by Hazel Anna Rogerts for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog
Bowie went to Berlin to escape. That is how it seems. We weren’t there, most of us, so we don’t know. There is talk about cocaine, about notoriety, about noise. But we weren’t there, so we don’t know.
It makes a good story, doesn’t it? It always does. All the fame in the world, but a lonely man still. A man divided between art and celebrity. A city divided into two disparate halves.
On August 13th, 1961, they built the wall. To the West, the democracy of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. To the East, the Communism of the Soviet Union. Disparate states.
It’s 1977, and the people of Berlin are divided. There are people here, in the West, who have family over in the East, and that is sad. No amount of democracy can placate the grief of a married man whose wife did not make it over the Wall. There are soldiers here and there, and everywhere. On the one side, the American ones, the British ones, and the French ones. On the other side, the Russian ones. However ‘free’ a place might seem, it seems less free when uniforms of war are on the prowl.
There is a cyclist roaming the streets, and it is David Bowie. He has been here for two years. Today, in his diary, he has written ‘I have really now got the will. I will be and I will work’ (Rory MacLean, ‘BERLIN’, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2015), pp. 332).
It is true. He works a lot while he’s here. He spends a fair amount of time alone. He lives in a small first-floor apartment in Schoneberg. His assistant, Coco Schwab, gets him paint and canvases, and she spends time with him. He also spends time with lots of other people. Iggy Pop, who moved with him to the city. Romy Haag, performer and nightclub owner. Later, Brian Eno.
He makes music, then he leaves, and he leaves all of his characters and props behind too. He is stripped naked by Berlin. It is good. He is happy about it. Berlin was a happy time for Bowie. He left part of his heart there.
Even knowing all this. Knowing all the people he knew, the friends he made, the drunken nights he spent in clubs and at cabarets, there is a desire in me, and perhaps in you, to consider this a deeply lonely time for David Bowie. It is an addictive image. The image of him sat on a hotel bed in a dressing gown. Or the one of him smoking by a big window. Or the one of him stood in the street in a long leather jacket, frowning at the camera. But then isn’t the loneliest place in the world a crowd? A crowd of frantic fans, howling and screaming as he ducks away and out of sight, away from the stage, half dead from the cocaine, and off to take some more.
We love it. We love the torture of it. The cracks in the artist’s smile. The diary pages we read when they have left us. The videos and photos and testimonies that we pore over. We love how sad they were. We love how tortured they were.
I say not that David Bowie was a sad man. Rather the contrary seems to be the case. By all accounts, Bowie was a gentle, affable, well-mannered man who had a besotted wife – Iman – and loving friends and family. Things were difficult, perhaps; in Berlin, the consensus seems to be that Bowie drank and partied frequently, but he was simultaneously coming back to himself – David Jones, musician, dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, cycling unknown through the city streets.
But this is not just about David Bowie. This is about them all. Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Gauguin. Vincent Van Gogh. Sylvia Plath. Kurt Cobain. Ian Curtis. Amy Winehouse. We love the cabaret of it all, don’t we? The tortured artist. We pore over the music and the art that they left behind, and we mourn what they could have done if they’d lasted just a little longer.
Ah. The Artist. I hesitate to call myself an artist, because I am in agreement with actress Beatrice Dalle, who says that she is not an artist, she just reads words off of a page. She said that in a radio interview that I listened to a few months ago.
But if we are to call me an artist, and to call many of my friends artists (many are actors, like me), then we are all prey to the addictive solitude that characterises the artist’s existence. It’s more poetic that way. It’s more poetic to frame our loneliness, our lack of consistent work, the hours and days spent waiting after an audition, the nights of alcohol and drugs and melancholy, the days spent learning scripts alone in our rooms, the evenings spent playing music that no-one will ever hear, the counting of notes in a wallet – it’s more poetic to frame it all as essential to becoming a great artist. After all, this life is all secrets and closed doors, so why would we not also close our doors and keep our secrets and our superstitions to ourselves? We all think we’re special, we all think we are the chosen ones, we all secretly think we are better than the others because we wouldn’t be able to bear it if we didn’t think that way. And, after all, what is interesting about an artist who is not in suffering, in some way or another? The artists we go back to, the ones we fascinate over, are the tormented ones, the strange ones, the ones who seemed separate from the rest. That isn’t to say they were. We just like the fantasy more than the truth.
I am not especially sad. I smile a lot of the time. I am often quite superstitious. Last time I had an audition, and I felt that it did not go well, I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ (the Marlena Shaw version) and danced around my flat. I got a callback a few days later. After that callback, I got an email that made me think I hadn’t gotten the role, so I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ in the shower, and cried a little. The following morning, I learned that I had landed the role. I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’, and danced in my living room with my sister. So now, this song seems to represent something magical. Now, I feel a compulsion to play this song when I next have an audition.
Regardless, it is a wonderful song. You should have a listen to it, right now. Marlena Shaw’s version has an upbeat, disco energy that is not so present in Diana Ross’ original version. I like Ross’ version too. It was the first version I heard. It was on a CD called ‘Sunday Morning’ that came free with The Sunday Times magazine. I think it was called that. I found a copy in a charity shop a couple years ago. We had the same CD at home while I was growing up, and we played it often. A compilation CD. I like listening to CDs. I also liked watching DVDs when I lived at home, and I liked listening to cassette tapes and watching VHS cassettes too. It feels sometimes like we don’t own anything anymore, like everything is up in the cloud, the digital cloud, and it could disappear in an instant. There’s something about these tortured artists that feels like nostalgia. Maybe that’s also why we like the image of it so much. David Bowie wasn’t posting Instagram photos of himself when he was in Berlin. He met people in the street, in nightclubs, and if he called them, he called them through a telephone whose curled wire was attached to a box on his bedside table. The time he spent in his apartment, he spent reading, or painting, or reflecting, or writing. He could live a private, secret life, should he wish to. All he had to do was lock his door, for there was no mobile phone on his nightstand that would buzz and buzz and buzz until he picked it up.
It is difficult to be so secretive, so unknown, nowadays. It is difficult to be mysterious. It is counterintuitive to try to be so, too. If I had not made my short films and put them on YouTube, if I had not posted my films and creations onto my Instagram, then I probably wouldn’t have landed my first role in a paid short film. Thus, I would probably not have managed to have signed with my current agent. Thus, I would not have had that audition I mentioned earlier, and I would not have listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ in the shower. It’s all so different, now. In some ways, I long to be Bowie in Berlin, hat tilted over my eyes, checked shirt billowing a little in the breeze, cycling anonymous over Potsdamer Platz with my pockets empty save for some coins for coffee, knowing in my heart that I have really now got the will, that I will be and I will work, that I am an artist with something to give, something essential, something beautiful.
Maybe it is not so different. In the city, where many of us live, it is not so difficult to be secretive, to be unknown. It is not so difficult to be mysterious. All one must do is walk a mile or two away from home, to where the crowds are – for no-one who is no-one is anyone in a crowd. And when the crowds walk by, perhaps I will know in my heart that I have really now got the will, that I will be and I will work – that I am an artist.
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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Bowie’s Alter Ego, The New Art, and Grimes, Music and the Future of Art.
You can also find Carl Kruse on Buzzfeed and on one of the older Carl Kruse Blogs.
