Some Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part 1

Each time I watch The Man Who Fell to Earth, I wonder anew. I have no thesis here, so these thoughts just roughly follow the chronology of the movie. Bowie’s character does not smoke cigarettes during the movie. Buck Henry’s Oliver Farnsworth does in the first scene in which he appears and at least once […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar. David Bowie, Islander

David Bowie was an islander, born in England, died in Manhattan, his ashes scattered off the island of Bali. He had a lifelong interest in another island nation, Japan, and homes in Australia, Mustique, and Bermuda. Like Thomas Jerome Newton, his avocation could easily be described as Traveler; his moniker on his website was […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar: Frock Coats and the End of Empire

Bowie on Outside in 1995 interview with Larry Katz: “Outside is set at the end of the millennium. What are your thoughts about what’s in store?” Bowie: “‘I’m very positive about it. …What Brian and I are trying to do is develop a series of albums that trace the last five years of the ‘90s. […]

Sailor’s Journals Indexed, Part 4: Places

Galleries, museums, cemeteries, cities, nations, even a zoo: places in Sailor’s Journals. For the most part, Bowie lived in New York City for the years covered by Sailor’s Journals. Unless Bowie is discussing a specific observation about New York, it isn’t indexed.

Psychic Attacks

A disclaimer: My understanding of what Dion Fortune wrote is slight, as is my knowledge of the occult. I read Psychic Self-Defense because I was intrigued by Bowie mentioning the book and his use of “psychically damaged,” which I previously figured he used because of his antipathy toward psychiatry. Psychic Self-Defense defies summary. If I […]

Ziggy in the UK and US: What Americans Missed

At times I’ve found the emphasis on the Ziggy years to be puzzling. Pick up any of the biographies or most of the obituaries, and you’ll see what I mean: the 1970s are covered at much greater length than the whole of 1980 to 2016 (36 years!), and even within these pages, Ziggy gets a […]

On the Late Cat Turbo of the House Where Bowie Doesn’t Live

Once upon a time Bowie owned a house called Mandalay on the island of Mustique, the subject of a scrumptious photo-essay in the September 1992 Architectural Digest. Google Mustique today and you will still find Bowie; the young Prince George vacationed on Mustique last week, where, Hello! says, he can “meet interesting people” maybe at David […]

Poor Hoggle

Nothing seems quite as inanimate as an animaton who will never again be animated. Such is the fate of Hoggle, the mischievious imp of Labyrinth, fated to stay encased in Scottsboro, Alabama. Why? Where? The Hoggle was lost and forgotten, never reaching his destination, on a flight from who knows where. He turned up, the […]

The Man Who Fell to Earth in White Sands [Updated]

Updated: Since I wrote this, I got hold of the Criterion DVD with the extras, including interviews with Production Designer Brian Eatwell and Costume Designer Mary Routh. Additions in green. Trying without success to figure out how astronaut Capt. Jim Lovell landed in The Man Who Fell to Earth (Hallo Spaceboys), I came across a […]

Lambeth to Brixton, or Poetry and Painting, Sound and Vision, William Blake, and The Institute of Imagination

David Robert Jones was born within walking distance of the house where William Blake (1757-1827) did much of his greatest work. London seems a remarkably small town in some ways: so much has happened there in so little space over so many hundreds of years’ time. South of the Thames River, at Hercules Road, London […]