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RIP David Bowie — 15 Comments

  1. The wife and I really like the movie Labyrinth where he played Jereth, the Goblin King. I guess we’re on a different cultural level than many here LOL!

  2. Androgyny is an offense against nature. It is supportive of biological suicide. It is anti-life.

    David Jones death is tragic, as is any cancerous death.

    David Bowie’s career and the adulation he garnered is indicative of dysfunctional elements within Western civilization. “Pregnant women react more strongly to music”.

    “(Phys.org) — Ever wonder why Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” moved so many people in 1969 or why the music in the shower scene of “Psycho” still sends chills down your spine?
    A UCLA-based team of researchers has isolated some of the ways in which distorted and jarring music is so evocative, and they believe that the mechanisms are closely related to distress calls in animals.
    They report their findings in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Biology Letters, which publishes online June 12.

    “Plants exposed to dissonant ‘music’ are sickly, stunted and exposed long enough, even die.”

    “Extensive research has also been conducted on the effects of music upon non-human life, both animals and plants. Paradoxical as it may seem, plant experiments concerning the effects of music upon life are even more convincing than human experiments: that music does affect life, including human life.

    This is because in plant experiments the effect of the mind’s subjective preconditioning and subjective reaction to the music, or one’s “feeling” for the music, or one’s personal tastes in music have obviously all been removed; i.e., if music [score] can be shown to affect plants, then such effects have to be due to the objective influence of the musical tones and rhythms directly upon the cells and processes of the life-form itself. (It is also easier to set-up a valid, scientifically controlled experiment with plant life than with human life.)

    The plant research findings are solid: not only did rock music stunt the growth of a wide variety of plants, but if played long enough, the plants actually died.

    And even more startling were the findings of Dr. T.C. Singh, head of the Botany Department at Annamalia University, India. His experiments demonstrated that not only did certain forms of music and certain musical instruments (specifically, classical music and the violin) cause plants to grow at twice their normal speed, but that later generations of the seeds of musically stimulated plants carried on the improved traits of greater size, more leaves, etc.!

    Presumably, the same effect can result in the negative sense, from ‘bad’ music. The possible significance of Dr. Singh’s findings to human life is evident, and should be at least a little disconcerting to rock music fans.”

    Though I like many rock songs, I cannot pretend that factual observations are inconvenient truths best denied. There has been a steady devolution in all the arts of Western Civilization since the late 19th century.

  3. For the most part, his music wasn’t to my taste but it was clearly good stuff, and there was no denying Mr. Jones was a totally original talent, very creative, and fearless about bucking trends.
    His battling cancer in private over an extended period speaks to a quiet dignity and humility almost unheard of in show business.
    He was also ahead of his time in the world of finance – in 1997, Bowie securitized a ten-year royalty stream on a large body of his work, receiving an up-front payment of $55mm in the first “celebrity bond” issue.
    RIP Ziggy Stardust

  4. Watching the icons of youth die out is like watching the sand in your own hourglass disappear down a small hole, till its your turn…

  5. Not his most upbeat song but you can’t say he didn’t create from the stuff of his life right up until the last moment.

  6. I liked his music in the 80’s but was never a superfan. It was great how he continued to grow musically and branch out into other media. Seems we always hear about the musicians who crash and burn, but rarely about the ones like Bowie/Jones (unless you intentionally follow their career).

    Bowie’s son Duncan Jones is an artist, too, and directed two interesting movies, “Moon” & “Source Code.”

  7. I couldn’t force myself to look at him.

    There was some hyper-kinetic parody movie (imitating the late 1050s?) on cable years ago wherein he, (I think it was) played an advertising exec or something who went around saying “Fantastic !” all the time.

    All that I recall besides that, was that he looked kind of normal. That, and the woman in the tight cocktail dress who lay on her back and kicked her legs.

  8. “(imitating the late 1050s?) ”

    That would be the Nineteen Fifties, not the age of Harold Godwineson.

  9. Huh … just checked and can’t find it. Must have imagined it. Who was that sexpot woman? I’ve seen her somewhere …

  10. I was not the biggest Bowie fan, but I was certainly familiar with a lot of his music. He was a one-of-a-kind talent, and will be missed.

    Probably my favorite music of his was his late-70s funky period: Golden Years

    And here’s an early version of “Space Oddity” which offers a plausible explanation of why Major Tom cut off communications with Earth: Space Oddity

  11. I wouldn’t blame the editor of the movie too much (I admit I haven’t seen it, though).
    I read “The Man Who Fell to Earth” quite recently, and it is nearly unintelligible without quite a bit of reading between the lines.
    So maybe the movie left all those line-betweens out.

  12. AesopFan:

    I don’t know about the book, but in the case of the movie you actually can blame the editor:

    When “The Man Who Fell to Earth” originally landed in the United States in 1976, it was shorn of some 20 minutes by its distributor in an effort to make the film more straightforward, with entire scenes removed, including a disconcerting love scene involving Bowie, Clark, booze and a pistol. The results were rather disastrous, distorting Roeg’s complex timeline and resulting in some poor press and audiences more confused than dazzled. A DVD and Blu-ray edition of the director’s cut put out by the upscale Criterion Collection relatively recently is already out of print.

    “Very little was changed,” Roeg said. “Any cuts that are done to any film, they’re usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth of the piece. It’s something like having a suit made and then telling the tailor to take the right arm off. It doesn’t change the suit, it exposes the person who’s cut it.”

    Clark is less circumspect regarding the original American release version.

    “I totally hated it,” Clark said. “It shocked my system, all that work hacked to bits. It made me sick, it really did. Once I saw it I stopped promoting the film. As it was it was hard to follow, and it totally lost its momentum when it was cut because it was indecipherable. But once it got healed and put back together I never gave up on that film.”

    I saw it when it first came out in the theaters. It was very interesting, and Bowie was amazing, but the film was incoherent.

  13. Folks were “shocked” that Bowie died? At age 69? They weren’t told he was ill? Of cancer (type remains unmentioned)? But he “battled” it. People are always “battling” cancer, but they are never said to “battle” any other ailment.

    Has anyone ever said Cheney “battled” his heart disease? No. And the Left hoped he would die of it, sooner than later. But he endured.

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