On October 15, Target released their new fall collection for men - Bowie by Keanan Duffty.  The line has some great looks that take their inspiration from the Thin White Duke era all the way to Bowie’s style of the late 90’s (which sadly has no catchy name).  Like a good little Bowie fan, after checking out all of the new Bowie by Keanan Duffty items online I made the trek down to my local Target.  I was, however, saddened by the piddling amount of items they had stocked from the line.  I had hoped to score a couple items for myself (no, I am not above stealing looks from men, thank you) and a couple items for the Webmaster and avoid paying shipping through the website.  Oh well, fashion hurts the wallet sometimes.

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Here’s one for the top 100 dumbest lists about music: it’s A. V. Club’s 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone. Topping the list somehow is Bowie’s Young Americans. Really? Young Americans? Because I have a hard time imagining what Young Americans would sound like without the saxophone. Maybe I’m biased, but to me David Sanborn’s opening sax in Young Americans is the hook that latches onto your earlobes and keeps you listening. It’s fundamental to the idea of the song and the sound of the entire album. But to the author, Josh Modell, it’s just sounds like “constant nagging and yipping.”

If you want to make a case for bad sax in a Bowie song, why go after a classic? I think Neukoln is your obvious choice. I don’t mind the wailing there, I’ve never heard the sax played in such a way, but I can see how someone else might find it a hard listen. Or what about the Forgotten Songs of David Jones version of Waiting For The Man? I think I actually would describe that sax as constant nagging and yipping.

What do you think? Are there any Bowie songs you’d prefer with different instrumentation?

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For years I have been mystified as to why I continue to subscribe to the faux-hip, quasi-artistically aware magazine Rolling Stone. Every time I read it I have to resist the urge to throw the magazine across my living room and shout, “Gawd, I hate this magazine!”, thereby causing various four-legged house animals to scatter in fear and confusion. Today for the first time, I now feel the urge to not only throw the next issue I get, but to throw it at a Rolling Stone staffer. Rolling Stone just published the results of their Great Songs on Bad Albums blog entry and narrowed the list down to include 25 songs. I was prepared to look at the list and have a laugh until I came to item number 5. Item number 5 is Hallo Spaceboy from Outside. I ask you, reader, what is Rolling Stone smoking? Whatever it is, keep it far far away from me because it will obviously turn me into a philistine. How in the hell did the staffers at Rolling Stone by-pass Tonight or Never Let Me Down (which David himself admits is not his finest work) and settle upon Outside?! Leave it to Rolling Stone to choose one of David’s most ingenious and unique works and peg it as “bad.”

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised at all. This is the magazine that simply squeed with joy and sycophantic admiration when Shania Twain said in an interview that she only published the songs that would make her a lot of money (not an exact quote, obviously). This is also the same magazine that is publishing fashion tips so that young people can dress just like their favorite musician, because, you know, God forbid anyone develop a style of their own. It seems like all that Rolling Stone is doing is just parroting the widely held critical opinion that Outside is one of Bowie’s weaker albums since obviously it is too much trouble to actually listen to the music that the entire magazine draws its livelihood from. I don’t know why I am continually surprised when Rolling Stone publishes a bone-headed opinion. I guess I’m just a relentless optimist, even though I should be old enough to know better.

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Merritt Martin at the Dallas Observer is a wise man. The David Bowie Tribute Show at the Opening Bell Coffee in Dallas inspired him to give some tips to those performers who wish to show their love for David Bowie. He divides the songs into two categories: Songs That Are Not Necessarily Acceptable, But We Acquiesce and Songs You Are Absolutely NOT Allowed to Cover. Just Don’t. Read his advice here. It might save you from regurgitated non-fat vanilla latte stains on your awesome duds.

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I know I tread dangerous and controversial waters by addressing this, but the Bowienet news item for May 16 entitled Five Years…That’s All We’ve Got has nothing whatsoever to do with David Bowie or his current projects and everything to do with the news editor’s political, non-Bowie related views. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking his views, I respect anybody who takes up a cause to save the planet (in fact, the Webmaster and I are huge believers in conservation), but the Bowie News section on David Bowie’s official website is not the appropriate place to do so. The news section is entitled Bowie News and it should report on, you know, news about David Bowie. This news item appears above another news item about tonight’s High Line Festival events and has absolutely nothing to do with Bowie, other than a tenuous thread drawn between the lyrics from Five Years and the article from the WWF.

Now whether a BowieNet reader or subscriber thinks the human race is sending the planet to hell in a handbasket named Global Warming or thinks global warming is the latest political fad doesn’t matter. The section for Bowie News has historically reported on news about, well, Bowie. Isn’t that one of the reasons why the paid subscribers and other fans regularly visit the site? BowieNet is not our one-stop shop for news that vaguely has something to do with Bowie. If it were, then the readers would see hundreds of news items in a month reporting on every person who quotes David or mentions his name. But it’s not - it is not meant to be the Wal-mart of news sections on official fan sites. What irks me is not the inclusion of this news item on the site in general, it’s just the location. All BowieNet subscribers know that there is a forum entitled Politics and Religion, and that is the place for this post. Furthermore, I’m quite confident that BowieNet readers are savvy enough to read blogs for news pertaining to their own political views, if they even care that much about politics. Neither the casual BowieNet browser nor the paid subscriber deserve to have the BowieNet news editor’s personal, non-Bowie related views thrown at them and taking precedence over news items about current projects such as the High Line Festival. Surely we deserve better than that.

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The following review was kindly written for CrackedActor.com by Samuel Mohar. I must admit, I’ve never been much of a fan of Arcade Fire but this review makes me want to give them another chance. If anyone else wishes to contribute a review to be posted on this site, contact me or the Webmaster at webmistress (a t) crackedactor.com or webmaster (a t) crackedactor.com.

In preparation for my first Arcade fire concert, while spraying on some cologne, a roommate asks “Gotta smell good for David?” “Yessir,” I reply. Ain’t gonna hide my purpose here; I bought these tickets at least in part due to my hope that the man himself, David Bowie, would pop by, sing a song, as he did at last years Fashion Rocks, and once again at a follow-up New York concert Arcade Fire had. And after the opening act, The National, I doubted anything but his presence would make this worth the price.

Welcome to Radio City Music Hall! Opulencia! “Poor man’s eating off a hundred dollar plate,” and poor student’s going to a $50 show (after Ticketmaster’s healthy chunk). The crowd covers a decent age range, mean lower 20’s, median 29, as a rough guess. The man a few seats down from me looked 45, and I saw a few other older fellows, almost all in some sort of print button up over a t-shirt, often with its own design. The youth were as expected: late-twenties hipsters with tight vests, late-teens hipsters with that wonderful hair that apparently is never socially acceptable after that age, and a couple of Danish dames to my left, who were lively and would later dance throughout Arcade Fire’s set. I was in a nice white tee and some imitation cologne, and felt more underdressed than I should at a rock show. Shiny glowstick stirrers in plastic cups abounded, brought in from the numerous bars littering every floor.

The auditorium itself is huge. I made my way up to the second of three mezzanines, and sat down to view the giant egg of concentric half-ovals, nestled nicely back in the middle of the mez, enveloped in the blue lights twelve feet above. It felt appropriately isolated and distant from the stage, but comfortable, especially with the sparse crowd to which The National took the stage.

Their sound filled the womb of the stage, with poorly mixed and overpowered bass becoming like a disproportionately distant beating- you make the metaphor- while the screeches from the front-man sounded strangely close and natural, not reproduced or amplified. They sounded good, playing decent indie rock music with clean, solid, but expected builds. The songs became formulaic. The lead singer did his thing fairly well, singing Nick Cave drones into the mic at the odd body angles of Tom Waits, sometimes bordering new wave, sometimes going up into the aforementioned shrieks. Nothing sounded bad about the band, but nothing stuck out, either; we could have been listening to a CD player, and, had we been, I would not have been paying more than cursory attention to it. Now, the frontman’s leg was injured, damaging his ability to jump around, though he made good effort. But the rest of the bands’ perpetually bored appearance did nothing for their show. The drummer’s hands looked mechanical, in perfect time, in perfect rhythm; the rest of him could remain dull at the most frenetic beats. It was apparent, though, why they would open for The Arcade Fire; look no further than the drone guitar and slam piano on “Apartment Story.” Nonetheless, I was near falling asleep before Arcade Fire had taken the stage.

Coming back from intermission, an immediate change was noticed; the place was packed. How everyone knew exactly when to show up so as to miss the openers, I’ll never know, but there they were, twice as many hipsters, twice as many high-schoolers, and everyone twice as excited. The lights dimmed to a cheer, and five white circles placed amongst the numerous instruments on stage lit up with an old recording of some female televangelist. “Anyone who can’t feel the light of God needs a Jesus enema put right up their butt.” Yes, really, it was something very similar to that. She continued, and the theme was set.

If you’ve ever heard that Arcade Fire is best live, you’ve heard completely right. At first I thought the sound was true to the album, clean and well-rehearsed. Maybe, but that is far from all. By the time they tore through “No Cars Go,” I knew I was in for a theatrical experience. Strange faces played across the back curtain, sometimes fading into live feed of the drummer, and red neon lines of light stuck straight up in front of the band, six of them. Every “Hey!” was accentuated with a bright flash at the audience. And, more importantly, every person on stage, all ten people, were completely into their music like it was their first time playing it live. And they wanted everyone else to be, too. The lead singer at one memorable point in the evening tried to summon more people to the sectioned off space in the front: “Come on, there’s more room up here. Oops, he’s [the security guard] shaking his head ‘no.’ Come on down, what the fuck are they gonna do?” Wonderful sentiment, exactly what bands need to keep from losing all fan interplay to these large venues, except this ain’t a punk-rock audience. They may be into the music, but certainly aren’t going to run up against the four or five guards standing at the entrances to the barricades, especially not these guards who looked large even from my viewpoint and distance. So he does the next best thing, running out into the audience during “Power Out”, a brave stagehand dashing out to loose him some mic cord. The same song featured a gorgeous duet of fiddling, just discernable enough over the general drone. Later, in a valiant attempt to grab some much-deserved attention, one of the men from the horn sections ran all the way back along the side.

Which reminds me: never have the horns on Neon Bible stood out in any way, especially not as emotional catalyst, to my ears. And yet they were one of the most impactful pieces of the orchestration on many songs live. This leads me to believe that Arcade Fire could take a cue from Ziggy Stardust: TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME. This is not just ambient rock, to set on as background, this is a wall of noise! Every instrument is emotive, and every instrument is vital! The mixing on the album does not do them justice.

While watching, the smell of pot wafted up to my seat fairly early in their set.  The aforementioned Danish women danced through every song. The hipsters did their thing, which seems to be showing appreciation by standing attentively, occasionally nodding. The friendly older man leaned over and spoke with me, behind a rather cute hipster who hardly moved his hands to clap. The last time he had seen Arcade Fire, he had snuck into the VIP section (No one was watching it), and, after a few songs, noticed that David Bowie was standing nearby, completely engrossed in the music. This should have sent me back into fret over whether he would appear, but by that time, more than halfway through the set, I no longer minded; I was seeing a true performance. Beginning, middle, end, it was about the arch, about the concert as a whole. “In The Backseat,” a ballad sung by one of the women in the band, is not a song I’d normally listen to on an album. But when placed in context, with her stunning performance and strange little circular hand motions, the effect was haunting; the cello solo doubly so.

They ended beautifully, the drone dropping out, only a chorus of reverberant voices remaining, as a siren fades in and the band leaves the stage. A moment later, the siren is gone, the stage is barren, but for the five TVs displaying the Neon Bible logo. All that remains is the chorus of voices, which grew until it sounded as if the audience was a congregation, all singing along. A glance proved this untrue, but I’ll just take that as a nod to the sound men. When the encore claps came, they seemed obtrusive to this moment, distracting, a reminder that no, you aren’t in some strange post-apocalyptic church, just in an audience of hipsters. But getting to hear the man himself, and this time I’m referring to Win Butler, sing those words: “Poor man eating off a hundred dollar plate…” It was worth the disruption of the final tableau. But following that up with “Wake Up?” That was just cruel. Just asking the audience to expect Bowie to pop on stage.

-Samuel Mohar

Insunchild@earthlink.net

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This one is a head-scratcher for me too. This week the Webmaster and I came across two stories about Michael C. Luckman’s Signals to Space Concerts. Luckman plans to hold music festivals in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, China, Russia, Mexico and London and beam the music out into space for extraterrestrial beings to hear. The goal is to make peaceful contact, Voyager 1 and 2-style. No dates, venues, or line-up for the concerts have been determined but Luckman is hoping to sign David Bowie as a headliner along with Sir Paul McCartney, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson (!?), and Aerosmith.

I’m not sure the point of this concert series. According to Luckman, he and the producer are going to send the music to “targets in our solar systems[sic], including Mars and the moon.” The last time I checked there was not life on Mars (groan groan, I know, horrible pun) nor was there life on the moon. Furthermore, every radio signal that is sent to any receiver on Earth eventually makes it’s way out of the atmosphere and into space. So any extraterrestrial life that is tuning in to our frequencies will already know what we listen to and how much boy bands and poptarts suck. Not to mention that the Voyager satellites already have sound files containing not just music but also general sounds that a person living on Earth might experience in their lifetime. This concert series idea sounds like Luckman is just trying to promote his book that he published two years ago and is trying to enlist all of the living artists he mentioned on it’s pages to help him do so.

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On Sunday April 8, Tim O’Reilly, the CEO of O’Reilly Media, proposed a Blogging Code of Conduct that he hopes to have posted on bloggingcode.org. The purpose of the code of conduct is to repress personal attacks on blogs. Why am I posting about this here? The news portion of this site is technically a blog. While we are not a traditional blog, we limit ourselves to posting about David Bowie and related subjects with the occasional opinion piece, this will directly affect us. I also want to get the word out to the readers of this site who run their own blogs and may not have heard about this yet.  It may affect you all as well.  I learned about this through my good friend Saudade and her blog. She wrote an excellent opinion piece on the subject which I thought would be appropriate for this issue and the Cracked Actor news blog. Frequently she and I are of the same opinion and with her entry, she touched upon all the issues that I myself would. Plus she stated it more eloquently than I ever could. After reading this if you have an opinion that you wish to express, visit Tim O’Reilly’s blog. So without further ado, today’s guest column:

As usual, I’m a little late in the game, but this proposed code of conduct for bloggers and “netizens” (groan…) that has everyone in a tiz has to get a requisite (gigantic) blurb on my page.

As a regular contributor on a few message boards and blogs, a lurker on others, and of course as a blogger, I understand the general panties in a knot about personal attacks, and sympathize with the scary of stalking. When I first got into this stuff, which was a very short time ago (but, haha, eons in MySpace time), I was completely freaked out by what people would say anonymously. I really dislike jerks who hurt people publicly, and then hide their obvious need for validation behind ragged veils of free speech or being free-thinking or contrary. People saying awful things I just know they wouldn’t say (or ever have to own up to) to someone’s face would grate on me. Dammit, even trolls sometimes still make me batshit. In the past, and quite recently, I have become very angry. I’ve had altercations, I’ve helped to ban people and chosen to leave spaces on my own accord as well, and I’ve chosen to ignore potential fights too.

Those were my choices. That’s the thing. For me, message boards or blogs where the vibe doesn’t fit or I think there’s too many fightin’ words and not enough real discourse, or I don’t agree with the subject matter or moderator policies, I drop. It’ just like real life, folks. Sometimes respect garners respect, sometimes the opposite. It’s not a level-paying field. But most of the time there are choices. And if you’re able to access the internet, that is one infinite and messy field of choice you got there.

Any place worth having a solid, sane conversation attracts a solid, sane core of people. That self-policing thing? It really can work. Those civility tenets in the article? Natural occurrences on some spaces. Officially labeling some places as fit for consumption, or warning people that they may be subject to flaming - it is paternalistic, creates victims, and opens the door for censorship. Let people get mad and hurt and sad and find solace, or not. Let them live and make their own choices and create and police and build and destroy their own online communities. Don’t hold their freaking hands at every turn.

I don’t want to invalidate the victims of cyber-stalking with my little rant. It is very very real, and frightening — especially for women, who seem to be the majority of bloggers and message board participants. But stalkers are completely different than your general run of the mill assholes and cowards, or people who just need Prozac or a place to project or blow off steam. The distinction has to be made clear. While I like the idea of general civility guidelines, they can only be a reminder to be human and think of others. Slapping subjective ideas down uniformly as law on the vast internet community and its written word, with honor badges for the “civil” sites and warning signs for the ones who refuse to get into line is not the way to do this. Assholes will just continue to be assholes, but instead of really localizing and eliminating the detritus, everyone is a potential, creating a culture of fear and victimization. Outright threats are one thing; telling someone they’re ugly, fat, stupid, slutty, not as cool as them - whatever - is cruel and childish, but another thing entirely. Let’s not lose perspective. And it is sad that a lot of online community has a monumental amount of childishness, passive-aggressiveness, and posturing punctuated by a few level-headed people. But let’s face it, that is the way real life is too.

So, yeah, I think public interaction online should be handled like real life. You got a problem, you speak up. If you get flamed or the discussion is not your thing, move on. And it may just not be your community. Racists, misogynists, misandrysts, assholes, weasels, attention-whores, posers, gayathiestCatholicpuppybunnywhatever-bashers, and all-around big talkers but small walkers are part of life. But life, and the internet, is vast.

And another thing — if you delete comments you don’t like from your blog, it is not censorship. That’s your little slice of the internet pie. Who cares? Some people won’t like it, or you. And they’ll talk about you or not come around anymore. That’s called consequences. As long as they don’t threaten or otherwise try to hurt you physically, or post naked pictures of you on MySpace, get over it.

I know not everyone can do this. But do kid-gloves make it better for those who can’t, or worse for them and everyone else?

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For those of you, like me, who looked at the venue list for the High Line Festival and wondered to yourself, “This is scattered across multiple venues? How exactly is this considered a festival associated with the High Line?” and were too lazy to look at the geography, David Bowie himself answered part of that question on a post to the Bowienet message board. He says what “holds this particular festival together is that all the venues are on or follow a geographic route in New York called the High Line (an old overhead railway). Hence, the High Line Festival.”

So there you have it. As disgruntled as I am about the conspicuous lack of a live performance by the man himself despite his initial announcement, he is sticking to the original geographic plan. From the original news item on Bowienet, “[t]he 10-day marathon event will take place at street level and at neighbouring venues alongside the High Line.”

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According to the ridiculous site Love Gods Way, David Bowie is one on a long list of bands that might slyly turn you or your children *gasp* gay. No seriously, look at the list on the site. Then take a look at the list of the “safe” bands. If you listen to the Dresden Dolls, then you’re probably okay. So lyrics like “coin operated boy/sitting on the shelf he is just a toy/but I turn him on and he comes to life/automatic joy” are way better for the eternal fate of my soul than lyrics like “I should live my life on bended knee/If I can’t control my destiny.” Whew, good to know. I wonder if my risk of turning gay is canceled out by the fact that I’m Catholic?

Update: Joe over at Joe.My.God. has noticed that improv actor Joel Oglesby looks suspiciously like Pastor Donnie Davies of Love Gods Way. Check it out for yourself. If Joel Oglesby really is Donnie Davies then that’s a brilliant bit of viral marketing. Can’t wait for C.H.O.P.S. the Movie. Now I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that David Bowie won’t make me gay.

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