I'll Stick with You Baby for a Thousand Years

Last Friday, April 29, 2016, we hosted a great big extravaganza at Thunder-Sky, Inc. that allowed me to understand better why we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Upstairs it was "Radically Visible," a fashion-show/danceathon/performance-art-glitter-fest, with Sky Cubacub, Lindsey Whittle, Antonio Adams, and Craig Matis all delivering the goods in the form of neon-colored fashion, ecstatic make-up, big gaudy collages, gloriously stylized poster-sized photos, and the kind of energy that helps you to re-invigorate what you want not only out of art, but out of life.  It was like an extended funky parade all night, all that electricity boxed in and vibrant and burning in all directions, and by the end, when everyone was dancing and carrying on, the floor felt like it was about to collapse.  That almost collapse is what "Radically Visible" was truly about, a beautiful crew of artists and models and everyday people blending into one big bombastic moment when snobbery and skepticism leave the room to go sit outside in their cars, and vision replaces judgement:  all feeling, walls and floor shaking like a kite blown around by wind.  All smiles, sweat, and silliness.  You don't need anything else sometimes.  

And then downstairs we were doing a David Bowie tribute (curated by Emily Brandehoff) that pulled together over 40 or so artists' visions of what Bowie meant, our basement wall-to-walled with interpretations of his greatness.  Crayon drawings right next to oil paintings, conceptual found objects situated with upfront portraits of the artist as he was, as he wanted to be.  Bowie's world was about being radical and visible too, of course; he was always in search of some otherworld to replace the glum, phony one we're all usually stuck with.  

We karaoked the hell out of some of his greatest songs in that basement.  And as I screamed out the lyrics to "Golden Years," I felt somehow vindicated, although I really didn't understand the point of the vindication outside of the fact that we are keeping Raymond alive in the humblest of ways, dedicating art and time to his memory, archiving almost everything he left behind:  Raymond Thunder-Sky, urban legend and Cincinnati curiosity transforming year by year into mythological god and mentor.  And mid-song, my lungs burning from me trying to imitate Bowie's angelic/demonic baritone, I realized I was staring up at the shelves holding Ray's toolboxes, all those toolboxes he carried around town as he rode buses to get to demolition sites so he could draw them.  Those metal and plastic boxes contained his drawing supplies, candy, photographs, pieces of his ongoing clown costumes... 

Everything we do here celebrates the triumph of his strangeness, the rigor of his freakishness. 

I'll stick with you baby or a thousand years

Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years...

Raymondism

Raymond Thunder-Sky

David Bowie

Lindsey M Whittle

We're opening two shows this month at Thunder-Sky, Inc.:  "Radically Visible," featuring costumes, photos, collages, drawings, and other art by Antonio Adams, Sky Cubacub, Craig Matis, and Lindsey M Whittle, as well as a group show curated by Emily Brandehoff, "Bowie in the Basement," featuring about 40  or so works from a variety of artists, celebrating Bowie's life and art.  When I was pulling together news release info, I came across the above three photos, and they've stuck in my head, so that means of course a blogpost about Raymond, Bowie, and radical visibility, but also beyond that I wanted to reconstitute a little of Raymond's myth and menace and glory, conjure up his presence from back in the day, when people did not know what the hell to do with him.  And despite a lot of bull-shit he persevered, finding a way to be what he wanted to be, who he wanted to be.

Raymond had no choice really in that department.  For him, costume, performance, art, life, and being Raymond all intermingled into one sensibility that seemed forever eschewing conformity but also never flaunting the eschewment self-consciously.  I am what I am so just get fucking used to it -- that's all over his face in pictures, especially in the one up top.  He toured Cincinnati like that, all clowned- and construction-workered-up, silently going about his obsessive business of drawing from real life the destruction and construction people did to their surroundings, haters be damned.  And there were haters,  people who treated him like a freak without kindness or even just plain everyday manners.  I'm not going to go into those stories because they don't matter here.  He survived, created his own universe, found a way to make meaning out of what he wanted the world to be.  

He left behind those costumes too, which we've archived at his joint:  hard-hats, clown-suits, boots, overalls, clown-collars, hats. Shininess juxtaposed with burlap ruggedness, a show-off propensity pushed up against the need to be part of a team.  At the end of the day he merged show-business and working-class desires, furtively and yet also somehow loudly proclaiming his right to be a great big beautiful freak, while also trying to invent a job for himself.  (His construction-worker drag came from the fact that he truly wanted to be a construction-worker.  He actually started putting on the work-clothes and showing up at sites with his drawing materials because he couldn't get hired on as an actual construction-worker [he didn't have a driver's license so they couldn't].  He willed himself into that status through a sort of flaky and beautiful camouflage.)

The freakishness and the self-created celebration of the freakishness go hand in hand with Raymond. He was his own one-man band in many, hermetically sealed ways, but also willfully open-ended, walking and walking and walking in that get-up all over the city, riding buses, being a part of the world bubbled-off but completely in the maelstrom, a sort of Native-American-Shriner's-Clown-Working-Class Dandy.  

Nineteenth Century poet and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was always riffing on and refining his metaphysical takes on the "dandy."  He defined dandyism as an elevation of aesthetics to living religion, that a dandy in his finest fineries simply walking about the wretched city, shining like some self-created aristocrat, pisses off the responsible citizenry existentially because the dandy has paid so much close attention to his own existence and identity outside of the realm of their control, and their taste, their lives. 

Casting Raymond as a "dandy" kind of helps situate and contextualize what the artists in "Radically Visible" will be up to, as well as gives some backroom logic to "Bowie in the Basement."  In their work, Sky Cubacub is on a quest to reestablish the meaning of fashion and clothes as both demarcation and demonstration of the way someone should be able to live and love. Antonio Adams, one of Raymond's best friends, carries on Raymond's legacy through his own sense of kingly garments and a continuous reinvention through art of his own mythologized self.  Lindsey M Whittle takes silliness and freakishness in as forms of alchemical oxygen, breathing out little kingdoms of goof and color, and Craig Matis' collages use the circus, itself a version of over-the-top captivity and release, as metaphor for reconfiguring the struggle to be exactly who you need to be, no matter what constraints and condemnations.  

Then there's David Bowie, king of the dandies, shape-shifting his way from space-cadet to thin white duke to harlequin and beyond. Bowie has left behind a legacy of I-am-what-I-am-so-fucking-get-used-to-it; he managed to change the world by appearing not to be in it.  Somehow he was able to crack the code of all clowns and freaks:  be exactly who you are until the day you die.  

Locking into Place

Of course it's January when David Bowie dies.  Cold silvery light, frosted-hard glass, that sense of loss locking into place:  roads, tree-branches, ditches, power-lines.  He was silvery like that somehow, frosty; you didn't know him, you just experienced his atmosphere. 

 

That's exactly how I remember him.  Just enough cold to make you shiver, just enough strangeness to make you feel scared, just enough glamor to make you understand, just enough video to freak you out.  Once somebody like him goes, you get what he means, and it's startling.  You've depended on his strangeness to get you through.  I have.  Truly.  Depended on David Bowie's oddness and fearlessness and creepiness, his shapeshiftingness, his ability to disappear and reappear.  It gave me hope.  Gives me hope still.  He pursued a swarm of off-kilter notions that turned into a kingdom.  His musical catalog is an electronic nest of hallways, every word and note merging into rooms that flow into one another and then suddenly you're outside in the cold again, freezing, wanting to freeze:  "Sons of the Silent Age," "Always Crashing in the Same Car," "Boys Keep Swinging," "D.J.," "Wild Is the Wind," "Heroes," "Ashes to Ashes," and so on.  I'm in a Berlin k-hole here, fixating on the albums Bowie made right before, during, and after he moved to Berlin and got God (Brian Eno):  Station to Station, Low, "Hereos," The Lodger, and Scary Monster (and Super Creeps).  You can't escape their importance, nor their interstellar drag, a music that defines a secret era through saturation and slurred loveliness.  It's the late 70s and very early 80s, but also it's just Bowie:  disco refashioned into robotic trance, punk recalibrated into thoughtfulness, rock's warmth and stir disconnected and rewired into beautiful crooned terror. 

Bowie was a weirdo that somehow found a way to make weirdness majestic, worth putting up with.  He did this through experimentation, but the experiments, at least those I'm referencing, always paid off, always found their way out of flaunts and fancy-flights into direct bullets to your brain and soul.  It's the kind of music so connected to life it feels foreign to it; you just want to ride inside the spaceships he's made, close your eyes, find that planet of ladies rubbing lipstick off their faces, the planet of furious D.J.s and harlequins entrancing bulldozers.

Even before Berlin, Bowie was like that.  One of the first memories I have of him is from Soul Train.  For real.  Bowie singing "Golden Years" on Soul Train.  Well, lipsyncing at least.  Out of it.  He was thin and regal and looked doped-out, emptied of all feeling, but still into it, lizard-like and connected to some kind of malevolent corporation.  The perfect thing:

All those guises, all those identities.  I was maybe 10 years old.  Loved watching Soul Train.  Bowie's presence, though, made Soul Train feel gorgeously soul-less, like purgatory, and yet you wanted to be there, wanted to figure out what the hell?  That was him:  so strange he defined "strange," and now nobody is strange.  They are just wannabes. 

God bless the Thin White Duke.  Rest in Peace.

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.