Clumsy grace
Nov. 11th, 2004 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
It's 1977 and David Bowie looks like a ventriloquist's dummy in cravat and white flares. With sculpted hair and thick pierrot make-up, he wanders alone in a white room, making occasional desultory stabs at his guitar, mumbling some of the words to a song called 'Be My Wife', a rather strange cabaret piano stomp about being lonely and wanting to marry. Someone seems to have put Bowie in this room to sing, but he just can't summon the showbiz conviction. He just can't go through the motions. Each gesture falters halfway, each mimed lyric ends in an illusion-breaking wince. It could be an instruction video entitled 'What Not To Do In Showbiz'. Never be low, never be half-hearted, never do anything by half-measures! Keep your sunny side up! Walk it like you talk it! Turn the conviction up to 11!
But it's precisely the half-heartedness, the clumsiness which make the 'Be My Wife' video so winning. Incompleteness of gesture and uncertainty of tone are still rare enough in pop videos that we sit up and pay attention when we see them. There's also something tremendously appealing about seeing a very good looking person seeming lost and lonely. I suppose it's as kitsch as a sad clown in some ways. And commedia dell'arte isn't far away: Bowie seems to be in the role of Pedrolino, the pierrot, making a mime sketch of a rock star making a rock video. The physical theatre is deft even in its clumsiness; the awkwardness is performed gracefully. There's something of Buster Keaton here (Keaton gets a little homage in a much later Bowie video, 'Miracle Goodnight').
One of my favourite moments in 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' is when Bowie is seen in a church with Mary-Lou. He's trying to sing a hymn, but can't quite get the notes right. He winces and grimaces, looking terribly pained and nerdy and British and embarrassed. We want to take care of that character, just as Mary-Lou does. We understand his difficulty with our rituals.
Bowie revisits awkward grace in some other videos: 'Fashion' abandons the winning tentativeness of 'Be My Wife' and plays the deliberate clumsiness in more obnoxious mode; the Bowie character makes a silly rat-like gesture at one point, stops, sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and continues. It's a great little piece of actor's business, a sort of Brechtian alienation effect. Very few rock stars have the degree of theatrical sophistication it takes to risk ambiguity like that. And very few rock stars are attractive enough to risk making 'ugly' gestures or giving 'mixed messages'. The video for 'Heroes' is also fantastic; here the deliberately awkward pose seems to refer to Christ on the cross, and also anticipates Bowie's portrayal of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. I suppose the sleeves of 'Lodger' and 'Heroes' also contain the same deliberate awkward angularity and 'brokenness', with a wink in the direction of German Expressionism and Egon Schiele.
Someone else who knows the grace of clumsiness is my friend Toog. His 2002 album 'Easy Toog For Beginners' ends with a song called 'Clumsy', a succession of embarrassing situations and apologies which ends with a series of explosions. Oops, he did it again.
If 'beauty is just the first sight of terror we're still just able to bear', as Rilke said, perhaps 'clumsy grace' is the place where beauty most fully realises itself, right on the edge of ugliness. Perhaps it's beauty's avant garde. Or is clumsy grace the 'revenge of the nerd?' Is it the visual equivalent of squandering the family fortune? I remember reading a self-appointed style expert somewhere saying that good-looking hipsters who dress in deliberately awkward thrift store clothes want to 'discourage the weak' from pursuing them. But does 'clumsy grace' make successful people seem more or less accessible to the millions of people out there with low self-esteem? Does it lower the bar or raise it? And I wonder if there's even some attempt at 'clumsy grace' in Bush's malapropisms and hesitations, his dismal performance during the TV debates? Although in his case it's hard to detect any 'grace' whatsoever, and he disqualifies himself by turning the conviction up to 11.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 09:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 09:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 10:20 am (UTC)Feel free to contact me at hugowilcken at hotmail.com
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 11:12 am (UTC)i remember reading somewhere (maybe here, duh) that bush supporters find his constant mistakes charming and cute. that pic of him holding the book upside down is quite cute indeed and makes me want to hug him against all rationality
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 03:43 pm (UTC)that sounds great
i dont really know that much about bushs image, since i dont have tv and all i see are random pics here and there, but everytime i get that impression...
adopt your own pet bush now!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 08:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 11:56 pm (UTC)Most days Bowie would stay in bed until after noon, and only then would his new day begin with a light breakfast of coffee, juice and cigarettes, and a brisk walk to the Hansa studio, where he would pick up where he left off the previous 'day' -- which might have been earlier that morning, just a few hours before. Bowie would frequently work through the night, well into the following morning -- but was equally capable of deciding after just two hours that he had done enough for the day, or of taking the day off, and then, dressed like a painter and decorator, with Iggy Pop in similar garb, disappearing with Coco, riding around Berlin on bicycles, or with their bicycles tucked away in the boot of their car.
All this was totally incomprehensible to Angie, who would still turn up unexpectedly, shattering his sense of calm, partly because she now saw it as her mission to get rid of Coco, upon whom Bowie depended far more than his wife. 'I was in turmoil, not being able to speak to him face to face, and I couldn't understand why he had gone to Berlin,' she says, revealing how little she knew about his day-to-day life. 'He had never asked me if I wanted to live there... It had never once occurred to David to stay at home with Zowie and me. His boredom threshold was too intense to live with. He swung from genius to the erratic without warning... David was commuting between Berlin and Montreux as the mood took him.'
In November 1976, little more than a month after he moved in, Angie visited Bowie at his apartment, describing this in Free Spirit as 'our one last chance of a possible reconciliation'. Relations between them were calm enough on the first day, but on the second Bowie developed sharp pains in his chest. Angie asked the British Army clinic to send and ambulance, thinking he might have had a heart attack. Bowie was kept in the clinic for 24 hours, given an electro-cardiogram and sent home. So far as the doctors could tell, there was nothing much the matter with him. 'I thought it was a manifestation of depression,' she says in Free Spirit. By the time she was interviewed for Kerry Juby's radio series six years later, her divorce long behind her, she admitted his collapse was diagnosed as 'an anxiety attack' and blamed this on the fact that Coco was unwilling to return to the apartment while she was there. 'It was very exciting in the middle of the night calling up the hospital and all that. He was alright. He was fine in the morning, once he could get away from all the things that were pecking at his brain -- poor thing.'
Meanwhile, Angie tried to burn Coco's room, gathering her clothes in a heap and splashing them with vodka which she thought would burn like petrol. When it did not, she slashed them, threw them out into the street, together with Coco's bed -- and caught the next flight out of Berlin.
From George Tremlett's David Bowie: Living on the Brink (http://tinyurl.com/5dtkn)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 12:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 01:33 pm (UTC)is seeing tom baker dressed pierrot.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 03:16 pm (UTC)http://sorryeverybody.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 04:55 pm (UTC)Might have been better to make the people all naked, though. It would've got more hits and perhaps converted some bush-lovers.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-12 05:03 am (UTC)you just want to see various strangers NAKED on the internet!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 03:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 04:27 pm (UTC)It depends on what the person is trying to achieve. We have a history of presidents in the USA who vacillate between patronizing self-effacement and steely confidence. Reagan was the master of self-depreciating jokes that never underminded his "grandfatherly patrician" act. Clinton took it one step further: the sensitive, soul-searching, New Man. John Kerry or Al Gore in 2000 couldn't do this as effectively as George W. Bush, which has factored into his success. I've asked many Republicans over the years why they vehemently support George W. Bush, and the most common answer has been, "He seems like a genuine guy". Of course, that answer always horrifies me, but it is telling.
A man of letters
Date: 2004-11-11 08:35 pm (UTC)The other night i watched "Man Of letters" and I noticed this same sort of clumsy grace in the video segments. Especially during trust me i'm a doctor. It seems put-on, but it also seems you were very aware of this and communicated it thought action. Brecht's alienation effect combined with half-hearted grace? It think it's a process of having a mask handed to you, having it in your hands and whether by nature or artifice allowing it to slip and at times removing it but above all letting the audience know it.
Re: A man of letters
Date: 2004-11-11 10:12 pm (UTC)Re: A man of letters
Date: 2004-11-11 11:03 pm (UTC)The reason I may have looked clumsy in the 'Trust Me I'm A Doctor' video is that the naked girl on the hospital trolley, the one I'm prodding with my stethoscope, was actually tremendously uncomfortable to be there in such a state of undress. It squeezed a real identity politics anxiety into the song (remember this was the early 90s, the height of 'political correctness'). But the song is really about unreliable narration and ageing rather than sexism per se.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 10:12 pm (UTC)clumsy grace
Date: 2004-11-12 03:49 am (UTC)Lucky Pierrot
Date: 2004-11-12 06:50 am (UTC)Is it post-modern or is it just bad taste?