Not Fake News. Urban Legends“Sceptical?” piped up the old-timer. Of course I’m flamin’ sceptical ye addlepated mudfish!” –
“Aye, but it wasn’t always so. I was a dour and solemn presbyterian from birth onwards, and bar the whisky, gossip columns, loose floozies and muckraking, a devout one too! But all this changed suddenly in the winter of ’94, twenty years ago, when Auckland was struck by drought.
I was lucky enough Thursday evening to meet a small cohort of extraordinary people via the friend who originally put me onto the The China Study.
I spent the evening soaking it all up, like a pup loose in a seal colony, and finding some surprising points of similarity. One of those was an interest in podcasts.
Which reminded me that I’d been meaning to write something pointing to some favourite podcasts, and a couple that were mentioned, and new to me.
Hell will be smelly , not hot as the Bible and Billy Graham tell us.
I surmised this today, as I laboured to rid my whare and surrounds of bad odours.
Some old friends will roll their eyes when I write I harboured a long-term fascination with the words, music, and iconography of David Bowie.
It will also be no surprise to many that over the years he peppered more than a few of his songs with references to drug usage and habituation.
I myself used to have what I now understand is an adolescent, voyeuristic, fascination with the same. Adolescent in the sense that, in my early 50s, I’m beginning to grow up. Partly voyeuristic because as a youngster, drugs ( including alcohol over-use ) had a verboten kind of attraction. Thus I partook more than is medically recommended, let’s say. Like many, I’ve come to understand through experience that that caper ultimately ends not in glamour, but in death, jail, or sad sordid squalor. I finished up on the squalor route, fyi.
In that light, here are a few of Bowie’s more and less obvious references;
In Space Oddity, 1969, Major Tom floats off into space, his last communication with Ground Control “tell my wife I love her very much she knows”. The next time he speaks it is to himself – “… planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do..”.
In 1980’s revisit to the Major, Ashes to Ashes, we have Bowie commenting “… we know Major Tom’s a junky, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low..”
Opening that same album Scary Monsters,the brillant It’s No Game ( Part I ), starts with a Japanese woman laying down a challenge. Bowie replies in three lines ending with a magnificent scream I don’t remember since Five Years ( Ziggy Stardust album) “silhouettes and shadows / watch the revolution / no more / free-steps to Heaven”. Wink, nudge.
Earlier we hear the blatantly obvious “You’ve got your transmission and your live wire / You got your cue line and a handful of [qua]’ludes” ( a 70s drug from before my time ).
All this, and many more, is nothing new from the stable Bowie liked to pretend that he was part of. That stable includes The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, and the Ig-ster, the man who by all rights should be dead, Iggy Pop.
Whether or not Bowie was a pretender is one of those questions that followed him throughout. ( cf Keith Richards re Bowie “it’s all a pose” ). It didn’t help that Bowie was renowned for telling the Press whatever suited him at the time.
I don’t wish to make light of very sad early demise. I do infer from that though, that the man thrashed his body very hard at least though most of the period when he was at his peak, 1969 – 1980.
The late Carl Wyant was a friend.
Before he passed in 2001, he spent some months trekking up a steep hill in the stink of a northland summer to complete a manuscript, which he called Rumours From The Pit.
By that stage, 51-year-old Carl was in bad shape, due to a misspent adulthood, but nonetheless, he completed the manuscript.
Seventeen years later, another friend Buddhimanta Khan Das is working to have that manuscript published.
I am including occasional pieces of that manuscript’s contents on this site to honour and remember Carl by, and to showcase the quality of his writing.
That remembrance, for me, has tinges of profound regret, at not having done more at the time to help him.
Dear Cottontail,
Since I last wrote everything has become unbearably complex.
But first let me say how nice it was to get your last letter, and of course, the 8 by 10 glossies of your recent photo shoot for Pet Of The Month.
I’d been thinking about you before your letter arrived, which isn’t too surprising considering that you drenched my dictionary in perfume so that every time I used it I’d be reminded of you.
He weaves around the corner, grinning and ragged in the rain, like a familiar smelly dog you don’t want to touch.
He is pleased to see me. I am not pleased to see him.
His left hand wields a can of something that will make the average person barf after three or four. He wears dirty cut-off blue jeans and a wet white shirt.
Now that a man many have called a clown is running his Oval Office Show, how much less might we hear the old line, “America – the Greatest Country on Earth”?.
Aside, that is, from wealthy ‘liberals’ who claim to be leaving in Trump’s wake, and American Democrats unable to stomach the loss. There are no doubt many others mulling over – at least in private – whether the Orange-haired One is a signpost on a downhill road.