rusty_halo

* USA released three network promos featuring Neal and Peter from White Collar. I don’t know the characters from the other shows, but yay for more Neal and Peter!

* Some clueless pro writer posted a screed about why fanfic sucks. Old wank, I know, but it’s inspired some lovely counterarguments that have reminded me how wonderful fanfiction is, both the art form itself and the community around it. Here is a really lovely ode to fanfic from pandarus.

* There’s this discussion going on in the feminist blogosphere about “Dude Music” and the comparative lack of respect female musicians and fans get. It’s incredibly interesting if you’re into rock music, and if you’re not it’s still very relevant, since it highlights a whole lot of the subtle ways that sexism works. I found it absolutely fascinating, because I’m definitely someone who grew up with a very male-dominated playlist–I’ve been working to understand why and to be a fan of more female musicians. Anyway, read the discussion in this order:

- I Went To Your Concert and There Was Nothing Going On, or, A Meditation on Dude Music

- The World At Large: How Privilege works in Rock Music

- The center and the margins, and butt hurtness

* Rare Film of Ronald Reagan, James Dean Unearthed. Is it wrong that I kinda wanted to read a slash version of this after I watched it?

* Bowie Dance Ride in NYC today. “Participants are encouraged to dress up as their favorite Bowie character and pedal away, Ziggy Stardust–style.” Uh, seriously?

* Iron Man 2 tonight! I can’t wait. This whole Supernatural obsession was incredibly well-timed; it managed to prevent me from clicking any of the Iron Man 2 spoilers that have been all over my reading list this week. :)

* netweight recommended Conversational Winchester for Trolls by eloise_bright and it is indeed awesome.

* I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge last night (exercise! fresh air!) and then went home and cooked a real dinner (roasted acorn stuffed with spinach cous cous and topped with toasted pine nuts). And then I sat down to watch Just One Episode of Supernatural. And… ended up watching four. So much for functioning like a sane person.

They were good! I enjoyed them. Maybe my previous feeling of disillusionment was just a fluke. Maybe by lowering my expectations I was better able to focus on what’s good. Maybe I was just saddened by the prospect of not staring at Jensen Ackles’ adorable freckles for the next two days, so I appreciated these episodes more.

My thoughts:

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

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Um, hi. I’ve let myself get out of the habit of posting. Again. (Sorry.)

I actually have been reading my friendslist, though. (Some of you will have noticed totally random comments from me over the past few weeks/months.) *waves*

I miss being in fandom; I just don’t have much to talk about. Mostly I’m worrying about real life stuff: money, and possibly moving again, and my cats’ health, and work, and… it’s just depressing, really.

But I do have a few fannish thoughts on my mind! I have mostly been occupied with:

* David Bowie, of course. I’m up to Heathen, from 2002. It’s fantastic! I can’t believe it came so late in his career! The cover of “Cactus” is awesome, and “Everyone Says ‘Hi’” is very moving. I’m hesitant to listen to “Reality, though, because it’s the last one and (unless he comes out with something new *fingers crossed*) once I hear it, this whole Bowie odyssey will be over. *sniffle*

* I started watching White Collar. I haven’t watched a current American TV show in years; I guess I kind of missed the experience? I chose it for utterly shallow reasons: I saw the ad on the subway and thought the guy looked hot in a Brian Kinney way. (He is cute, but alas, nowhere near Brian Kinney.)

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Top 10 Bowie Songs:

These are my personal favorites, not which songs I think are “objectively best.” Sort of in order, but some are too close to call.

1. Station to Station
This song is dark, beautiful, complex, innovative, and disturbing. Its enveloping atmosphere and progression of emotions captures a sense of the search for life’s meaning, the fear of emptiness and hope for transcendence.

2. Ziggy Stardust
The perfect archetypal rock song for the perfect archetypal rock star.

3. Subterraneans
So beautiful, longing, and sad. Bowie’s a master at capturing this particular emotion; “Subterraneans” is the best example, although…

4. The Bewlay Brothers
Even the Bowie encyclopedia doesn’t seem to quite know what to make of this song’s enigmatic lyrics. Whatever it’s about, the vivid imagery and haunting music are eerie and sad, steeped in a nostalgia for something deeply precious and irrevocably lost. (Plus, Bowie deserves major props for turning that chipmunk vocal effect last seen in “The Laughing Gnome” into something effectively ominous here.)

5. “Heroes”
Specific and universal, ironic and yet deeply moving–”Heroes” is an epic contradiction of a song. (I already raved about it here.)

6. Always Crashing in the Same Car
So much emotion brews beneath the cool surface of this song. It is a mood, a musical landscape of numb disconnection.

7. Alternative Candidate
I can’t believe this jaunty and twisted outtake wasn’t even on the album!

8. Cygnet Committee
Perhaps a bit over the top, but I love the sincerity of this folk epic. Bowie’s impassioned criticism of the corruption of 1960s ideals is a reminder of the substance beneath his style.

9. My Death (July 3, 1973 live version)
This isn’t even a Bowie song, but it ranks in my top ten for the quality of the performance alone.

10. The Man Who Sold the World
Thanks to Nirvana, I grew up with this song; I still adore Kurt Cobain’s raw vocal performance. Bowie’s original is equally sad, with a detached performance that gives its emotion a more distant quality. The lyrics are among his early best.

(Runners up: Life on Mars?, Five Years, Moonage Daydream, Rock N Roll Suicide, Aladdin Sane, Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing, Big Brother, Young Americans, Who Can I Be Now, Stay, Wild is the Wind, A New Career in a New Town, Neukoln, Ashes to Ashes, Ricochet, Loving the Alien, Jump They Say, Outside, I’m Afraid of Americans)

I know my descriptions tend to linger on the angsty aspects of the songs, but a lot what makes them so effective is Bowie’s irony, self-awareness, and sense of the absurd.

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

After Writercon, it feels like a total non-sequitur to launch right back into another long babble about David Bowie. I apologize to everyone who’s just friended me. But you know how it is when you’re in the grip of an obsession, right…?

So on to the Bowie talk.

Despite all my frustration about not being able to connect with Low, I have fallen head over heels for the song “Subterraneans.” I’ve been listening to it nonstop for a week. It captures this sense of time and place and distance and sadness and, just, the way Bowie’s lonely saxophone comes in at the end, wandering through the mist, reaching out and then fading away. It’s so beautiful and moving. I can’t explain it in words–you can listen to the song here.

I’m still reading Bowie books. I finished David Bowie’s Low (33 1/3) by Hugo Wilcken, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s exactly what I was wanting and not quite getting from Bowie in Berlin–an analysis of Low in relation to art and culture. Wilcken’s analysis is spot-on and interesting–he talks about Low as minimalism, its connections with German Expressionism, and about Bowie’s effort to remove narrative entirely. One of his best insights is that Low deliberately strips away the two things that were considered Bowie’s strengths: his words and his voice. His psychological analysis is less compelling, but I like how he talks about the album’s progression from the retreat into physical space (the first side’s references to hiding away in a room/bedroom) and then mental space (the second side’s nonverbal mindscapes).

He also talks a lot about how Bowie himself was already moving in an abstract direction–it’s not like Brian Eno swooped in and blessed Bowie with his ambient fairy dust or whatever. There’s a clear progression in Bowie’s work, starting from the linear narratives of his early folk songs (which probably culminates in the epic of Ziggy Stardust, although even by the Ziggy time the actual narrative was becoming ambiguous). Then the still very word-oriented “cut-ups” of the Diamond Dogs era (an idea taken from William Burroughs, in which Bowie would literally cut up his writings and paste words and phrases together in different combinations). It’s like he first tried to escape narrative convention with more and more layers of words and then with Low realized he could do it with many fewer words. The more I think about it, the more apparent it is that Low and Station to Station are two sides of the same coin. They have this same empty, disconnected, lonely core about the search for meaning and connection, but Station to Station’s surface is frantic and overwrought whereas Low’s is withdrawn and blank. And also, isn’t it a good thing that Bowie spent so long writing interminably epic narrative folk songs in relative obscurity, so that he was ready to explore more interesting experiments by the time he was famous?

I like that the book zeroes in on the work itself from an analytical point of view. It avoids long digressions about Bowie’s personal life and about which musicians played on what and which songs were released where. My only complaint is that the editing sucked. Wilcken uses the word “autistic” about forty times in a small 138 page book–yes, we got the point already. He’s also got a few factual errors and a couple of repeated phrases, but the overall work is so interesting that these flaws are easy to overlook. I’m really glad I read this–it’s helped me to understand and appreciate Low more than anything else so far.

I’m also reading Bowie: Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford, which is absolute crap, on par with Alias David Bowie. It has Bowie “bursting into tears” in every other paragraph and alternates between describing him as an emotionally unstable lunatic and a scheming emotionless fascist. Its musical analysis is facile, it’s full of blatant factual errors, it treats all rumors as fact, it disregards everything Bowie says as agenda-driven but accepts as gospel the claims of bitter former acquaintances, and it’s just really offensive and gross. It’s clear that several of the better Bowie books are full of clarifications that are responses to this. (Thus the sense, when reading Strange Fascination, that I was missing half the story. I was, because it’s intentionally a sane reaction to the sensationalism of Loving the Alien and Alias David Bowie and probably a lot of other rumor-mongering crap.)

Current Mood: weird & weird & weird

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

* David Bowie interviewed by a 17-year-old Cameron Crowe for Playboy in 1976

The thin line between madness and genius… or, holy shit, David Bowie was really fucking crazy.

* ThreadBared on why The Legend of Billie Jean was the best teen movie of the 80s

It’s so sad that this film has been mostly forgotten; it’s the perfect antidote to the conservatism of the John Hughes oeuvre. Plus, Helen Slater is awesome in it.

* I’m reading Bowie in Berlin by Thomas Jerome Seabrook. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this book. It relies almost entirely on recycled information from other sources, but it is quite useful for its intensive focus. It zeros in on Bowie’s Berlin years with an analysis of Bowie’s music and how it was impacted by his personal life and (to a lesser extent) by the location(s) and era. I think I’d enjoy more about the music’s position in relation to the mid/late 70s zeitgeist to balance the focus on the personal life of the creator–something more in the cultural studies realm.

The book spends a lot of time on the innovative production methods and how they went on to influence popular music (I remain amazed at what a huge influence Bowie’s had). The author is a bit of an arty snob, though–I keep imagining how annoying he would be to get into an argument with at a party–but he knows his stuff, and I’m enjoying reading his opinions even if I don’t always agree with him. (His quick dismissal of Ziggy Stardust and his pages of reveries about distorted drum sounds reveal that he’s a completely different type of music fan than I am!)

I don’t think I’ll ever love Low the way I love Station to Station. I respect it immensely as an artistic achievement and I enjoy listening to it, but it doesn’t move me as deeply–maybe my psyche is more attuned to the frantic turmoil of Station to Station than the reflective contemplation of Low. Low is more intellectual, more about atmosphere and mood, more detached. It’s Bowie coming down from the cocaine-fueled insanity of his previous few years, processing it, starting to heal. It’s like a snapshot of a pause, of the period where Bowie took a breath and dealt with himself. It’s fragmented and meandering and often very sad, but with a thread of hope running underneath, an indication that he’s already hit rock bottom and is slowly on his way back up.

It doesn’t help that I’m just so much of a verbal person–the lyrics on Low are incredibly sparse (only half the songs even have English words). I believe people when they tell me that the sound of Low is brilliant, but I don’t fully understand why. I try to listen to the instrumentals and appreciate the textures, the effects, the interactions of the various instruments, but my brain is just not built that way. I can’t focus on an instrumental–no matter how hard I try to force myself to concentrate, I catch myself making a shopping list or worrying about my cat within 30 seconds. To keep the thread, I need words.

And I love the words that are on Low–I love how fragmentary they are and how oddly yet perfectly they interweave with the music. I wouldn’t change anything about this album–I recognize that it’s brilliant–it’s just not brilliant in the way that best draws me personally in.

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

I watched two more Bowie DVDs: Black Tie White Noise (1993) and VH1 Storytellers (1999).

The thing is, Bowie as an older man is wise, funny, cultured, entertaining, charismatic, and… just not 1/10 as interesting as crazy fucked up genius 70s Bowie. You get the sense that he uses his charm and sense of humor to deflect his interviewers and avoid revealing anything particularly personal, whereas in the early years of his fame he was often quite passionate and sincere about whatever disturbing, odd, interesting things happened to be going on in his head.

(Or maybe he just grew up and mellowed out. *shrug*)

queenofthorns

Current Mood: confused & confused

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Seriously, this had me on the floor from laughter.

(If the embed doesn’t work, click here.)

Current Mood: amused

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Last night I finished reading Bowie: The Pitt Report by Kenneth Pitt. I think this was the most interesting of the Bowie books I’ve read so far. Not the most informative–it only covers a couple of years in the late 60s before Bowie became famous–but fascinating because of the personalities involved and because the author knew Bowie so intimately.

In later years Pitt was criticized for being an ineffectual manager and for trying to turn Bowie into an “all-around light entertainer,” so much of the book is taken up with his attempts to refute that. He chronicles the work he did to promote Bowie in meticulous detail–industry people he contacted, letters and promos he sent, performances he organized. After reading this it’s impossible to deny that Pitt worked his ass off for Bowie–perhaps Pitt was looking in the wrong places, or perhaps Bowie’s work just wasn’t quite star-quality material yet. But what makes the story interesting is not so much the long lists of performance dates and industry contacts as the fact that Kenneth Pitt was clearly head over heels in love with David Bowie.

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I’ve been hibernating. Sick for two weeks, tired, depressed. I canceled my cable TV to save money, which is actually good because it means I’m getting stuff done for SuperVegan and am reading books instead of watching Futurama reruns. And I can get Colbert, Stewart, and Rachel Maddow online for free, so there’s no reason to pay $70/month for cable. But it’s kind of depressing, anyway.

We’re going to be adding more cities to SuperVegan’s restaurant guide (right now it’s just NYC). So I’ve been very busy working on the programming for that. Of course, once the programming’s done we have to actually enter the data… um, any vegans out there want to volunteer? I guess the ideal is to get local people on the ground in each city to keep the information accurate and up-to-date, but I don’t know how feasible that’ll be. We’re having enough trouble keeping NYC up-to-date, and we all live here!

I read a couple of books. I finished Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander after leaving it half-read on a shelf for a year. I didn’t like it. Like Dunnett, it’s full of historically accurate jargon that’s difficult for a modern reader to parse; unlike Dunnett, the story and characters were just not compelling enough for me to want to put in the effort. I basically just finished it to get it out of the way. I bought more books in Forester’s Hornblower series instead; I found that one much more readable and the main character so much funnier (inadvertently) and more interesting.

I also read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book because I got a free copy at BEA. It was cute, although typical of Gaiman in that none of it really made sense. He tells stories on the level of metaphor, which is nice, but he doesn’t have the plots or logic to back them up. I always want to know hows and whys that he never provides. This isn’t really a criticism, because it’s a perfectly legitimate way of writing, it’s just not one that appeals to me personally. (I have the same problem with most Stephen King.)

I’m currently reading Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, but it’s slow going. I’m only 50 pages in, but I just… so don’t care about dragons. I find them creepy and silly and unpleasant to read about, actually; it’s a credit to grrm that I love A Song of Ice and Fire despite the dragons. (It probably helps that I was already totally into the story by the very late point that he finally introduced the dragons, and he slipped them in very slowly.) But I’ll try to finish this book; I want to give it a fair shot since I think the author is doing awesome things for fandom via her involvement with the OTW.

Oh yeah, and Writercon is still happening. Come hang out and talk about fanfic for a few days. It’ll be great.

Update on my continuing Bowie obsession: I skipped ahead 15 years after Scary Monsters and am now listening to 1. Outside. I’m just not quite ready to face 80s Bowie yet. Or Tin Machine. (I finished two Bowie bios and most of the encyclopedia and none of them had anything nice to say about Tin Machine.)

Current Mood: blah

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The comments here contain a debate about who’s hotter, Barack Obama or David Bowie.

I love the Internet, you guys, seriously.

(It’s Bowie, of course. I’ll fight anyone who disagrees!)

Current Mood: amused

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