A story circulating online, no idea if it's true
David Bowie had gone to a private showing of his 1987 movie Labyrinth. Afterward, he’d have a meet-and-greet with a group of children. He met them and had a ball, but one boy was shy and withdrawn.
So Bowie asked the organizers of the event if he could talk to the boy by himself, seeing as though he was “so shy."
The kid wasn’t actually shy — he was autistic. Bowie told the kid he was also scared, too, of everything. He was, in fact, only able to face other people because of a “magic mask” he would always wear. It just so happened the mask was ‘invisible.’
He gave it to the boy. He then acted rather distressed himself and had to make another magic mask, after which he became calm, too. Bowie and the kid just hung out for thirty minutes, and it was a magical experience.
The boy later said he actually felt more confident after meeting David Bowie and receiving his “magic mask."
Bowie reminded the boy of how ‘everyone is shy and scared sometimes, and we all wear masks’. Not every celebrity as famous as Bowie would take so much time and go through such effort to put an uncomfortable kid at ease at an event.
Puts this pre-fame parable-about-fame film that Bowie made in a different perspective, eh?
I seem to have a memory of being dispatched to review Labyrinth... and that it was absolutely awful. But I have not come across the review anywhere in my cuttings files since then - and don't feel like flicking through copies of Melody Maker from 1987.
Bowie learned about masquerade from mimester Lindsay Kemp, who I was surprised to see pop up playing the role of an art dealer in this film by thesp-loving Ken Russell: Savage Messiah.
He's also in The Wicker Man, playing the landlord of a public house.
This Kemp-concocted fantasia of a TV special, featuring Bowie, is just about worth sitting through.
Another Kemp pupil turned pop star
This was the most famous of his company's productions, I think
Not connected to masks, but to your article on Dylan's precocious doomscrolling. If I recall rightly, Bataille wrote in On Nietzsche (I think) that he would purposely read 120 Days of Sodom in order to feel wretched. Oddly enough, the sense of revulsion upon reading Sade has, in my opinion, largely been lost nowadays, and most people I know to have tried reading Sade have objected to the tedium, not the brutality (one or two did just find the work disgusting).
ReplyDeleteIn that regard, does that make Metal Machine Music truly Sadistic?
I really need to find a way to activate the comments section on Blissblog!
ReplyDeleteI've never really read de Sade - maybe a few pages here and there - probably read more pages ON de Sade. I once had and read Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman. So I have a sense of what it's like. The repetitiousness is intentional, isn't it? But to what end?
You are probably right, though. Really horrible, gruesome or perverse things have more exposed through later writing. Think American Psycho.
I don't find Metal Machine Music that unbearable, I must admit. It's just formless. I think if you play it really loud, then its appeal is masochistic. But I know people who claim to find it relaxing. They play it at low volume, use it as ambient music, even fall asleep to it. It is like one of those white noise generator machines that people use.
My sense of Reed's intent was he was on this solipsistic methamphetamine power trip at the time, this noise is sort of the amplified hum of his nervous system. The subtitle to Metal Machine Music refers to the Amine B-Ring which is to do with the molecular structure of amphetamine. And the sleevenote is a kind of ode to speed. He's like the ultimate chemical hipster, he knows his pharmaceuticals and his neurochemistry. He talks about how he's no dilettante, but someone for whom the needle is equivalent to a toothbrush - a daily ritual. Hilarious intravenous oneupmanship that culminates in the famous kiss-off: "my week beats your year".
It's not unrelated to masks, in so far as Lou Reed at that point is like a death's head of inscrutable, unreachable supercool - absolutely expressionless and cut off from everyone.
ReplyDeleteAnd a few years later in 1982 Lou Reed released an album called "The Blue Mask". Which seems to be in similar territory, although to be honest his meaning is a bit opaque.
DeleteIt was widely considered to be a Return To Form, but Barney Hoskyns said it had a "smarmy self-satisfaction that said: 'I may have been a bit of a jerk when I strutted around on stage with a needle in my arm, but I am now a bona fide Artist and you will treat me as such.'"
Ah, I appear to have managed to activate the comments in Blissblog! If you want to move your comment there, and I'll move these replies, that would be cool. Or not. Anyway, going forward, hopefully will be working in Blissblog now!
ReplyDelete