Watching Lawrence of Arabia, Another Man Who Fell to Earth

Yesterday I watched for the first time in 30 years David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

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 […]

Playing Favorites: Bowie-Yentob-Pullman

Other than being two of my favorites, David Bowie and novelist Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust) have nothing much in common beyond having been born in post-war England within a few months of each other (1/47; 10/46). That, and having interesting minds and reading widely. Now I find that BBC One, […]

Philip Hoare’s RisingTideFallingStar: David Bowie, Cosmos-politan, 1

“He looks like a comet, his flame-like hair slicked back on entry into earth’s atmosphere.” Philip Hoare, on the fall to earth of alien Thomas Jerome Newton, aka David Bowie. RisingTideFallingStar (130) After a brief meditation on the fall of Icarus (this book is about risings and fallings and risings of tides and stars, and […]

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 […]

Echoes of Cocteau

I was flipping through Jean Cocteau by Patrick Mauries recently and came across this photo of the character Death in his film, Orphée, based on the myth of Orpheus, a poet so in love with Death he follows her into the underworld. Here we have Death (María Casarès) [photo by Roger Corbeau/Ministère de la Culture/AFDPP]. […]