A magician would do anything to be better than his competition. That's why Robert Angier from London goes to America and asks the magical scientist Nikola Tesla to help him perform the trick of appearing in two places at the same time. Tesla does that. But instead of teleportation, instantly transferring the body to another place - the machine constructed by Tesla does something else: it creates a duplicate of every body that finds itself inside it.
This is an episode from the American-British psychological thriller "The Prestige", filmed in 2006.
Nikola Tesla is played in the film by David Robert Jones, better known to the world as music star David Bowie. The thriller was a commercial success. And it wasn't the only film Bowie starred in.
A singer who acts, an actor who sings
In the 1981s, I saw a musician who acts well many times in cinemas. The German film based on the cult book "Kristiana F. - we the kids from Zoo station" was shot in XNUMX. West Berlin heroin addicts listened to Bowie. And Bowie, who lived in Berlin for several years, plays himself in the film - the soundtrack is also his. To this day, the film has a cult status.
Two years later, in the Japanese director Nagiso Oshima's film "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence", Bowie plays the Japanese prisoner Jack, who confronts the warden of the camp and at one point kisses him. Flirting with the homoerotic image was part of Bowie's media strategy.
By the way, he played Pontius Pilate in "The Last Temptation of Christ", a film directed by Martin Scorsese.
His music reached me in the XNUMXs, when all Sarajevo cafes were tirelessly playing "Let's Dance" from loud speakers, a thing that became a world hit. It wasn't my music, but it made me tap my foot and sway my pelvis. Compared to the festivity of many of the hits, the tune was racy pop-rock. Later, I liked his duets with Tina Turner (Tonight) or Mick Jagger (Dancing in the Street) the most. And it's only today that I realize what David Bowie really meant to English-American pop and rock.
75th birthday
If he were alive, David Bowie would have celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday this Saturday (January 8, 2022).
The family he was born into was from an average British milieu in south London. The area named Brinkston was part of today's Lambeth borough, where the London Eye - the largest panoramic carousel in the world - was located on the eve of the new millennium. There is also the Royal National Theater as well as one of the main railway stations - Waterloo.
His father worked for a humanitarian organization, and his mother as a waitress. As an adult, Bowie stated that he did not have a happy childhood because he had a certain type of British parents who were cold and rarely hugged other people.
Little David only lived in his native area for the first six years. The parents got better jobs and the family moved to Bromley, a prosperous middle-class neighborhood. Over a hundred parks on the territory of the municipality speak for themselves.
Already at the age of nine, his father gave him the Little Richard single "Tuti Fruti". Afterwards he declared that he heard God then. The innovator Little Richard planted in the boy's soul what would later germinate - the need to revolutionize popular music, changing himself.
The painstaking birth of a star
The boy's role model was his older half-brother on his mother's side, Teri. He took him to Soho, introduced him to beatnik literature and jazz. Bowie once got into a fight with the now mocking George Underwood over a girlfriend. It was 1962. He suffered a serious injury to his left eye. This led to a permanent dilation of the pupil in that eye, which then appeared darker. No one will be able to forget that look. But the friendship between the two artists did not end. George became a painter and later even designed one of Bowie's album covers.
He was already singing in a band at the age of fifteen. He starts playing the saxophone. One recording of that band from 1963, on which Bowie participated in the composition, was accidentally found on a forgotten tape and sold at a London auction for £40.000. Soon, David Bowie records his first single, but success is lacking. He is a member of various bands, and for some time he works with the extremely popular mime and choreographer Lindi Kemp. There, Bowie will learn eccentric stage performance.
He also started thinking about a stage name. In his opinion, David Jones is a name that was already "busy" on the music scene, because the percussionist and singer Dave Jones worked in the popular band "The Monkees" at the time. David therefore decided on the name Tom Jones, but he was not lucky there either - just a few weeks later, a singer whose real name was Tom Jones ruled the charts. That's right, the second name was "taken". After a brief flirtation with the name David Cassidy, he finally decided on the surname Bowie: after James Bowie, an American hero of the Texas Revolution, a speculator and an alcoholic known for stabbing opponents to death.
Space curiosity
The American landing on the moon in July 1969 helped the young Bowie, as red-headed and odd as an alien, produce his first successful single "Space Oddity". Bowie's inspiration was Stanley Kubrick's film A Space Odyssey, which premiered in 1968. Major Tom, Bowie's alter ego, was musically launched into outer space. Ten years later, Bowie would say that it was a different kind of launch and journey - the song describes the trip of a drug addict.
Although his subsequent singles were not successful, Bowie musically relies on hard rock, and ideologically on science fiction, mysticism and Buddhism. He is increasingly influenced by the American scene from Dylan to Andy Warhol.
Worldwide success brought the album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars" (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). Ziggy is an androgynous, bisexual figure, a rock star. The album is about his rise and then his failure.
Likes or dislikes men?
With this staged figure, David Bowie tickled the erotic imagination of the youth, provoking the humiliation of his fans' parents. It was recorded that Bowie briefly interrupted a successful tour to attend an Elvis Presley concert in New York.
Although he lived with his wife Angela and had a son with her, Bowie declared himself gay in an interview. However, he became an icon of glam rock, the direction that first marked the end of the hippie image on stage. Marc Bolan, Gary Glitter, and bands like Slade, T-Rex, Roxy Music, and Queen, or later Kiss and Lou Reed in America, had their own glamorous, often gender-ambivalent staging. David Bowie was probably the most daring and creative in that company.
In the summer of 1973, at one concert, Bowie simply canceled his Ziggy Stardust concept and disbanded the band. He moves to New York, where he returns to his youthful inclinations towards blues and soul. He calls his music ironically "plastic soul".
The Berlin years
From 1976 to 1978, Bowie lived in West Berlin. In the Bavarian quarter, he is weaning himself off hard drugs. Then he rents a huge apartment in the trendy Schöneberg district. Later, he will mark Berlin as the "heroin capital of the world". Guys like Mick Jagger occasionally stay in his apartment, and Iggy Pop is his neighbor. Evil Berlin tongues claimed that Bowie, his wife Angie and Mick Jagger were in a love "three", but none of the actors ever confirmed this. To this day, there is speculation as to whether the Rolling Stones' hit "Angie" is dedicated to that lady.
In Berlin, Bouvi meets the German rock elite - he is influenced by German bands such as Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk or Can. The three albums that were created in that period were marked by Bowie as an experiment. But even in the experimental phase he has several hits. It is probably the biggest of them "Heroes” from the album of the same name, which many fans claim is the best thing Bowie ever recorded.
After Berlin, Bowie moved to Switzerland, where he would live for 14 years. In 1980, he divorced his wife Angie, his son stayed with him. When he marries Iman Abdulmajid, a Somali woman who has become an American top model, he moves to New York. She will have one daughter with Iman.
A spider called Bowie
There it changes its sound again. They call him the "chameleon of pop", to which he retorts that a chameleon adapts to the environment, while he usually does the complete opposite. And indeed, when he decided to change the image of an avant-garde artist in the image of an international star in the early eighties, he had no problems declaring that he was no longer gay.
The American magazine Rolling Stone ranked Bowie 39th among the 100 greatest musicians and songwriters and 23rd among the 100 greatest singers of all time. The American business magazine Forbes (Forbes) estimates that when Bowie died on January 10, 2016 in New York, he left behind an estate worth 230 million dollars. He had time to think about the fair distribution of the inheritance - he had been suffering from liver cancer for 18 months without the information leaving his family circle in New York's Soho. He left his fortune to his wife, children, an assistant and a governess.
A newly discovered species of spider is named after him, Spintharus davidbowiei, an asteroid, in Berlin they marked the place where he lived, the board was stolen once, so they had to make a new one. In January 2022, the German Post issued a stamp in his honor.
His musical influence is still great, his artistic play with our perceptual biases is intelligent, and his overall appearance, inventiveness, willingness to think in an unconventional way, can justify the nickname - the Tesla of pop-rock.
Maybe that's why it's logical that this artist exists in Serbian language in at least three language forms - as Bovi, Boui and Bouvi. I'm not getting into what this or that authorized language interpreter recommends - they agree to disagree on that. As I said, I encountered his music in the early eighties. Then for all of us he was just - David Bowie.
Bonus video:
