We knew David Bowie could pretty much do it all—glam rock, jazz, funk, Philly soul, cabaret, pop, drum and bass, folk, avant-garde, you name it. In front of the camera, he could stretch himself into the beautiful but wounded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the scary-sexy-cool Goblin King of Labyrinth, the mystical genius Tesla in The Prestige. Nothing he attempted seemed beyond his grasp, including, as you can hear above, off-the-cuff, mostly spot-on impressions of friends and fellow singers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen.
The audio clip you hear comes from outtakes producer Mark Saunders happened to capture on tape during the 1985 sessions for the Absolute Beginners film soundtrack (“a better soundtrack than it was a movie!” Saunders remarks).
While recording a lead vocal, Saunders writes, Bowie “broke into the impersonations and I realized that these might get erased at some point, so I quickly put a cassette in and hit ‘record.’” You can read his full recollections at The Talkhouse in a short essay he wrote to accompany the audio—introduced by Zach Staggers of indie band the So So Glos, who writes:
Bowie goes through a handful of sung impressions, including but not limited to, Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Loud Reed and Anthony Newly, who was such a big influence on the iconic singer that the impersonation almost sounds like Bowie mimicking himself. Between takes you can hear Bowie having fun and going back and forth with the engineers. Jokes.
Bowie also does what sounds like Bob Dylan (or Tom Petty, or Marc Bolan as some have speculated?) in the second take and a passable Neil Young in the last. His Springsteen, Reed, and Pop are excellent (Bowie called the Iggy impression “difficult, he’s somewhere between all of them.”) He closes the impromptu performance with “That’s it, night night.”
Bowie did indeed have jokes, though anyone who followed him over the decades knows of his comedic talents, whether playing straight man to Ricky Gervais’ obnoxious superfan or displaying impeccable timing in his deadpan delivery of “Bowie Secrets” from Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2002.
Despite the kiss-off he gives Gervais in their comedy bit, those who knew and worked with Bowie all testify that he never took himself too seriously or, as Saunders remembers, threw his weight around by “using a big rock star ‘Hey, I’m David Bowie and I want it done my way.” He may have seemed to many like an alien or a god, but he was apparently in person a pretty humble, and very funny, guy.
Though it’s sometimes regarded as a pretentious-sounding term for genre writers who don’t want to associate with genre, I’ve always liked the phrase “speculative fiction.” J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman… A touch of surrealist humor, a highly philosophical bent, and a somewhat tragic sensibility can be found among them all, and also in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, who does not shy away from the genre labels of science fiction and fantasy, but who approaches these categories in the way of, say, Virginia Woolf in her Orlando: as feminist thought experiments and fables about human ecological failings and inter-cultural potential.
That’s not to say that Le Guin’s writing is driven by political agendas, but that she has a very clear, uncompromising vision, which she has realized over the course of over five decades in novels, short stories, and children’s fiction. LeGuin’s writing takes us away from the familiar to worlds we recognize as alternatives to our own.
Like those in ancient epics, her characters undertake journeys to realms unknown, where they learn as much or more about themselves as about the alien inhabitants. And though we experience in her stories the thrill of discovery and danger common to fantasy and sci-fi, we also enter a world of ideas about who we are as human beings, and how we might be different. For Le Guin, fiction is a vessel that can carry us out of ourselves and return us home changed.
Le Guin stated last year that she no longer has the “vigor and stamina” for writing novels, and having given up teaching as well, said she missed “being in touch with serious prentice writers.” Thus, she decided to start an online writing workshop at the site Book View Café, describing it as “a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation.” In keeping with the metaphor of sea voyaging, she called her workshop “Navigating the Ocean of Story” and declared that she would not take reader questions about publishing or finding an agent: “We won’t be talking about how to sell a ship, but how to sail one.” Reader questions poured in, and Le Guin did her best to answer as many as she could, posting advice every other Monday for all of the summer and much of the fall of 2015.
The first question she received was a doozy—“How do you make something good?”—and her lengthy answer sets the tone for all of her counsel to follow. She is witty and honest, and surprisingly helpful, even when confronted with such a vague, seemingly unanswerable query. The dozens of questions she selected in the following weeks tend to deal with much more manageable issues of style and technique, and in each instance, Le Guin offers the querent a clear set of coordinates to help them navigate the waters of their own fictional journeys. Below are just a few choice excerpts from the many hundreds of words Le Guin generously donated to her reading community.
The problem of exposition:
In answers to two readers’ questions about providing sufficient backstory, Le Guin refers to an old New Yorker feature called “The Department of Fuller Explanation, where they put truly and grand examples of unnecessary explaining.” Most of us, Le Guin writes, “tend to live in the Department of Fuller Explanation” when writing; “We are telling ourselves backstory and other information, which the reader won’t actually need to know when reading it.”
To avoid the “Expository Lump or the Infodump,” as she calls it, Le Guin advises the writer to “decide—or find out when revising—whether the information is actually necessary. If not, don’t bother. If so, figure out how to work it in as a functional, forward-moving element of the story… giving information indirectly, by hint and suggestion.”
The problem of description:
When it comes to describing characters’ appearances, Le Guin suggests getting specific:
It’s not just facial features—a way of moving, a voice quality, can ’embody’ a character. Specific features or mannerisms (even absurdly specific ones!) can help fix a minor character in the reader’s mind when they turn up again…. To work on this skill, you might try describing people you see on the bus or in the coffee shop: just do a sentence about them in your head, trying to catch their looks in a few words.
The problem of setting:
Le Guin answers a reader who confesses to trouble with “world building” by pointing out the central importance of setting:
Event requires location. Where we are affects who we are, what we say and and do, how and why we say and do it. It matters, doesn’t it, whether we’re in Miami or Mumbai — even more whether we’re on Earth or in Made-Up Place? So, I don’t know if it would work to try and build up a world– “all those details” – and tack it onto what you’ve written. If inventing a world isn’t your thing, OK. Stick close to this world, or use readymade, conventional sf and fantasy props and scenery. They’re there for all of us to use.
The problem of dialogue:
Le Guin offers some very practical advice on how to make speech sound convincing and genuine:
All I can recommend is to read/speak your dialogue aloud. Not whispering, not muttering, OUT LOUD. (Virginia Woolf used to try out her dialogue in the bathtub, which greatly entertained the cook downstairs.) This will help show you what’s fakey, hokey, bookish — it just won’t read right out loud. Fix it till it does. Speaking it may help you to vary the speech mannerisms to suit the character. And probably will cause you to cut a lot. Good! Many contemporary novels are so dialogue-heavy they seem all quotation marks — disembodied voices yaddering on in a void.
Getting started:
Many readers wrote to ask Le Guin about their difficulty in getting a story started at all. She replied with the caveat that “no answer to this question is going to fit every writer.” While some writers work from “a rough sketch, notes as to where the story is headed and how it might get there, with more extended notes about the world it takes place in,” for others, “a complete outline is absolutely necessary before starting to write.” Whatever the method:
A story is, after all, and before everything else, dynamic: it starts Here, because it’s going There. Its life principle is the same as a river: to keep moving. Fast or slow, straight or erratic, headlong or meandering, but going, till it gets There. The ideas it expresses, the research it embodies, the timeless inspirations it may offer, are all subordinate to and part of that onward movement. The end itself may not be very important; it is the journey that counts. I don’t know much about “flow” states, but I know that the onward flow of a story is what carries a writer from the start to the end of it, along with the whole boatload of characters and ideas and knowledge and meaning — and carries the reader in the same boat.
There are dozens more questions from readers, and dozens more insightful, funny, and very helpful answers from Le Guin. Whether you are a writer of science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, or none of the above, much of her advice will apply to any kind of fiction writing you do—or will give you unique insights into the techniques and trials of the fiction writer. Read all of the questions and Le Guin’s answers in her “Navigating the Ocean of Story” posts at Book View Café.
“Teach your children well” sang Crosby, Stills and Nash once upon a long ago, and that adage could be paraphrased as “make sure your students don’t grow up learning substandard pop songs. Give them a real education.” An enterprising elementary school teacher in Mombach, a district of the Rhineland city of Mainz, did so in 2015, dressing up his students from Lemmchen Elementary in their own handmade robot outfits and teaching them to sing the classic 1978 Kraftwerk hit “The Robots” (or “Roboter” if you own the German version, which you can hear below).
While the original prog-rockers turned electronic demigods tried to strip away as much of their humanity when playing live, you just can’t do it with kids. They’re just too cute, and their wobbly, shuffling attempts to be machines only warms the heart more. (Could their parents tell who was who, I wonder?) Their version of the music is similarly charming and pretty faithful, though it’s possibly played by instructor Lars Reimer. (An older class shows their faces and plays instruments in a more recent video, a cover of “Tanz” by Stoppok.) So yes, Mr. Reimer, you’re passing on some good musical taste.
Though Kraftwerk was often thought of as cold and artificial when they first arrived on the international music scene, the intervening years have only emphasized the romantic beauty of their (mostly major key) melodies. (See for example the Balanescu Quartet’s rendition of the same song below.)
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Sometimes I’ll meet someone who mentions having written a book, and who then adds, “… well, an academic book, anyway,” as if that didn’t really count. True, academic books don’t tend to debut at the heights of the bestseller lists amid all the eating, praying, and loving, but sometimes lightning strikes; sometimes the subject of the author’s research happens to align with what the public believes they need to know. Other times, academic books succeed at a slower burn, and it takes readers generations to come around to the insights contained in them — a less favorable royalty situation for the long-dead writer, but at least they can take some satisfaction in the possibility.
History has shown, in any case, that academic books can become influential. “After a list of the top 20 academic books was pulled together by expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers to mark the inaugural Academic Book Week,” writes The Guardian’s Alison Flood, “the public was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influential.” The shortlist of these most important academic books of all time runs as follows (and you can read many of them free by following the links from our meta list of Free eBooks):
The top spot went to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which Flood quotes the University of Glasgow’s Andrew Prescott as calling “the supreme demonstration of why academic books matter,” one that “changed the way we think about everything – not only the natural world, but religion, history and society. Every researcher, no matter whether they are writing books, creating digital products or producing artworks, aspires to produce something as significant in the history of thought as Origin of Species.”
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reasonplaced a still impressive fifth, given its status, in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton, as “one of the most difficult works of philosophy ever written,” — but one which aims to “show the limits of human reasoning, and at the same time to justify the use of our intellectual powers within those limits. The resulting vision, of self-conscious beings enfolded within a one-sided boundary, but always pressing against it, hungry for the inaccessible beyond, has haunted me, as it has haunted many others since Kant first expressed it.”
This is the kind of thing we usually just mention on our Twitter stream. But perhaps you’re not following us there, and we didn’t want you to miss this.…
In 2003, David Bowie rummaged through his collection of 2500 vinyl LPs and created a list of his 25 favorite albums for Vanity Fair. The list came prefaced by these (and other) words:
If you can possibly get your hands on any of these, I guarantee you evenings of listening pleasure, and you will encourage a new high-minded circle of friends, although one or two choices will lead some of your old pals to think you completely barmy. So, without chronology, genre, or reason, herewith, in no particular order, 25 albums that could change your reputation.
Just as eclectic as you might expect, the list recommends everything from blues tunes by John Lee Hooker, minimalist compositions by Steve Reich, avant garde rock by The Velvet Underground, electronic music by The Electrosoniks, psychedelic folk music by The Incredible String Band, and the last works of Richard Strauss. You can view a copy of Bowie’s list here (and perhaps couple it with his list of 100 Favorite Books).
And despite his concerns about finding these albums in supply, you can stream most of his favorite albums for free on Spotify using the playlist above. (Yes, we got a little inspired and pulled it together.) If you need the software, download it here.
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Here’s a remarkable short film of the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to introduce the band’s unique style of guitar- and violin-based jazz to the British public before their first UK tour. As Michael Dregni writes in Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing:
The Quintette was unknown to the British public, and there was no telling how their new music would resonate. So, Grade sought to educate his audience. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus promotional short entitled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British theaters providing a lesson in jazz appreciation to warm up the crowds.
That would explain the didactic tone of the first two and a half minutes of the film, which plods along as a remedial lesson on the nature of jazz. It opens with an orchestra giving a note-for-note performance of Handel’s “Largo,” from the opera Xerxes, which the narrator then contrasts to the freedom of jazz improvisation.
But the film really comes alive when Django arrives on the screen and launches into a jazz arrangement of the popular French song “J’attendrai.” (The name means “I will wait,” and it’s a reworking of a 1933 Italian song, “Tornerai” or “You Will Return,” by Dino Olivieri and Nino Rastelli.) Although the sequences of Reinhardt and the band playing were obviously synchronized to a previously recorded track, Jazz “Hot” is the best surviving visual document of the legendary guitarist’s two-fingered fretting technique, which he developed after losing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. To learn more about Reinhardt and to watch a full-length documentary on his life, see our August 2012 post, “Django Reinhardt and the Inspiring Story Behind His Guitar Technique.”
In a new video series from “How To Make Everything” — a Youtube channel dedicated to finding out how to break down complex production processes and make things from scratch — you can watch Andy George create a book using very traditional techniques. And when I say traditional, I mean traditional. He creates papyrus, parchment, ink and leather book covers by hand. And be warned, some parts may make you a bit squeamish. “The How to Make a Book” series is divided into eight separate videos. If you click play above, you can watch them all from start to finish.
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“No, I have not shorted out or fallen in love with a cyborg,” insisted Robert Christgau in his review of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express, which he credited with “a simple-minded air of mock-serious fascination with melody and repetition” and textures that “sound like parodies by some cosmic schoolboy of every lush synthesizer surge that’s ever stuck in your gullet — yet also work the way those surges are supposed to work.” To electronic music fans, Kraftwerk now have a status even beyond that of the grand old men of the tradition, but continue to tour the world enthusiastically (with their own detached, biomechanical interpretation of enthusiasm), performing the deliberately technological, sometimes startlingly jagged, sometimes startlingly rhythmic music they invented.
The world got their first taste of it, in an early experimental form, a few short years before successful and relatively mainstream Kraftwerk records like Trans-Europe Expressor Autobahncame along. The group debuted onstage in their native Germany (in the town of Soest, to be precise) in the 1970 concert captured on video. Watch the gig above, or find it on YouTube. Together, the footage captures with unexpected clarity the avant-gardism of both Kraftwerk’s performative sensibility and technological setup as well as the reaction of the crowd, on the whole more pleased than bewildered. Now, in an age where performers playing from laptops onstage have become commonplace — even Kraftwerk themselves have joined that rather introverted party — it doesn’t seem as striking as all that.
But the genre of “kraut rock” (which All Music Guide describes as made by “legions of German bands of the early ’70s that expanded the sonic possibilities of art and progressive rock,” going in “mechanical and electronic” directions by “working with early synthesizers and splicing together seemingly unconnected reels of tape”) began in a different reality — in an era when Christgau could still, reviewing a later Kraftwerk album in 1981, write that every time he hears their lyric “ ‘I program my home computer/Bring myself into the future,’ I want to make a tape for all those zealots who claim a word processor will change my life.”
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