All Show, No Tell

We accidentally got to see "David Bowie Is" at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on Friday.  We went there to see Rufus Wainwright sing with the Toronto Symphony, and that was amazing of course, but the David Bowie show has a magic shimmer to it in my head because of the serendipity and the utter beautiful chance of the whole thing.  Bowie has a huge place in my life; he's like a planet I've revolved around many, many times, me this white-trash moon.  In the seventies and early eighties, he was sometimes all I had connecting me to a place I wanted and needed to be, some glamorous kingdom in which pure feverish creativity is the very atmosphere you breath and pollute.  His three "Berlin" albums (made with Brian Eno. God bless him, self-exiled in a city that is perpetually in black-and-white), Low, Lodger and Heroes, all leave a majestic space in your head, as if they were recorded before records were even created.  Those three records are so out of time and so rich with eerie throbs and an aural meanness that goes beyond sentiment and toward delirium (and even a little ecstasy), you think you are in the presence of an alien god just arrived and ready to kill what he can't enslave.  At least that's what it felt like being 17 years old and experiencing them for the first time.  The songs on each range from moody set-pieces to ballads to honest-to-goodness rock anthems, but as a whole each of those three albums feel like they were hatched in meth-labs, home-made science that somehow creates a whole new subculture.  Lodger for me especially has a sort of love-sick brilliance to it; songs like "Fantastic Voyage," "Repetition," and "Boys Keep Swinging" speak to life outside of life, satirizing and elegizing at the same time the desperate need you feel when you can't feel what you are supposed to.  Lodger is the best novel I've ever read in many ways:  literary and fast-paced, and almost completely plotless, but pulled forward by that sinewy, reptilian, gorgeous voice and soul.

"David Bowie Is" captures a feeling of both worship and understanding, as if a bunch of freaky good-for-nothing teenagers with a penchant for goth-rock and posing wised up and became astute curators and assessors.  There's so much stuff in the show (lyrics to "Fame" on a cocktail napkin, beautiful costumes from Diamond Dogs to Labyrinth, videos (the one for "Life on Mars" is spectacularly glamorous), albums covers in a makeshift record-store corner, paperback books Bowie posed with and eventually read strung from the ceiling like birds flying into the horizon, a one-room concert-hall flashing scenes from "The Glass Spider" 1987 debacle/tour, and so on) that you'd think you'd be totally overwhelmed, but the way all the objects and ideas have been placed and contextualized you feel right at home.  I almost burst into tears a couple times, especially, of course, in the rooms associated with Berlin.  Someone even had the great insight to place the keys to Bowie's Berlin apartment inside a Lucite box on the wall, and the video performance of "Sense of Doubt," a really gloomy soundtrack flourish off of Heroes, is one of the most absurd and beautiful live performances you'll ever witness. 

I could go on. 

Museum shows often try to examine events and historical epochs through a constellation and collection of images, trying to form an abstraction based on concrete data.  It's like trying to swallow a whale usually:  too much "stuff," not enough meaning.  In choosing to focus on one person who has an amazingly prolific and effusive history of creativity and pop-culture resonance, the curators here almost effortlessly show us the times Bowie lived in without even talking about the times he lived in.  It's all show, no tell.  The way he worked his magic with what he had is all we need to witness.  It's not a retrospective as much as a dream of the past forty years or so.  And that dream, like Bowie's music and performances and life, tells you a lot more about the way world is than actually trying to survey and "capture" it.



Beastly Lobotomy

 

Just finished Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, a mesmerizing and eerily horrifying historiography of 1933/34 Berlin, climaxing with the Night of the Long Knives, the first real outwardly evil pogrom the Nazis accomplished, killing many of their own, including the John-Wayne-Gacy-looking leader of the Brown Shirts, Ernst Rohm.  Larson follows the lives of the Dodds, an American diplomatic family who move to Berlin in early 1933, when everyone was burying their heads in the sand, trying to figure out how people could actually take Hitler seriously, while Hitler became the monster in every room, and the salvation of every little German town. 

With swift strange calmness, Larson narrates this passage of history without a lot of brio so the terror seeps into your brain just like it should:  as a form of obstinate normalcy.  Berlin in the 1930s is a captivatingly over-ordered culture of Weimar apologists on the one side and Nazi comptrollers on the other, a sort of Best of/Worst of coagulated into a society mean enough and hurt enough to pass laws against whole groups of people without really giving it a thought.  The process starts slowly at first, as in Jews cannot work on the staffs of newspapers, and Jews cannot go to the same hospitals as Aryans, and Jews cannot marry Gentiles, etc.  The laws build into a sort of tower that people begin to fear and to worship simultaneously.  "Order" comes from that kind of division.  That's what Hitler totally counted on.  The dreamy calculations made without thought are what laws love to feed on:  that power of controlling situations with blame and extortion and eventually murder creeps up like flood waters in a basement, while everyone else is upstairs having a dinner party, or darning socks.  The accumulation is what is truly evil, the way all those little humiliations and biases build up into genocide, without really anyone seeing.

There's a scene in the middle of the book that is epic and unforgettable.  The diplomat's freewheeling daughter, toying with the idea that Nazis are fun, takes a trip with one of her Nazi beaus to Hamburg.  It's an old beautiful town, and she is thrilled that the curvy brick streets are filled with excited citizens when they arrive.  It's a celebration!  There's the smell of fire wood burning, and the jovial faces of all the townspeople shining at dusk.  Then the Brown Shirts start their inevitable patriotic parade, and she witnesses that wholesome, exciting scene turn rancid in the blink of an eye.  At the front of the Brown Shirt parade is a thin, pale, frantic woman in rags with a sign around her neck:  "JEWESS."  The townspeople seem to be enjoying the spectacle.  They applaud the most when she stumbles.  The Brown Shirts push and pull the woman down the town's streets to the large luxury hotel at its center, and there they all condemn her for trying to marry a non-Jew.  They call her a variety of horrible names. 

Her face looks like it's been frozen in a silent movie frame inside my head -- fear of course, but also a guttural disbelief, as if she can't understand how things got here so goddamn fast.  How did she end up like this?  How are these people so joyously sucking the very life out of her life?

This was in 1933.

And so I'm thinking about Russia, and the law they've passed there, banning "gay propaganda" around "children."  The inevitable violence against gay people follows.  Thinking about the buzz around Sochi as well, and all the talk about whether the US should boycott or not, etc.  It all has that feeling that Larson's book is so good at dramatizing without a lot of sturm and drang:  just this hazy, sad, godforsaken maelstrom that moves as slow as a landslide, and yet has the power and the secret velocity of pure evil.