Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Concluded

Finishing this up. My days turned to weeks. 9. Nicolas Roeg allows viewers much room to intuit connections in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The first few minutes are among the most illogical. All you have to go on is the title. Something seems to explode in the sky and crash into a lake. […]

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: 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. […]

Evocation: Billy Collins’ “Embrace”

Last week I came across Billy Collins’ poem “Embrace” — and I learned the rules* have changed, so I can offer it in totality, which is a good thing because you need it all. Embrace You know the parlor trick. wrap your arms around your own body and from the back it looks like someone […]

Liminal Lazaruses 3: Do You Want to Be Free?

“This way or no way/ You know, I’ll be free” Two Lazaruses: a song and a play; a beggar who stays dead, and a youth who walks out of his grave and into legend. If Bowie’s last works were a parting message to his fans, why were there two of the same name but so […]

Liminal Lazaruses 2: Loving the Alien

“Love the alien as you love yourself; for you were once aliens in the Land of Egypt… “(Leviticus 19:34) “Thinking of a different time Palestine a modern problem Bounty and your wealth in land Terror in a best laid plan. . . ” (Bowie, “Loving the Alien”) “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled […]

The Liminality of Lazaruses, part 1

Bowie’s Lazaruses (Blackstar’s and the musical’s), Anna Kavan’s, the beggar Lazarus, Lazarus of Bethany: I’ve been thinking about Lazaruses a lot lately. “I’m a dying man who can’t die”– David Bowie and Enda Walsh, Lazarus: A The Musical We know Thomas James Newton can die; he is mortal. That, after all, is why he is on […]

The Thin White Duke Laid to Rest and Psychic National Defense

Nothing about the Thin White Duke, the last of Bowie’s characters or personas, makes sense. There’s no story line to him, as there is with Ziggy, just the one song, “Station to Station.” And what an odd song it is: There seems to be a narrator in the first two lines (“The return of the […]

The Cabbalah and Magic, Malicious Magic, and Magical Mishaps

Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense (1930) is a book she would have preferred not to write. She acknowledges that to describe means of defending against psychic attacks requires divulging information about how psychic attacks are made, but she believed too that psychic attacks went unrecognized and were more common than one might expect, and so it […]

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 […]