Monday, January 11, 2016

Vale David Bowie (Jones) Berlin Trilogy: Fired Memories


A Queensland photographer has captured a heartbreaking scene of mourning in the wild, in which a male kangaroo cradles his dead mate as a joey looks on Klokan aka kangaroo photos capture mourning in the wild
Hervey Bay photographer Evan Switzer captured a kangaroo mourning the loss of its mate in the wild.


Hervey Bay photographer Evan Switzer captured a kangaroo mourning the loss of its mate in the wild

This dalliance with "plastic soul" continued on the album Station to Station and brought Bowie hits including Golden Years, Knock on Wood and his first US number one single, Fame, co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.


David Bowie: 69 facts BBC 


Bowie gets first US number one album BBC. Incredible that it’s the first.

David Bowie’s other legacy: media dragon and internet visionary, finance pioneer Sydney Morning Herald   The importance of David Bowie

From Cold War history to literature, David Bowie read a lot of books.
In honor of the Thin White Duke, who passed away yesterday, we revisited David Bowie’s reading list, which includes works from Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia. Bowie revealed his reading list as part of a traveling art show called, “David Bowie is” from 2013.
The Guardian has the complete list at this link


Rock singer David Bowie takes a break from his current project; playing the title role in a Broadway play based on the life of John Merrick, the hideously deformed ' Elephant Man' (October 1980)
Bowie appeared on Broadway as The Elephant Man in 1980

David Bowie was different and often changed directions, the best direction was moving to Berlin and working on a triptych of albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger. Produced in collaboration with Brian Eno, these dense works were perhaps the most experimental of Bowie's career, mixing electronic sounds and avant-garde lyrics to produce a radical, and influential, song cycle.

After the soulful but colder Station to Station, Bowie confounded expectations after settling in Germany by recording the atmospheric 1977 album Low, the first of his “Berlin Trilogy” collaborations with Brian Eno.  Of the three albums, Heros was the only one wholly recorded in Berlin. The title track remains one of Bowie's best known, a classic story of two lovers who meet at the Berlin Wall. The album is considered one of his best by critics, notably for the contributions of guitarist Robert Fripp ho flew in from the US to record his parts in one day. David Bowie
I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing, will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
 

We can be heroes, just for one day 

And you, you can be meanAnd I, I'll drink all the time


Cause we're lovers, and that is a fact
Yes we're lovers, and that is that
Though nothing, will keep us together
We could steal time, just for one day
We can be heroes, forever and ever
What'd you say?
 


I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever

Oh we can be heroes, just for one day
 

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side
 

Oh we can beat them, forever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day
 



We can be heroes
We can be heroes
We can be heroes
Just for one day

We can be heroes
We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying, then you better not stay
But we could be safer, just for one day
Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh, just for one day


West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall early 11 November 1989
‘When I was 20 years old I watched David Bowie create a song. He sat down at the piano with only the inkling of an idea and – in less than an hour – enchanted a tune out of the air as if by magic’
– Rory MacLean

Dave Bowie brought four of his 14 world tours to Australia and New Zealand, the first in 1978 and the last in 2004. He spent much of the 1980s living in Australia, owning a flat in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay from 1983 until 1992. Few times Dave invaded the Andrew Boy Charlton pool at Mrs Mcquarie Chair. Rene Rivkins butler Thomas Mann of Polish descend has a selection  of colourful stories of Sydney at midnight ..

David Bowie’s dying wish was to have his ashes scattered on Bali — in line with the island’s Buddhist customs — and his riches sprinkled on his wife and kids, according to his will filed Friday in Manhattan court. ...
Bowie also directed that his property and money be divided among his model wife Iman, his two children, Duncan Jones and Lexi Zahra Jones, a personal assistant and a former nanny.
The music icon was worth around $100 million when he died this month of cancer at 69, according to court papers.
Iman will receive roughly half of his fortune, plus the couple’s apartment on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. ...
By rock standards, David Bowie was a real tax oddity — because he was so savvy with his money.
He shopped around his legal residency — from London to Switzerland to Ireland — to get the best tax rate. He also peddled his famous Bowie Bonds, which leveraged his music catalogue to provide him with cash when he needed it.


Firies recall: DB recorded with his band Tin Machine in Sydney as well as two film clips in Australia:


Outside Newtown fire station in Sydney.

Outside Newtown fire station in Sydney. Source:imgur
Speaking of Berlin Wall, How is Polish democracy evolving?

What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like? Foreign Policy. Kept nodding my head to this one, until I remembered that Kissinger, another war criminal who makes Blair and Bush look like pikers, was a realist. Via Naked Capitalism


“My other works are wine and water; but my Gum Tree is pure parliamentary wine (Something Laurie Brereton would select for the parliamentary cellar).”

Seventy years ago today, George Orwell published an essay, “Pleasure Spots,” in the Tribune.  The title sounds more anatomically salacious than Orwell probably intended. He was not a notably salacious man, even a bit of a prude, and many readers today would doubtless judge the sentiments he expresses unacceptably bourgeois and pleasure-denying. As always, Orwell is most interested in the humanity of human beings, our ever-vulnerable essence as thinking, feeling creatures ...  

 Auden writes under the sway of Kierkegaard, a thinker we can safely assume never meant much of anything to Larkin, for whom religion was “created to pretend we never die.”