is somehow deemed quaint (better to steal, er... pay homage to other artists' work, a la Tarantino).

Although the viewers of today are supposed to be the most sophisticated in history, given their techno-savvy and awareness of cliché and tropes, they still cling desperately to the “reality” of the cultural items they watch/read/listen to, as is reflected by the nearly-pathological “no spoilers!” sensibility.

A lot of Bowie’s best work called attention to the medium itself — this is no surprise given his interest in Brecht’s work (upon meeting David, the noted Brecht expert and translator John Willett is said to have remarked to a fellow Brecht-o-phile “[Bowie] knows more about Germany as a whole — and Brecht in particular — than anyone we know!”). Thus his music-videos were truly radical for the late Seventies, as well as the more jaded Nineties and Aughts.

Fans of his work can debate which of his videos is the “best,” but I’d nominate “Ashes to Ashes” (directed by David Mallet and Bowie) as the most important, primarily because — besides the fact I like it a lot — that it pretty much mapped out the music video equation with style and imagination, and this a year before MTV signed on the air. Along with Chuck Statler’s “The Truth about Devolution” and Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” (directed by Godley and Creme), “Ashes to Ashes” is a seminal video because it showed the potential for all-out visual innovation (and plain old weirdness). All three of the aforementioned also were the antithesis of what became the dominant model, the kitschy-when-they-were-new (and quite awful) “story” music-vids of Bob Giraldi.

Of course, Bowie himself went straight for the mainstream and became an MTV staple in 1983 with the release of the Let’s Dance album. From that point until 1995 and the release of his 1995 reunion with Eno, 1.Outside (the return to greatness for most hardcore fans), he was making jukebox music. Some of the songs were catchy and enjoyable, many were instantly forgotten (even by the artist himself, as he indicated in several interviews).

He summed up that period (which lasted more than a decade) in a recently reprinted New York Times interview, saying, “I was going through my middle-age crisis smack on cue…. I felt awful with myself as an artist. And I probably started working on the visual side of things really quite desperately to find some salvation as an artist.” He’s referring to his painting here, but we can equally extend that to the music-videos, which is in some cases were better than the songs they visualized.

   

The oddest musical move Bowie made between Scary Monsters and 1.Outside was to create the band Tin Machine with Reeves Gabrels and the Sales brothers. Bowie tried to subsume his identity within that of the band, but he remained the central attraction throughout its nearly four-year, two-album lifespan. I like the hard-edged music of Tin Machine, but don’t relisten to it (I did so right before writing this, for reference). The songs on the two studio albums by the group are wildly uneven —a good number (“I Can’t Read,” “Goodbye, Mr. Ed”) will often be followed by an abominable one (like “Crack City,” with perhaps Bowie’s worst-ever lyric: “Corrupt with shaky visions/and crack and coke and alcohol/They’re just a bunch of assholes/with buttholes for their brains”).

The single best thing about Tin Machine is that it gave Bowie a musical “enema” that woke him up and made him ready to create 1.Outside and Earthling, the really challenging and innovative albums he produced in the mid/late-Nineties (yes, there was one other solo album between the Tin Machine period and 1.Outside, but the less said about that, the better).

Bowie fans argue the merits of the music made by Tin Machine (Bowie himself said “When it worked, it was unbeatable, some of the most explosive music I’ve been involved in or even witnessed. But when it was bad, it was so unbelievably awful you just wanted the Earth to open up and take you under”). 

One thing that experience did for Bowie was to keep him creatively energized so he didn’t slide into the torpor of Jagger & Richards and Daltrey & Townshend (touring oldies forever) or Billy Joel (a pathetic figure who hasn’t written a new pop song in two decades now, but packs oldster fans in for nostalgia-fests at MSG) or, worst of all, Paul McCartney, who continues to release new albums that do nothing but tarnish his old reputation. (In more recent years, when Bowie felt he had nothing new to offer musically, he seemed to follow the same course as George Harrison — step away from the microphone, stop touring, and don’t release unnecessary albums.)
*****

Now onto my final (for the moment) celebration of Bowie’s work, a look at the best videos that came after “Ashes to Ashes” (shortly after which he became blonde-male-model Bowie in the lackluster music-vids for the Let’s Dance songs).

“Loving the Alien” (1985), directed by Mallet and Bowie, does still feature male-model Bowie, but it is oddball enough to qualify as a kind of “Ashes to Ashes, Jr.” Filled with peculiar symbols, elements taken from fine art, and memorably offbeat images (the wedding image where he poses with a Muslim woman with money pinned to her dress) and creepy ones (a brief final image of Bowie floating through space in a bed, with a sizzling soundtrack that “breaks” the  song down entirely).

Yes, this video approaches self-satire, but Bowie spoke in interviews about how he felt parody was an essential element of what he did, through all the stages of his career.



Skipping to the album that I try not to mention (coughcoughBlackTie,WhiteNoisecoughcough), Bowie’s next visually arresting video was “Jump They Say,” (1993, directed by Mark Romanek). Yes, he’s still male-model Bowie (that didn’t go away until he grew a goatee and went back to a darker hair color), but this video is a gem, blending an alternate-present corporate culture with imagery directly nabbed from Alphaville and, most prominently, Chris Marker’s La Jetee. It’s a brightly-colored upbeat nightmare scenario:



Moving forward from the years he spent in the creative “wilderness,” we wind up with the return to form that 1.Outside represented. The album is a wildly creative and unique creation, in that it is the single longest Bowie audio creation (running 75 minutes), has a bizarre but somewhat linear narrative (more linear actually than Ziggy or Diamond Dogs), and contains a harder, industrial sound than anything Bowie had done in the past (including the more raucous moments on the Tin Machine albums).

Nicholas Pegg, in The Complete David Bowie, also gets right to the heart of the matter when he notes that “Noticeably, 1.Outside was the first album since Scary Monsters on which Bowie… reveled once again in the artful unwholesomeness that was the stock-in-trade of his 1970s work. This is a triumphantly queasy, deliciously unpleasant album, and by the time of its release Bowie… was once again prepared to explore areas of moral complexity.” (Pegg, p. 391)

The perfect couple:
Bowie and Eno

Pegg quotes Bowie saying in an interview: “‘I’m not suggesting for one small minute that you rush out and get your junkie kit together,’ he told one interviewer in 1996. “‘Not at all. It’s just interesting that people who make those explorations, if they go through the cusp of those experiences, they do tend to come out the other side in a way better people for it, you know? That’s a dangerous thing to say, but it’s true in my case. I’m glad I did everything I did. I really am.’” Pegg adds, “He would never have said anything like that in the 1980s.” (p. 391)

1.Outside is indeed a dividing line, where the Bowie beloved by his diehard fans returned — the one who wove interesting experiments that resulted in spellbinding albums (filled with catchy songs, no matter how depressing or debauched the lyrics might be). The plot, such as it is, concerns a criminal committing “art-ritual murders” (at the time, Bowie was becoming interested in the creepier performance artists who harmed themselves in the course of their shows).

The video for “The Heart's Filthy Lesson” (1995, directed by Sam Bayer) is a truly creepy affair, with tribal, pagan, blasphemous, “incorrect” imagery that makes it far more confrontational than the Seventies gender-bending performances and publicity films, which look extremely quaint in comparison. The setting is an art studio inhabited by a collective of people creating and worshipping mutilated sculptures.

The editing is much quicker than it was in the Mallet vids, but it perfectly fits the song, which is an assault on the senses. And yes, male-model Bowie is now in the past — he was sporting his tiny beard by this point. He performs erratically and seems to be mocking the viewer and also the totem-like objects he and his group are creating. It’s a total redefinition that was as radical for its time as the glam/Thin White Duke/Berlin personas were for their eras.



Bowie always was absorbing new music genres and then trying to incorporate them in his work. He liked the wave of techno music that flourished in the Nineties, and thus began to weave fast-paced sensory assaults like “Little Wonder” (1997, directed by Floria Sigismondi). The somewhat mangier, eyepatch-wearing, goateed Bowie plays a frenzied collector of curiosities, who is counterpointed by younger actors dressed as his earlier personae.

Sigismondi was as good as David Mallet at visualizing Bowie’s music (both directors shared Bowie’s crazed and fertile vision for quick, memorable imagery). Her direction here is kinetic, confrontational, and willfully abrasive, which is absolutely perfect for the song, with its intentionally trivial lyric. 

The dream/nightmare imagery is potent (using the subway as the locus of nightmares is always a wise decision), and the decision to use Gerard Oursler’s “electronic effigies” (projections of film onto dolls and other inanimate objects) was a masterstroke (Oursler first worked with Bowie on his 50th birthday concert and continued to supply amazing imagery to his music-videos and concerts up to and through the videos for The Next Day).

The fact that David was 50 years old here should give inspiration to those of us “of a certain age.”

“Dead Man Walking” (1997, directed by Sigismondi) is a totally abstract video, in which Bowie and various figures perform random actions. Among these figures is bassist and all-around Cool Chick Gail Ann Dorsey, who not only was Bowie’s regular bassist for his last few tours (and several albums), but also makes a fine “devil girl” here.

Bowie used to show Un Chien Andalou by Bunuel and Dali before his concerts (a nice light prelude to a night’s entertainment there) and he clearly favored surrealism throughout his career. Here it’s ecstasy-flavored surrealism with the same sense of self-parody that always fueled Don Luis — especially when a gent tries to retrieve a side of beef from a staircase.

If I was asked to pick my favorite post-’80 Bowie video, it would probably be “I'm Afraid of Americans” (1997, Dom and Nick). The song it visualizes is catchy as hell, and it’s socially significant without being preachy. Bowie loved living here in NYC in the two decades of his life, but he was right to be wary of the gun violence that consumes our society. Instead of writing a pro-gun control song, he came up with this (that phrase again) nightmare scenario.

Of course the video is ripped right out of Taxi Driver, but since Scorsese has long since left that sort of gritty stylization behind (in favor of trying to refashion Leonard DiCaprio into a number of adult parts he isn’t quite versatile enough to excel in), so it’s all up for grabs. Trent Reznor makes a very good (younger) Travis Bickle and the emphasis on random New Yorkers pointing imaginary guns at each other is a masterstroke (it also enabled the video to be shown on music-video channels and shows — by this point gangsta-rap videos with guns in them were being banned).

Bowie’s recognition that Reznor was just about the best thing happening in American music at that time was also quite perceptive — again, with the exception of hip-hop (Al B Sure?), Bowie continually made the right decisions about which artists to “borrow” from, namecheck in interviews, and collaborate with.

The video is as vibrant and scary as the song, and for NYC residents, it also offers a great view of downtown in the late Nineties (replete with several views of the now sadly defunct Pearl Paint).



Bowie’s last two albums are filled with all kinds of songs about age, the passing of time, and death (but then again, one must remember that in his 20s he was singing about “Time” and “My Death” on a nightly basis). Back in 1999, though, he began his music-video meditation on age with “Thursday's Child” (1999, directed by Walter Stern), a moving piece that finds David at 52 thinking about his youth.

In an interesting reversal of the scene in The Hunger where he grows older, here we see him growing younger and, as in “Little Wonder,” we see a younger counterpart for Bowie, who studies himself in the bathroom mirror.

Over the years, Bowie either downplayed his acting talent, or noted that his acting career was always going to run a distant second to his interest in music. He was a very good actor who (for the most part) made very smart choices in taking roles — later in his life he was wise enough to just take showy supporting parts and stay far away from starring in anything. In this video he clearly conveys the angst and “what might have been?” aspects of aging.

The wistfulness of the video and the catchiness of the tune make it an important transition in his music-video work. It might seem like a step backward from the above nightmare-frenzy sessions for him to make a piece that has a linear narrative, but to shine a light on his own aging was a very brave move for a former king of the pop charts.



In the last part of this blog entry I mentioned the song “Slip Away” from the 2002 album Heathen. Bowie made the very interesting move of not making any music-videos for that album, saying in an Entertainment Weekly interview, “There’s a certain age you get to when you’re not really going to be shown [on TV] anymore. The young have to kill the old… that’s how life works…. It’s how culture works.”

He did do a few videos for his next album, Reality (2003). “Never Get Old” is a great lyric about the vows made by youth (as seen by an older man), but the video is just a stylish lip-synch, as is “The Loneliest Guy.” Far better is “New Killer Star,” (directed by Brumby Boylston), an oddball “all-American” reverie done as a series of lenticular images. Lenticular imagery isn’t meant for video (since it’s about making static images “move,” which is already the province of film and video), but this video is interesting  because the song is so damned hook-driven and the images are so “wholesome” as to be creepy, which was surely the intent.

One detects the influence of Jim Blashfield’s earlier music videos in this bit of animated weirdness. See what you think.



The same man who swore in 2002 that he no longer wanted to make music videos was by 2013 a bit of an enigma: an NYC resident who had stopped performing publicly, rarely appeared in films and on television, and (to most folks’ knowledge) had stopped recording music. Thus, the appearance of The Next Day really was a bit of a surprise (as was his next, and last, album). Thankfully, it was a pleasant surprise, as most of the songs were excellent.

The most touching song, and most moving video (until the final pair) was “Where Are We Now?” (2013, directed by multimedia artist Tony Oursler). A definite stock-taking by Bowie, the lyrics evoke his famous “Berlin period” by recalling locations in the city, while offering us the vision of a crowded artist’s studio inhabited by a pair of dolls — the faces of Bowie and Oursler’s wife Jacqueline Humphries projected onto them.

Bowie’s voice is at its most plaintive, and the piece on the whole is beautifully contemplative. Oursler’s video matches it emotion for emotion, as we again see “older David” (now 66) unsmiling as he looks directly in the camera (this is not the cocky glam king of the Seventies or the male model of the Eighties). It’s a wonderful piece of work that is incredibly sad and incredibly exciting to watch — not just because of the fact that Bowie was still making music (albeit very quietly, out of the public gaze) in his reportedly “retired” period, but that he was making such beautifully emotive music.



If “Where Are We Now?” wasn’t proof enough that Bowie was back at full strength, I need only point to the absolutely *delightful * video for “The Next Day” (directed by Sigismondi), which finds Bowie with tongue planted firmly in cheek playing a Christ figure entertaining at a “gentleman’s club” inhabited entirely by lecherous priests (led by Gary Oldman) and call girls (led by Marion Cotillard).

Bowie discussed religion a lot in interviews — constantly noting that he had no interest in organized religion but that he believed in some kind of god (this in the last 20 years). At another point in the last two decades, he noted that he had “an abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism.” (Pegg, p. 394) Whatever his beliefs were in the final years of his life, this video is wonderfully blasphemous and, as such, is a joy and pleasure to watch (over and over again, if you’re an ex-Catholic, like this reviewer).



Honorable mention should go to “Valentine’s Day,” in which directors Indrani and Markus Klinko wind up studying Bowie’s face. Having had some health problems, he looks quite different than he did a decade before in the Reality videos, but he clearly wanted the camera to see for once the “real” Bowie (in the last few interviews he did, he would refer to his existence as now being more a matter of David Jones — his real name — than the iconic and always-plugged-in Bowie).

John Schaefer, the host of the great "Soundcheck" show on WNYC wrote an article that decoded the video, declaring it an anti-gun piece (producer Tony Visconti has revealed that that was Bowie's lyrical intent). Best of all, Schaefer pointed out (this insight was later noted in the British music press, two weeks later) that one pose Bowie strikes is eerily (intentionally?) reminiscent of the famous image of Charlton Heston raising his gun at an NRA convention ("... from my cold, dead hands...").



The “Hello Steve Reich” remix done by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy for the song “Love is Lost” inspired this video directed by Bowie himself (he finally *did* become a director!), which again features Oursler’s projection-on-dolls  technique. The video is damned creepy, as it features the face of the aging Bowie superimposed on a Pierrot doll (with definite visual and aural refs to “Ashes to Ashes”), as we see the real David at the bathroom sink again (he clearly saw that as the locus for people confronting their wrinkles).

A creepy blonde-Bowie dummy takes the whole thing into the Twilight Zone. Both the Pierrot doll and the dummy were created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for a never-made video for another song. Bowie proudly maintained that the video cost a total of $12.99, the price of the flash drive he saved it on. (So presumably this video was shot somewhere Chez Bowie – or was it?)

  

Tilda as Bowie.

Tilda Swinton has spoken about how she grew up loving Bowie, so her costarring performance in the video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” (directed by Sigismondi) must’ve been especially mind-blowing for her. She was chosen clearly not only because she is a great actress, but because she is a chameleon (rumor has it Bowie hated that label, a lot) who looks a wee bit like  Mr. B.

The video is a narrative one, with Bowie and Swinton as a boring middle-aged couple who are haunted by two celebrity alter-egos (played by two young women) and a red-haired Bowie lookalike (played by a young woman incarnating the “Cracked Actor” coke-years David). The video meditates on fame (that old saw), privacy (something Bowie was very intent on keeping intact in this period – and so he did), and a familiar theme he had pretty much deserted, sexuality.



Bowie released the jazzy ballad “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” to promote yet another greatest-hits collection (Nothing Has Changed). The video is an evocative piece, with the song illustrated by b&w images of NYC tunnels and subways (this time not used as a setting for horror). We see Bowie recording his vocal imposed on the walls of the tunnels, as the words of the song appear onscreen.

I could’ve done without the karaoke-like magnified lyrics, but otherwise it’s an interesting video (directed by Tom Hingston and Bowie house photographer Jimmy King).

Bowie's last two videos have probably been seen by more people than any new music videos he's done since the Eighties Let's Dance MTV blitz. The first one, “Blackstar,” (2015, directed by Johan Renck), brings us back to the barrage of signs, symbols, and general weirdness that characterized the video for “Ashes to Ashes.” This piece is more complex, as it is longer and the piece of music it is visualizing has been described as a combination of avant-garde jazz, a Gregorian chant, and drum and bass. 

There were no in-depth interviews with Bowie after his Reality period, so we will never learn what eloquent, ambiguous, and self-effacing things he might've said about this very curious (and surprisingly long, for him) video. Many articles on the Net have tried to “unpack” the imagery, starting with the obvious question (that's Major Tom's skull, right?) to the exact nature of the oddities on display (from the tremor dance of the female celebrants to the “Buttoneyes” character Bowie plays early on). I can offer no solutions or even valid interpretations (all interpretations for ambiguous symbols are correct, in some formulation).

One thing is for sure: this was during Bowie's health crisis, and he looks terrific (he pulled off “greying” hair beautifully). And yes, although this is a deadly serious song, and a melancholic video, the song itself relies on some pretty goofy puns (our narrator reminds us he's a blackstar, not a porn star, a “gangstar,” and the curious “flamstar”). In any case, the best single passage in the song is at 4:40 (the “Something happened on the day he died...” interlude). And, yes, the crucified scarecrows are pretty much up there with the creepiest image in any Bowie video.

Now, for the final curtain. It was clear that Bowie "stage-managed" his death, hiding from the public, but providing a beautiful farewell in the form of the Blackstar album and these two videos. I thought I'd close out (before we reach the very last music-video of all) with some quotes from David about his mortality. 

After he turned 50 he began to speak more and more in interviews about his age and his feelings about being in rock as a middle-aged man (he had a far more practical take on it than the leaders of bands that tour endlessly, playing the oldies for the rest of their wizened existences). On the subject of aging, he said (in a promotional interview for Heathen):

“I didn’t want [the album] to become pathetic, either, like, you know, ‘Here’s an old man’s recollections’ or something. Still, I had no embarrassment about expressing the thoughts and experiences of an old man…. I wanted to give some sense of what happens when you arrive at this age — do you still have doubts, do you still have questions and fear, and does everything burn with as much luminosity as it did when you were young.” (Pegg, p. 408)

Bowie was quick to talk about death. In the quickie paperback biography Presenting David Bowie by David Douglas, there is an interesting passage: “Bowie’s dramatic statement, ‘I know that one day a great artist will killed on stage, and I can’t help feeling that it might be me,’ stems from an authentic fear that he might someday become the first pop star to be assassinated….

“According to [his former girlfriend Ava Cherry], after a while he didn’t even want to talk about the subject for fear the negative energy might increase its likelihood.” (p. 74) It has been reported in more than one source that the reason he didn’t extend his run in The Elephant Man on Broadway was a result of fears brought up by the killing of John Lennon (among Mark Chapman's possessions was an Elephant Man playbill; also, Bowie's name was purportedly on his list of targets).

At points he sounded like a character in a Bergman drama (or, conversely, a Woody Allen comedy). He plainly stated (at the “middle” age, mind you, of 51), “What I need to find is a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time — from today until my demise — is the only thing that fascinates me.” (Pegg, p. 394)

So he carefully kept his life under wraps in the last decade-plus, and the private nature of his death befitted a man who had always lived his characters to the full. His final character (and, aside from some studio work with Visconti, his final performance) was indeed “Buttoneyes,” who is also featured in the “Lazarus” video.

The video speaks for itself, but I will note that the image of Bowie at his writing desk coming up with ideas as his strength runs out is an inspiring one. Seeing David do some dance moves two months before his death is also pretty damned inspirational.

A final quote: “Our expectations of an ending or a conclusion… learned from repeated story-film-narrative culture, gives us a completely unjustified set of expectations for life.” (Pegg, p. 392). This clearly was something that bothered Bowie — people wanting decisive endings. Despite his disliking clearcut conclusions, he certainly provided us with a hell of a finale to his life as a performer, musician, visual artist, and “idea man.” 

Note: The title for this piece comes from “Quicksand” on the Hunky Dory album.