ithaka

5y

All this got me back heavy into Young Americans, such feel good which isn’t often coming from Bowie, song title screams sunny days

ithaka

5y

In April 1973, from the 24 to the 30th Bowie spent 7 days in a train to travel from Nakhodka to Moscow.

Isn’t that ridiculous? by now there’s planes right, that would shorten a such trip, time is valuable especially when you’re rockstar doing business across the globe.

But that wasn’t as important to Bowie as to what he saw:

”I won't fly because I've had a premonition I'll be killed in a plane crash if I do. If nothing happens by 1976 I'll start to fly again.

But I love trains and I'd probably take this ride anyway, it's supposed to be the greatest of them all."

• David Bowie, 1973 (from the book “Rail Journey Through Siberia” by Bob Musel)

David Bowie resumed to flying in March, 1977.

ithaka

5y

Is this my favorite Bowie quote? maybe

In 1993, Michael Dignum was working on the video for Bowie’s “Miracle Goodnight.”

“We had a change that was gonna take 10-15 mins to complete” so Michael struck up a conversation with Bowie, his childhood hero, and asked him what he thought the biggest moment of his career was:

“I was on the set of the music video ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ do you know the one?…So we’re on the beach shooting this scene with a giant bulldozer…I’m dressed from head to toe in a clown suit. Why not. I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera…

As he was walking by the camera, the director said, excuse me, mister, do you know who this is? The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said…’Of course I do!!!! It’s some c*** in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realize, yes, I’m just a c*** in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”

@Cookies @Goo @MrIndigo96 @rwina @Soupvillain

ithaka

5y

Is this my favorite Bowie quote? maybe

In 1993, Michael Dignum was working on the video for Bowie’s “Miracle Goodnight.”

“We had a change that was gonna take 10-15 mins to complete” so Michael struck up a conversation with Bowie, his childhood hero, and asked him what he thought the biggest moment of his career was:

“I was on the set of the music video ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ do you know the one?…So we’re on the beach shooting this scene with a giant bulldozer…I’m dressed from head to toe in a clown suit. Why not. I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera…

As he was walking by the camera, the director said, excuse me, mister, do you know who this is? The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said…’Of course I do!!!! It’s some c*** in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realize, yes, I’m just a c*** in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”

@Cookies @Goo @MrIndigo96 @rwina @Soupvillain

ithaka

5y

Is this my favorite Bowie quote? maybe

In 1993, Michael Dignum was working on the video for Bowie’s “Miracle Goodnight.”

“We had a change that was gonna take 10-15 mins to complete” so Michael struck up a conversation with Bowie, his childhood hero, and asked him what he thought the biggest moment of his career was:

“I was on the set of the music video ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ do you know the one?…So we’re on the beach shooting this scene with a giant bulldozer…I’m dressed from head to toe in a clown suit. Why not. I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera…

As he was walking by the camera, the director said, excuse me, mister, do you know who this is? The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said…’Of course I do!!!! It’s some c*** in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realize, yes, I’m just a c*** in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”

@Cookies @Goo @MrIndigo96 @rwina @Soupvillain

deepsleep

5y

mans really loves himself some train rides

MrIndigo96

5y

actually think it inspires a lot of artist. wish more artist did this but I understand why. today would be a totally different story.

HURRY UP kiddash3r

5y

@Ithaka thank you for tagging me man I love these bowie stories hes so amazing

ithaka

5y

My pleasure, I don’t tag too often because I don’t do it for likes I just hope these are cool stuff y’all never heard or read and would make your day or fulfill curiosity

There will be more coming about Ashes to Ashes video that’s for sure, big moment for Bowie

ithaka

5y

First Space Oddity tv live performance.

One of the last Space Oddity live performance.

Here’s an interesting odd one, Bowie rerecorded and shot a video for the song in 1979, a decade later after the original:

Love this.

ithaka

5y

· edited

I think video is there to be used as an art form as well as a sort of commercial device for illustration and promotion. In fact, I fell in love with video in the early Seventies when I got a Sony reel-to-reel, black-and-white thing and videoed everything and whatever. I got a small editing machine…and developed some scenarios for Diamond Dogs. I worked with miniature sets and cut video animation techniques which I’ve never seen used since. A dreadful but interesting failure.

David Bowie, 1981.

I story-boarded it myself, actually drew it frame for frame, David Mallet (who worked on videos for Lodger) edited it exactly as I wanted it and has allowed me to say adopts Edward Heath voice publicly that it is my first direction. I’ve always wanted to direct and this is a great chance to start, to get some money from a record company and then go away and sort of play with it.

The heart of this video, Bowie as a Pierrot The Clown walking and consoling an elder lady is a vision that goes back to ten years earlier, from a 1969 Bowie sketch he did that recalls Bowie’s father passing that August, leaving an estranged, bereaved young son tied to his bereaved mother.

Bowie had the artist George Underwood finish it for Bowie to use it son the back cover of his Space Oddity album:

Bowie original own sketch on left, George Underwood finalization of the art on the right.

We went down to the beach, and I took a woman there who looked like my mother, that’s the surrealistic part of making movies.

David Bowie, 1993.

Scary Monsters for me has always been some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with…You have to accommodate your pasts within your persona. You have to understand why you went through them. That’s the major thing. You cannot just ignore them or put them out of your mind or pretend they didn’t happen or just say “Oh I was different then.”

David Bowie, 1990

All 3 Bowie figures in the video all hail from his turn-of-the 70s: Major Tom, the urban spaceman; the asylum dweller of “All the Madmen” (the unluckier of the Bewlay Brothers); and the sad Pierrot of Bowie’s mime years, whose persona Bowie would use as a narrative voice from “An Occasional Dream” to “Thursday’s Child.”.

deepsleep

5y

love that quote about scary monsters

ithaka

5y

Spittin tru facts for all of us to still learn from it to this day, very relatable

ithaka

5y

@door think you would like the posts in these last pages, especially p32