A Look Inside David Bowie & Iman’s Beautiful Mountain Home
It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive.
Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their ultra-luxurious, Indonesian-style holiday digs on the Caribbean island of Mustique, but, as reporter Christopher Buckley noted, “role changes have always been part of David Bowie’s persona.”
By the time they bought property and started a family in New York, they had honed techniques for flying under the radar in public, allowing them to lead a fairly regular life in both Manhattan and Ulster County where the house they built on their 64-acre plot of Little Tonshi Mountain is located.
Even the most dedicated city slicker should be able to appreciate the beauty of their floor-to-ceiling Catskills views.
“It’s stark, and it has a Spartan quality about it,” Bowie said prior to breaking ground on the house:
The retreat atmosphere honed my thoughts. I’ve written in the mountains before, but never with such gravitas.
WPDH in Poughkeepsie reported that “the mountaintop retreat was kept “secret” from fans and paparazzi as much as anything can be hidden in the age of the Internet and TMZ:”
Locals, however, are well aware of Bowie’s mountaintop home. Although many knew of his address, the rock icon’s requests for privacy were mostly honored by his neighbors and fellow Ulster County residents. Bowie was spotted around town but rarely hassled by strangers.
By and large, his neighbors left him in peace to pick up Chinese take out, browse the indie bookshop, and celebrate his daughter’s birthday at a nearby water park.
Bowie recorded his final album, Black Star, on the mountain. Soon after, friends and family gathered to scatter his ashes there too.
Iman confides that she found it difficult to spend time at the house following his 2016 death, but spending time there during the most intense part of the pandemic helped her come to terms with grief, and rejoice in the many contents that remind her of him.
Some highlights:
- Bowie’s 1980 painting, Mustique, one of many self-portraits he painted over the years.
I feel like when I look at his eyes and I move around the house, it’s like it’s following me.
- Lynn Chadwick’s sculpture “Teddy Boy and Girl”
Art consultant Kate Chertavian recalls how Iman enlisted her to help her track it down in the summer of 1993 to mark the couple’s first wedding anniversary:
David had shared with her a small drawing of a sculpture by Lynn Chadwick… a version of his Teddy Boy and Girl that had won the International Sculpture Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale. Although I didn’t yet know David, his interest in this sculpture, with its musical references and incredible energy, made perfect sense. Teddy Boy and Girl is one of Chadwick’s best-known bodies of sculpture that helped rocket the artist to international fame. The series eloquently embodies the emergent 1950s British Pop culture as they depict post-war music-mad teens in their Edwardian frock coats dancing with arms in the air.
- Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s 1956 story collection, A Grave for a Dolphin, one of Bowie’s Top 100 Books:
…way before David and I met, this was one of his favorite books. And actually, he told me some of the lyrics from his song “Heroes” were actually inspired by this book. And then of course, finally, when we meet, we can’t believe that we both adore the same book, but that also the whole story happens from where I come from, Somalia.
- A self-portrait by their then-fifteen-year-old daughter Alexandria Jones, in which she and her mother are depicted inclining gently towards each other:
It’s me and her and, of course, the black star. That’s David… she painted this in 2016, which was the first year without David.
Of perhaps less immediate interest to those unconnected to the world of high fashion is a pricey black crocodile Hermès Birkin bag, a souvenir of a Parisian holiday early in the couple’s romance. This item does come with an endearing sartorial surprise for Bowie fans, however:
…and he bought himself, you won’t believe it, sandals.
Rounding out the tour are a limited edition porcelain pitcher by Kara Walker and gifts from fashion designer and photographer Hedi Slimane and fellow former models Bethann Hardison and Naomi Campbell.
(Are we wrong to wish those sandals had been Crocs?)
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The Art Collection of David Bowie: An Introduction
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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David Bowie Sends a Christmas Greeting in the Voice of Elvis Presley (and Sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”)
After David Bowie died in 2016, we discovered that the musician had a knack for doing impressions of fellow celebrities. Could he sing a song in the style of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen? Turns out, he could. And yes, he could do an Elvis impression too.
The clip above aired back in 2013 on “This Is Radio Clash,” a radio show hosted by the Clash’s Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. “Hello everybody,” this is David Bowie making a telephone call from the US of A. At this time of the year I can’t help but remember my British-ness and all the jolly British folk, so here’s to you and have yourselves a Merry little Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you very much.”
It’s maybe not as memorable as his 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby, but, hey, it’s still a fun little way to get the holiday season in swing.
Bonus: Below hear Bowie sing Presley’s classic “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.” I hadn’t heard it before, and it’s a treat.
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Watch David Bowie Perform “Starman” on Top of the Pops: Voted the Greatest Music Performance Ever on the BBC (1972)
The Beatles were made for black-and-white television, as evidenced by the immediacy with which their 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show launched them into permanent international superstardom. Though only a few years younger than the Fab Four, their countryman David Bowie arose in a different era: that of color television, with its vastly expanded aesthetic range. Bowie is known to have carried himself as if his own international superstardom was guaranteed, even during his early years of struggle. But it was only when he took full, lurid advantage of the technologically-expanded sonic and visual palettes available to him that he truly became an icon.
“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”
“It is hard to reconstruct the drabness, the visual depletion of Britain in 1972, which filtered into the music papers to form the grey and grubby backdrop to Bowie’s physical and sartorial splendor,” writes Simon Reynolds in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century. But to understand the impact and meaning of Bowie — and in particular, Bowie of the Ziggy Stardust era that had only just begun — we must imagine the sheer exhilaration of new possibility a young, artistically inclined Top of the Pops viewer must have felt as Bowie-as-Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars overtook their television sets for “Starman“ ‘s three minutes and 55 seconds.
“No matter how weird and alien you felt, you couldn’t have been as weird and alien as David Bowie and his bandmates looked,” writes the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. The occasion is that paper’s new list of the 100 greatest BBC music performances, whose range includes Bob Dylan, Prince, the Pixies, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and Dizzy Gillespie. But the top spot goes to Bowie’s 1972 Top of the Pops gig, due not least to the fact that “umpteen viewers have testified to the life-changing, he’s‑talking-to-me effect of the moment when Bowie points down the camera as he sings the line ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you.’ ” CNN’s Todd Leopold likens the Beatles to “aliens dropped into the United States of 1964,” but as Bowie would vividly demonstrate eight years later, the real invasion from outer space was yet to come.
Related content:
8 Hours of David Bowie’s Historic 1980 Floor Show: Complete & Uncut Footage
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)
Humanity has few fascinations as enduring as that with apocalypse. We’ve been telling ourselves stories of civilization’s destruction as long as we’ve had civilization to destroy. But those stories haven’t all been the same: each era envisions the end of the world in a way that reflects its own immediate preoccupations. In the mid nineteen-eighties, nothing inspired preoccupations quite so immediate as the prospect of sudden nuclear holocaust. The mounting public anxiety brought large audiences to such major aftermath-dramatizing “television events” as The Day After in the United States and the even more harrowing Threads in the United Kingdom.
“As a youngster growing up in the nineteen-eighties in a tiny village in the heart of the Cotswolds, I can attest to the fact that no part of the country, however remote and bucolic, was impervious to the threat of the Cold War escalating into a full-blown nuclear conflict,” writes Neil Mitchell at the British Film Institute.
“Popular culture was awash with nuclear war-themed films, comic strips, songs and novels.” This torrent included the artist-writer Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel about an elderly rural couple who survive a catastrophic strike on England. Jim and Hilda’s optimism and willingness to follow government instructions prove to be no match for nuclear winter, and however inexorable their fate, they manage not to see it right up until the end comes.
In 1986, When the Wind Blows was adapted into a feature film, directed by American animator Jimmy Murakami. Among its distinctive aesthetic choices is the combination of traditional cel animation for the characters with photographed miniatures for the backgrounds, as well as the commissioning of soundtrack music from the likes of Roger Waters, David Bowie, and Genesis — proper English rockers for a proper English production. If the adaptation of When the Wind Blows is less widely known today than other nuclear-apocalypse movies, that may owe to its sheer cultural specificity. It would be difficult to pick the movie’s most English scene, but a particularly strong contender is the one in which Hilda reminisces about how “it was nice in the war, really: the shelters, the blackout, the cups of tea.”
“The couple are fruitlessly nostalgic for the Blitz spirit of the Second World War, convinced the government-issued Protect and Survive pamphlets are worth the paper they’re printed on, and blindly under the assumption that there can be a winner in a nuclear war,” writes Mitchell. “These sweet, unassuming retirees represent an ailing, rose-tinted worldview and way of life that’s woefully unprepared for the magnitude of devastation wrought by the bomb.” You can see further analysis of the film’s art and worldview in the video at the top of the post from animation-focused Youtube channel Steve Reviews. In the event, humanity survived the long showdown of the Cold War, losing none of our penchant for apocalyptic fantasy as a result. However compulsively we imagine the end of the world today, will any of our visions prove as memorable as When the Wind Blows?
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Protect and Survive: 1970s British Instructional Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack
How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...When David Bowie Starred in The Elephant Man on Broadway (1980)
Joseph Merrick, one of the most severely deformed individuals recorded in medical history, would hardly seem like the role David Bowie was born to play. The latter looked and acted as if destined for nineteen-seventies rock stardom; the former so horrified his fellow Victorians that he was exhibited under the name “The Elephant Man.” But whatever their outward differences, these Englishmen did both know fame, a condition Bowie rued alongside John Lennon in 1975. Yet in the following years he continued to expand his public profile, not least by turning to acting, and even came off as a viable movie star in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth — not that playing a fragile but magnetic visitor from another world would have been much of a stretch.
In fact, it was The Man Who Fell to Earth that convinced theater director Jack Hofsiss to offer Bowie the lead in The Elephant Man, Bernard Pomerance’s play about the life of Joseph Merrick (referred to, in the script, as John Merrick). Hofsiss suspected that Bowie “would understand Merrick’s sense of otherness and alienation,” writes Louder’s Bill DeMain; he may or may not have known that Bowie’s experience studying mime, of which he made plenty of use in his concerts, would place him well to evoke the character’s misshapen body.
The Elephant Man explicitly calls for no prosthetic makeup; beginning with David Schofield, who starred in its first productions, all the actors playing Joseph Merrick have had to embody him with their acting skills alone.
You can see how Bowie did it in clips above. “I got a call within two weeks of having to go over and start rehearsal,” his web site quotes him as saying. “So I went to the London Hospital and went to the museum there. Found the plaster casts of the bits of Merrick’s body that were interesting to the medical profession and the little church that he’d made, and his cap and his cloak.” These artifacts gave him enough sufficient sense of “the general atmosphere” of Merrick’s life and times to make the role his own by the time of his first performances in Denver and Chicago in the summer of 1980. “Advance word on Bowie’s performance was encouraging, with box office records broken at the theaters in both cities,” writes DeMain; The Elephant Man soon made it to Broadway, opening at the Booth Theatre in the fall.
It was there, in December of 1980, that Mark David Chapman saw Bowie play Merrick, just two nights before he assassinated Lennon — and he also had another ticket, in the front row, for the very next night’s show. “John and Yoko were supposed to sit front-row for that show too,” said Bowie, “so the night after John was killed there were three empty seats in the front row. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to go on. I almost didn’t make it through the performance.” Having been number two on Chapman’s hit list surely did its part to inspire Bowie’s decision to recuse himself from live performance — to stop displaying himself for a living, as the character of Joseph Merrick would have put it — for the next few years. But it was only the early eighties, and Bowie could hardly have known that his real heights of fame, for better or worse, were yet to come.
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How Nicolas Roeg (RIP) Used David Bowie, Mick Jagger & Art Garfunkel in His Mind-Bending Films
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Art Collection of David Bowie: An Introduction
Today, it hardly surprises us when a successful, wealthy, and influential rock star has a large art collection. But David Bowie, ahead of the culture even at the outset of his career, began accruing art well before success, wealth, or influence. He put out his debut album when he was twenty years old, in 1967, and didn’t hesitate to create a “rock star” lifestyle as soon as possible thereafter. As the world now knows, however, rock stardom meant something different to Bowie than it did to the average mansion-hopping, hotel room-trashing Concorde habitué. When he bought art, he did so not primarily as a financial investment, nor as a bid for high-society respectability, but as a way of constructing his personal aesthetic and intellectual reality.
Bowie kept that project going until the end, and it was only in 2016, the year he died, that the public got to see just what his art collection included. The occasion was Bowie/Collector, a three-part auction at Sotheby’s, who also produced the new video above. It examines Bowie’s collection through five of its works that were particularly important to the man himself, beginning with Head of Gerda Boehm by Frank Auerbach, about which he often said — according to his art buyer and curator Beth Greenacre — “I want to sound like that painting looks.” Then comes Portrait of a Man by Erich Heckel, whose paintings inspired the recordings of Bowie’s acclaimed “Berlin period”: Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, and even Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, which Bowie produced.
As we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, Bowie also loved furniture, none more so than the work of the Italian design collective known as Memphis. This video highlights his red Valentine typewriter, a pre-Memphis 1969 creation of the group’s co-founder Ettore Sottsass. “I typed up many of my lyrics on that,” Bowie once said. “The pure gorgeousness of it made me type.” Much later, he and Brian Eno were looking for ideas for the album that would become Outside, a journey that took them to the Gugging Institute, a Vienna psychiatric hospital that encouraged its patients to create art. He ended up purchasing several pieces by one patient in particular, a former prisoner of war named Johann Fischer, enchanted by “the sense of exploration and the lack of self-judgment” in those and other works of “outsider” art.
The video ends with a mask titled Alexandra by Beninese artist Romuald Hazoum, whom Bowie encountered on a trip to Johannesburg with his wife Iman. Like many of the artists whose work Bowie bought, Hazoumè is now quite well known, but wasn’t when Bowie first took an interest in him. Made of found objects such as what looks like a telephone handset and a vinyl record, Alexandra is one of a series of works that “play on expectations and stereotypes of African art, and are now highly sought after.” Bowieologists can hardly fail to note that the piece also shares its name with the daughter Bowie and Iman would bring into the world a few years later. That could, of course, be just a coincidence, but as Bowie’s collection suggests, his life and his art — the art he acquired as well as the art he made — were one and the same.
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Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life
How Aladdin Sane Became the Most Expensive Album Cover Ever — and David Bowie’s Defining Image
Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...David Bowie Performs “Life on Mars?” and “Ashes to Ashes” on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” (1980)
On September 5, 1980, David Bowie performed for a delighted studio audience on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. First came “Life on Mars?”, and then his newly-released song, “Ashes to Ashes.” As his website (DavidBowie.com) describes it, the musician cobbled together a one-off band for the performance, ran through several rehearsals, and then taped the show at NBC Studios in LA. All of this came days before the release of his 14th studio album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and Bowie’s triumphant debut in The Elephant Man on Broadway. Enjoy!
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Read More...Watch David Bowie’s Final Performance as Ziggy Stardust, Singing “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, on The Midnight Special (1973)
If you had to choose a living cultural figure to represent nineteen-seventies America, you could do much worse than Burt Sugarman. He made his name as a television impresario with The Midnight Special, which put on NBC’s airwaves performances by everyone from ABBA to AC/DC, REO Speedwagon to Roxy Music, and War to Weather Report. Breaking with common practice at the time, the show allowed these acts to perform live rather than lip-sync against pre-recorded tracks. Thus, even viewers who tuned in to The Midnight Special to see their favorite bands were guaranteed to hear something they’d never heard before.
They stayed up quite late to do so: The Midnight Special followed The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which meant that it aired at midnight in the Central and Mountain time zones, and 1:00 in Eastern and Pacific. In 1972, the notion of putting on a music show at that hour was unfamiliar enough that Sugarman had trouble selling it.
He ultimately had to buy the airtime himself in order to convince NBC to pick the show up, which it did soon thereafter. (For the network, the prospect of extending their programming schedule would have been sweetened by the previous year’s Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which had banned the once-lucrative airing of tobacco advertisements on television.)
Now, more than half a century after its debut, The Midnight Special has reappeared in the form of a Youtube channel, which features high-quality videos of the show’s original performances. Those uploaded so far have been organized into artist playlists dedicated to acts like the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner, and David Bowie. That last includes Bowie’s rendition of “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithfull, seen at the top of this post, as well as his version of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” above, part of his final performance as his space-alien alter ego Ziggy Stardust — itself originally shot for The 1980 Floor Show in London, which despite its name took place in 1973. The Midnight Special itself would run until 1981, which means that a great deal of music remains to be brought out of Sugarman’s archives for us to enjoy here in the twenty-twenties. You can watch Bowie’s complete 1973 performance on The Midnight Special below.
Related content:
David Bowie Became Ziggy Stardust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Original Footage
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David Bowie’s Final Gig as Ziggy Stardust Documented in 1973 Concert Film
David Bowie Talks and Sings on The Dick Cavett Show (1974)
Watch an Episode of TV-CBGB, the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Sitcom Ever Aired on Cable TV (1981)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Miley Cyrus & David Byrne Perform David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on New Year’s Eve
Last night, Miley Cyrus and David Byrne performed David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the NBC holiday special Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party. And they also treated viewers to a performance of “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. Not a bad way to send off 2022.
Before leaving 2022 behind, we’ll also flag another Miley Cyrus collaboration–a performance from this summer’s celebration of the life of Taylor Hawkins. Below, watch her take the stage with Def Leppard and perform “Photograph” at the 3:45. No doubt, she can sing.
Happy 2023.
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Read More...What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Creates Images to Match the Lyrics of Iconic Songs: David Bowie’s “Starman,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” & More
Lyricists must write concretely enough to be evocative, yet vaguely enough to allow each listener his personal interpretation. The nineteen-sixties and seventies saw an especially rich balance struck between resonant ambiguity and massive popularity — aided, as many involved parties have admitted, by the use of certain psychoactive substances. Half a century later, the visions induced by those same substances offer the closest comparison to the striking fruits of visual artificial-intelligence projects like Google’s Deep Dream a few years ago or DALL‑E today. Only natural, perhaps, that these advanced applications would sooner or later be fed psychedelic song lyrics.
The video at the top of the post presents the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1977 hit “Mr. Blue Sky” illustrated by images generated by artificial intelligence straight from its words. This came as a much-anticipated endeavor for Youtube channel SolarProphet, which has also put up similarly AI-accompanied presentations of such already goofy-image-filled comedy songs as Lemon Demon’s “The Ultimate Showdown” and Neil Cicierega’s “It’s Gonna Get Weird.”
Youtuber Daara has also created ten entries in this new genre, including Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and (the recently-featured-on-Open-Culture) Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”
Jut above appears a video for David Bowie’s “Starman” with AI-visualized lyrics, created by Youtuber Aidontknow. Created isn’t too strong a word, since DALL‑E and other applications currently available to the public provide a selection of images for each prompt, leaving it to human users to provide specifics about the aesthetic — and, in the case of these videos, to select the result that best suits each line. One delight of this particular production, apart from the boogieing children, is seeing how the AI imagines various starmen waiting in the sky, all of whom look suspiciously like early-seventies Bowie. Of all his songs of that period, surely “Life on Mars?” would be choice number one for an AI music video — but then, its imagery may well be too bizarre for current technology to handle.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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