rusty_halo | I need, like, a music blog, or something

An act of anti-sanity: staying up until 3am on a work night, watching The Man Who Fell to Earth. For the second time.

*feels out of it and is going to bed early tonight*

It was better on rewatch, but even more depressing. I just wanted to curl up and cry at the end. Plus jaydk and I got drunk beforehand and watched the first two Death Note movies. Kind of a dark-themed night!

Watching The Man Who Fell to Earth while drunk is extra-weird because it’s largely a movie about alcoholism. That’s not the theme that intrigues me–more just the way it captures social isolation and the inability to communicate. The way you can want so desperately to connect with another person and it still doesn’t work–that love isn’t enough.

*gets depressed again*

Meanwhile I’m trying Low. I’m kind of sad because I feel like I can’t viscerally appreciate the full impact of this music, just because it was so groundbreaking at the time. Whereas I was raised on stuff like The Downward Spiral and just take the industrial / electronic / ambient thing for granted.

Still, nothing can take away from the fact that this is really good. Although not as dark as I was led to believe–but then, see: raised on The Downward Spiral.

Maybe Bowie’s just dark in a more subtle way than Reznor. I can barely listen to NIN anymore because Reznor’s lyrics hit my embarrassment squick so badly. I like to think he just pulls them verbatim from the diary he kept at age 16; the possibility that he’s writing them fresh as an adult is almost too horrible to contemplate.

Although actually, this reminds me even more of PIG (whose lyrics thankfully are not embarrassing), particularly of the instrumentals on Sinsation.

Anyway, Low. Is nifty, and I will listen to it more.

Also I am throughly absorbed in this David Bowie encyclopedia. It’s great–it’s entirely about Bowie’s creative output and skips the trashy bio stuff unless it’s directly relevant to the art. It’s divided into different sections–an entry on every single song, album, music video, film role, etc. The guy writing it seems to have a good head on his shoulders–he explains the history of each song, describes the creative contributions of everyone involved, points out the allusions and references, peppers his commentary with direct quotes as much as possible and explains his speculations with evidence, and includes both a historical overview of each piece in addition to quotes from the major reviews of the time.

It’s really fascinating both as a look at Bowie and at one sliver of the world of the 1970s, which is this whole other intriguing thing for me–this is the first time I’ve been a major fan of someone working in a era I didn’t live through, so it’s almost a study of the time as much as it is of him. It really hits you how much artists are influenced by the time and place they work in. I suppose the closest I’ve come before is my Sergio Leone obsession, which led to this whole interest in post-war European perspectives on America (which is also an aspect of Bowie’s work… and of Raymond Watts’… I wonder why I keep being drawn to that).

Sorry, babbling.

Current Mood: tired emoticon

tired

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