Unsolicited Advice

I don't often buy CDs anymore. With media I'm generally only interested in the main content, and the hard drive stays the same size no matter how much I load onto it, so digital services are easier. It's rare that I want some part of the packaging enough to store it, and pack it, and move it from house to house when I am eventually forced to be itinerant again. Placebo released a 20th anniversary retrospective, and I paid to have them mail me one. I like them enough to give them money, and their website asks a very reasonable $11 for a 2-CD set, in a hardcover gatefold. I wanted the pictures. More accurately, I wanted to know which pictures the two of them thought were relevant. Knowing what people want to remember is sometimes more interesting than the events themselves. There is a brief introduction to the album by Brian Molko in the front of the book. I have seen very little prose from him, but it all has the same curious quality of standing by itself, hanging over t...

On my usual trundles through the internet, I ran across a brief tribute penned by Placebo's frontman upon hearing of Bowie's death. There's a photo heading the article, of a 40-something Bowie -- tousled hair, a hint of eyeliner, scattered blond stubble -- with his arm hooked around a very, very young Brian Molko. Molko, in full glamorous face, looks back at the camera, wide-eyed with the exact mixture of excitement, bewilderment, and terror one would expect from someone who'd just learned that his lifelong idol not only knew he existed, but thought he was kind of a neat kid, and wanted to be friends. And had him in a sort of an affectionate headlock. On camera. I don't think I've ever worn that expression. There are a lot of people I respect. There are a fair few of them whose skills I think are admirable. But there's no one whose praise means the world to me, and never has been. Back when I was the age where you're allowed to put people up on pede...

I'm informed that Lady Gaga soloed a Bowie tribute at the Grammys. I have not seen it. I watched the opening with the face-tracking projector effect, then winced and turned it off. I'm pretty vocal in my dislike of her; I don't wish her ill, but I do wish she'd spontaneously decide she was rich enough already and retire to a tropical island somewhere. I have no problem with her being as weird as she wants, and I even concede her right to be weird specifically in order to sell records even if I'm not going to buy them, but I find her insistence that this claptrap is meaningful  to be pretentious at best. If you ask me, and nobody did, the tribute should have been given to a handful of artists instead. Perhaps one of them would have butchered his songs less than people are telling me she did. And if you'd insisted on handing it over to a solo artist, I'd have scared up Brian Molko, with or without the rest of his band. Molko is frontman for a band called...

Several nights ago, I had the good fortune to acquire, at the very last minute, a pair of tickets to a special showing of Labyrinth  at the Brattle Theatre. I took Jazmin with me, and pointed out that, being a Bowie tribute taking place down in Harvard Square -- a place crawling with self-aware weirdos even when the weirdo community isn't in active mourning -- at least a few people in the crowd were likely to dress up. If she wanted to wear any of the evening gowns she'd snagged when she modeled for one of my dearest designers, that event might be a good time. I wore trousers, boots, a ruffled blouse, and a long coat with satin lapels, topped with a fedora. Menswear, basically. Minimal makeup. I do not drag up especially well. I probably could, if cast as male and given time to work on that specific character, but in general, the note I hit is less Billy Tipton than Marlene Dietrich. I'm still distinctly me, just in clothing of a style that's traditionally considered ...

Sick. Drugged. Fuck germs. Thought it might be time to watch The Man Who Fell To Earth , since I am obviously not going to be moving or thinking very many concrete things for a while. I have already viewed this film on a number of occasions. I remember none of them well, mainly because it was in college, and I was stoned every single time. I may figure out what the thing is about this time around, but given that it's a 1976 adaptation of a nihilistic 1963 science-fiction novel, starring David Bowie as essentially himself if you substitute "literally extraterrestrial" for "insufflating such vast quantities of cocaine he might as well be from outer space," I doubt it. I must have absorbed some of it subliminally; I did pretty much this to my bangs not long afterward, and kept it that way until I got tired of giving money to the hairdresser. It looked perhaps slightly less natural on me, which is hilarious, because my real hair color is about as close as you c...

You can dig up a lot of video of David Bowie. He was in the public eye for most of his life. In this clip he's twenty-seven. In this one, thirty-six. In that one, fifty. A human being who is now gone will always be twenty-seven, thirty-six, fifty years old, in these strings of flashing pictures. The oldest pieces have nicks and scratches burnt into the picture, testifying to their origins on cheap film. Drawn in front of a lens by Clotho, wound by Lachesis onto a spool like a spindle, cut off by Atropos at the end of the reel. They are discontinuous snippets of a life that will last forever. The Video Fates don't so much weave a tapestry as they knit in intarsia. Bowie was charming. (Is charming. My brain thinks that running media is in the present tense, and I am tired of fixing verbs.) He is intelligent, and obstinate enough to keep getting up on stage despite starting out brutally shy. In 1974 -- in the video where it is always 1974 -- he is shockingly thin and milk-white...

One of the things I always liked about David Bowie was that he was the first major pop star to come out in print, and he  still  managed to stonewall and tap-dance his way out of identity politics for  forty-five fucking years . For those who were not around at the time -- I wasn't -- and are less obsessive than I am about tracking down old industry rags, the article that started the whole uproar ran in January 1972, in a magazine called Melody Maker . Originally a wholesome look at the socially-acceptable pop music of the day, in the late '60s it took a turn for the grown-up. Relatively speaking, anyway. It was fanwank, but slightly older fanwank than you'd expect from Tiger Beat . (Or whatever they publish that in now. Last time I knew was back in high school; my sister subscribed to a couple of them.) It didn't aspire to serious reporting like Rolling Stone , or to being culture critics like NME today; it was just aimed away from teenyboppers and more at readers in...

Moggie and I were indulging in a fit of college nostalgia the other night when the question came up of what, exactly, it was that made Bowie come off as so androgynous? I mean, physical characteristics aside, most of what makes people seem 'girlish' or 'boyish' is socially constructed gender performance, and varies from culture to culture. It's an interesting exercise to try to pin down exactly what it is that triggers the impression, particularly since my calibration can be rather badly off at times. I've spent the past twenty years watching anime. It's all in what you're used to. Answering this, of course, required me to knuckle down and watch many hours of things with David Bowie in them. The terrible sacrifices I make for research. (Yes, I'm linking everything. You're welcome.) You could point to a million things as explanation when Bowie was dressed up as a Martian drag queen , obviously, but it seems to have been largely behavioral, s...

I woke this morning to a cold draft coming in around the edges of the window glass, and snow collecting in the street. I watched it for a bit, strangely dizzy. It occurred to me eventually that this might be because, since I went out a few nights ago, I've had toast with cream cheese and jam, four crab rangoons, most of a bag of miniature peanut butter cups, one sandwich, a prodigious amount of flavored vitamin water, and a quantity of various drugs, for both medicinal and recreational purposes. I went grocery shopping the other day, and then didn't eat any of it. I'm debating whether I should fix this or not. A few days won't kill me, and I feel sick right now, not hungry. I haven't bothered to put my glasses on. There's a fine wash of film grain over the world. The Winamp visualizer and the winter outside seem equally real. The wind whisks ice crystals off the roof next door, and goosebumps curl across my back in sympathy. I have to make something for Jazm...

There has been too much death around me lately. I'm still crying over the rat. It takes a while. Every time. I keep telling myself that she had the best life I could give her. It takes so little to make a rat happy -- a warm dark place to sleep, water, food that appears at random, friends to nap on or groom behind their ears. My back was wrecked for a week, after I sat up with her pressed against my shoulder all night. I'm 34, I'll creak along to 80 or 90. Six hours out of the middle of my life is nothing. Six hours at the very end of hers was everything. Circlet lost one of its authors under heart-rending circumstances. I never dealt with her directly, but Cecilia talks to everyone, this one perhaps a bit more personally than most. She's written about it here . Cecilia is the only person I know who routinely has arguments with people to convince them she should be giving them  more money, and that's just cold impersonal cash. I don't even know how to begin ...