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]. […]

Bowie Sighting: Philip Hoare. Public and Personal Bowies

Last January while waiting for Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, I chanced upon Philip Hoare’s, The Sea Inside, and enjoyed it so much that after Serious Pleasures I returned to Hoare, this time The Whale (UK Leviathan), and hence to Melville’s Moby Dick, a wonderful book to live in for several weeks, when […]

Bowie Sighting: Philip Hoare, Part 1

I’m not going to write about my feelings on hearing David Bowie has crossed over; this blog has over the years been an extended thank you to David. I don’t know if I ever wrote here about one of the worst periods of my life when the only thing that brought me solace was scrolling […]

Are You Lithuanian?

I’d always assumed that the “Are you Lithuanian” scene in Nicolas Roeg’s film of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth was an episode of Roeg-ishness, a dialog equivalent of some of the odd visuals in the film. And then I read Walter Tevis’s novel. And, yes indeed, Bryce, the chemical engineer, does ask […]