Anthony Lee Collins

A few days ago, I use the phrase “five years” in a blog post, and, for no really solid reason, I linked those words to David Bowie’s song “Five Years.”

And, by coincidence, it is five years, today, since David Bowie’s death.

It still hits me pretty hard, more than the deaths of some artists whose work I admire more, and I have no idea why. His relative youth, his determination to continue to do his work (at a very high level) until the last possible minute, his insistence on not making his imminent death a public spectacle on social media? I really don’t know.

There’s going to be a big TV show tonight (or some sort of broadcast thing — maybe on the internet or something) of various famous people singing Bowie songs. I’m not going to search it out — I’m more likely to spend the day listening to his songs (my favorites anyway) as sung by the man himself.

(Of course, if any of the covers are really good, I’ll probably hear some buzz and be able to see them on YouTube later anyway.)

1) Still very much enjoying the Doom Patrol TV show. The moment I realized I was hooked was this one:

Not because of the scene, although it is good, but because of the song, “Lazarus,” by David Bowie. It’s from Blackstar, the album he made when he knew he was dying, and it was the last single he released during his lifetime. Blackstar is an intense, wonderful album (which I almost never listen to), and I feel very protective about it. But this scene, and this show, lives up to it.

If any of this encourages you to check out the show, the first episode is now available for free, for a limited time.

 
2) As I’ve talked about before, I’m very suspicious of absolute rules about writing (avoid passive voice, always write in third person, never have a prologue, eliminate all adverbs, etc.). This piece was inconsistent, but it had this wonderful advice:

“Always write in the third person. The third person is Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve. Every novel must be from his perspective.”

I love rules for writing, because it can be so much fun breaking them. Now I have to go find that draft I wrote once that started with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

To quote my father: There is only one rule for writing. Write well.”

 
3) In other news, Mary Norris, the Comma Queen, has clarified some things about the “royal we.”

This, in particular, amused me:

Elizabeth II once corrected herself after using “we” in reference to herself and Prince Philip, clarifying, “by that I mean the both of us.”

Georgina Comarty did a good post on how and when to kill your characters:

I made this comment:

“You do have to be careful with the ‘It drives an essential change in another character’ idea, though. There’s quite a tradition in comic books, for example, of female characters being killed (or raped or something else) mostly to make the male main characters feel and react in certain ways.”

Then I saw this in the review of the new X-men movie at rogerebert.com:

“How many more wives and daughters will be killed in these kinds of films in order to give a male lead some angst?”

Therefore all the more convincing me that I’m not going to rush out to see the picture.

 
Also on that website, there was this piece, which further clarified my thinking about The Hateful Eight:

It contains this observation:

“First, let’s analyze the individuals the filmmaker puts in the cabin that serves as the movie’s stage: there is a black man (Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Warren) and a representative of the racist Confederation (Bruce Dern’s General Smithers); there is a guy who supposedly got rich by becoming a partner in a venture (Michael Madsen’s Joe Gage) and the poor stagecoach driver who is required to work more than everyone else (James Parks’ O.B. Jackson); there’s representative of the Law (Kurt Russell’s John Ruth) and one who threatens the Order (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy); and there is, finally, the British guy who symbolizes those who colonized America (Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray) and the Mexican man representing the colonialist nature of the newly formed country (Demián Bechir’s Bob). We soon discovered, also, how General Smithers massacred a battalion of black soldiers, how Major Warren massacred a contingent of Indians, how Minnie (the owner of the cabin, who was black) hated Mexicans and how everyone seems comfortable in beating or threatening Daisy, the only woman in the group.

“It does not require much imagination, therefore, to see how the space shared by all those people from different backgrounds is a representation of America itself…”

This expands on the observation that I settled on last time: “…a parlor-room epic, an entire nation in a single room.”

 
Well, Secret Six, one of my favorite comic books, has been cancelled. Again.

Not that surprising, really. The restarted series wasn’t as good as it was the previous time around, and even at its best I often wondered who the target audience was supposed to be.

By the way, Gail Simone, the writer of Secret Six, was one of the people to identify the “women in refrigerators” syndrome I referred about above. So, it is both pleasing and appropriate that, as the article puts it, “…Simone quietly undid one of the great travesties in DC history: the murder of Sue Dibny in Identity Crisis.”

Sue was the wife of Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man. They were one of the great comic book marriages. Ralph was never a first-string hero — he had rather goofy stretching powers, but he was basically a detective. They were pretty much the comic book Nick and Nora Charles — zipping around the world solving mysteries and having a great time doing it.

Sue was never a fighter, so it was particularly inappropriate for her to be killed.

And now she’s back, which is as it should be, and the dysfunctional super-villains of the Secret Six got a really nice send-off. Like the Fast and Furious movies, and Firefly/Serenity, it was always the story of a family — a family made up of some not-very-nice people.

 
And, finally, I thought recently that I was in the mood to hear some new music from Lorde, which led me to the recent Brit awards, where she sang David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.”

You can watch the first half of the clip, with the speeches by Annie Lennox and Gary Oldman (accepting the award on Bowie’s behalf), or you can skip ahead to the performance (around nine minutes in).

The most moving part is that the musicians are Bowie’s long-time band, most of whom had played with him for many years (decades, in some cases), but I do have to report that Lorde nailed it.

A very appropriate farewell.

Way back when, touch screen devices, like the various versions of the Palm, always had a stylus. I think even the Newton, Apple’s first attempt at a touch-screen PDA, had a stylus.

But Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple, saw the stylus and he saw that it was not good, according to him. So, more recent devices, both those from Apple and others, mostly don’t have styluses (stylii?).

Recently, on an impulse, I bought a stylus for my tablet. Until then, I’d never had much luck with handwriting on the screen, or with swyping (swooshing my fingertip around the onscreen keyboard to form words).

But then, with the stylus, both suddenly became feasible — and more than feasible. So, now I had four different ways to input text into my tablet, including voice input which I’m using to write this sentence. (Which did not require any editing.)

I like having options.

 
Oh, and here’s a little more about David Bowie: ” David Bowie Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey: ‘He Altered the Course of My Life’“

Or, you can just watch them here:

I have only seen a tiny sliver of a fraction of the various reactions people have had to the death of David Bowie (which is fine), but there have been a few which have really caught my attention

 
St. Vincent gave the perfect tweet:

NO.

 
From an A.V. Club commenter:

He kept a lot of weird kids alive through a lot of shitty years.

 
From Lorde, who met Bowie when she was 16:

“I realized everything I’d ever done, or would do from then on, would be done like maybe he was watching,” she wrote. “I realized I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his. And I know I’m never going to stop learning dances, brand new dances. It’s not going to change, how we feel about him. For the rest of our lives, we’ll always be crashing in that same car. Thank you, David Bowie.”

 
From The Guardian:

“Almost from the start, Bowie’s career raised questions to which a definitive answer seemed elusive. If he was, as he loudly claimed in 1971, gay, then what was the deal with the very visible wife and the son he’d just written a touching little song about? If he was, as he dramatically announced from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, retiring – either from music, or from live performance, or from the character of Ziggy Stardust – then what was he doing back onstage in London three months later, belting out The Jean Genie in full Ziggy drag? How does anyone in the state Bowie was, by all accounts, in by 1975 – ravaged by cocaine to the point where he seemed to have genuinely gone insane; paranoid and hallucinating – make an album like Station to Station: not a messily compelling document of a mind unravelling, like the solo albums of his great idol Syd Barrett, but a work of precision and focus and exquisitely controlled power that’s arguably his best? In a world of cameraphones and social media, how could anyone as famous as Bowie disappear from public view as completely as he seemed to between 2008 and 2013: moreover, how could anyone as famous as Bowie record a comeback album in the middle of Manhattan without anyone noticing or leaking details to the media? How does anyone stage-manage their own death as dramatically as Bowie appears to have done: releasing their most acclaimed album in decades, filled with strange, enigmatic songs whose meaning suddenly became apparent when their author dies two days later?”

 
And from Slate:

“‘Under Pressure’ Is a Reminder That David Bowie Could Also Be Wonderfully, Powerfully Human“

There’s a lot of snark around these days, but, just so we don’t forget, this is how you write about great music.

I remember a few days after 9/11, I read something he wrote (he lived in New York, and was here when it happened) that was just so caring and thoughtful and appropriate. I haven’t been able to find it since, but it was one of the first things I heard that actually made sense at that time. 

Damn.

Thanks, David. My deepest condolences to Iman, Duncan, and Alexandria Zahra.

Oh, and this: