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| Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, 1976 frankpicturegallery.com |
We start the week of by noting a milestone. We hit 60,000 page views. Thank you so much for your continued support of this blog, it means a great a lot. Now onward and upward.
The news of David Bowie's death from liver cancer has finally settled in. For us fans, the shock still reverberates. Within a span of less than three years, we lost two singer-songwriter-musicans: Lou Reed and David Bowie to an insidious disease. The were preceded in death by Andy Warhol, one of the twentieth century's great masters. Before you all get the idea that today's post is an obituary, according to Edward Helmond of The Guardian, David Bowie's death "...cut Manhattan's last link with its wild, creative past..." He writes these words in in his article "First Lou Reed, now David Bowie. that's it for New York. It's over." This was the New York long before gentrification, Sex And The City, and countless Woody Allen movies made the city seem so glamorous, free of all its innate decadence. They certainly warped Blogger's idea of New York City. What was it about the wild, crazy creative past that still captures our imagination.
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| The Twin Tower, as seen from the New Jersey Shore, 1970s moviefiednyc.com |
In his October 15, 2015 article for The Guardian, "Why we're still obsessed with the 1970s of Lou Reed and Patti Smith," he reports that recent books by Rachel Kushner, Garth Risk Hallberg, and Patti Smith's sterling follow up to Just Kids (2011), M Train evoke places that are "...both very scary and every exhilarating. Not a place where some kind of arty misfit or wannabe arty necessarily wanted olive, but rather a place where one such creature could live." A place where the arty misfit or wannabe "...had to live." (http://www.theguardian.com; date accessed Jan. 18, 2016)
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| David Bowie and Lou Reed openculture.com |
One could suppose that the fascination with the New York is the a way of coping with increasing anxiety over Manhattan's gentrification. Anxiety over gentrification is not news. Edward Helmond writes, "But with the loss of each big figure associated with a past that many feel was and more creative-though that just mean sleazier and more dangerous-there is a deepening sense of disconnection from the city that shaped, and was shaped by, artistic figures from the Beat poets to Andy Warhol. David Bowie was initially drawn to the free form environment of Andy Warhol's Factory with curious gender-fluid population, which as Mr. Helmond observes, "...turned out to be as much an example of the city's gentrification as he had been representative of its infamous wild side."
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| Affordable housing complex Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York inhabitat.com |
Housing is still prohibitively expensive in Manhattan and beyond the grasp of the bohemian characters that populated David Bowie's musical landscape. Mr. Helmond writes, "Despite efforts to redress the imbalance, ranging from potential restriction on undeclared foreign ownership of apartments in the so-called shadow-maker towers going up around the city, to public housing projects for the underclass..."
In a September 10, 2015 essay for T Magazine, in the New York Times titled Why Can't We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s," Edmund White writes,
...Then, there were only possibilities. The cultural world-at least the cultural world that mattered-was much smaller then. (http://www.nytimes.com; date accessed Jan. 18, 2016)
Everyone knew everyone else-writers knew painters knew musicians, they were all accessible. while Mr. Kenny has no quarrel with Mr. White, he does point out that the phrase "the cultural world that mattered" is a pretty loaded phrase. In particular he observes that the cultural world that mattered was "...overwhelmingly white..." and would love to read a cultural history of the period written by musician and critic Greg Tate, who co-founded the Black Rock Coalition in 1985.
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| 42nd Street, mid-1970s vintage42ndst.tumblr.com |
While it is true that it was the white arbiters and avatars of the seventies that dictated what culture mattered, it was the economic conditions of the period that drew the denizens of David Bowie's music to New York-Glenn Kenny writes, "...namely, cheap rent, which created the cultural ferment of New York City in the late 70s do not exist in New York any more." He continues, "...what's also true is that when you reach a certain age, and you've achieved a certain position within the established culture, it's difficult to perceive whatever the ferment is, or not, happening away from where you are-not geographically, but hierarchically."
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| David Bowie out for a walk in New York City dailymail.co.uk |
Last week, as small shrine to the late singer-song-writer (hurts to write that) were going up, his fans were paying to not just David Bowie. Unlike the late John Lennon and Lou Reed (still hurts to write that), David Bowie was not particularly associated with New York City. In the 25 years he lived in the city, he made himself invisible. Take a look at the picture on the left. Do think the woman on the right hand side of the image knows she is walking next to David Bowie? Maybe? From the big smile on his face, you know that he knew he was being photographed. Edward Helmond cites a 1991 article in New York magazine in which David Bowie told the writer:
When I first came to New York, I was in my early-20s, discovering a city I had fantasied over since my teens. I saw it with multicoloured glasses...These days, my buzz can be obtained just by walking, preferably early in the morning...
Yet people forgot that he was a New Yorker through and through, going as far as to declare in a 2003 interview with SOMA, I'm a New Yorker! (http://www.bowiewonderworld.com) The really amazing thing was even in full Ziggy Stardust plumage, David Bowie could still walk the streets of Manhattan without notice. He and his wife, model-entrepreneur Iman lived a quiet and comfortable with daughter. Edward Helmond writes, "It was not so radically different to the life he lived in Geneva in the 1980s, or, minus the drug, the lifestyle he lived with Iggy Pop in the Turkish quarter of Berlin. They were living anonymous, middle-class lives and enjoying their culture and money."
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| Final picture of David Bowie Jimmy King hollywoodlife.coe |
Living an anonymous life, after a lifetime of being in the spotlight, was something that David Bowie valued for himself and his family. Manhattan was the perfect place to live like a proper older "Englishman in New York." In Manhattan, he could be anonymous, and anonymity was the ultimate disguise The Man Who Fell To Earth. Mr. Helmond writes, "And where better to live a sensible, wealthy middle-class life than contemporary Manhattan, a city-like central London-awash with foreign money with swaths of property owned through foreign shell companies whose ownership-and source-is unknown?"
Manhattan has increasingly become an enclave for the absent extremely wealthy or dwell devoted to cultivating a well-paid corporate identity, not the "extreme transformations of personality, creativity, or decadent lifestyles that New York, and famous inhabitant from poets and abstract expressionists to Bob Dylan, Warhol, Johnny Thunders, the Ramones et al, exemplified over the years." New York City inspired lifelong friends Lou Reed and David Bowi Tom Sarig, Lou Reed's manager told Mr. Helmond,
He was drawn to the grittiness, the verité of it. But while Lou was conspicuous in the city, a fixture, David blended in. He was a ghost in it in a way.
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| Like Lazarus, he will return untappedcities.com |
As the shock and numbness of David Bowie's death begins to ebb, we have to ask ourselves, who or what are we in mourning for? We are grieving for that moment in time when anything was possible. That anything was a wild and creative creature that had no boundaries. it was the New York of Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, David Bowie. Lovingly memorialized by Patti Smith and Rachel Kushner. it was a romantic time, akin to the Belle Epoque period where creativity flourished or the interwar years in Europe. We mourn our heroes and we mourn that piece of ourselves that got lost somewhere on our journey through life. That wonderfully wild creative piece of ourselves that found expression in the music of Lou Reed and David Bowie.
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