Hey Ziggy, We Did All Right; On Changing Language and Culture and Being Cool

Ziggy played guitar.

It’s one of those times in my life where I don’t know if I’m here or there, sad or happy, me or you, making it or faking it. But it doesn’t matter because I’ve got David Bowie playing on, in and around my headphones.

Dig it.

In my youth we said things like, “do your thing,” “it’s your bag” “funky” (I love the word funky — you jive ass turkey). We also said — well not me, but some people — my head’s in a weird place right now (for fuck sakes get it out of there!). We used to “trip” and “go through changes” and we were worried about someone “hassling” us or “messing” with us (the jive ass turkeys). Some of the shit people said was silly like “when is the meeting happening?” But at least no one forgot anything, they merely “spaced on it.”

I was young at some amazing times. It was when we stuck it to the man, took to the streets and grooved and got down and boogied. There was the fucking war in Vietnam and it was just so fucking obvious that that shit was messed up and we protested the hell out of the war. That was a damn good thing and was accompanied by our belief in equality and racial justice.

I’d grown up trying to be keen and boss but then it all became about being cool.

Young, man. That was a trip. Tripping man, they could be trippy. Course we tripped on acid (LSD to y’all). That was heavy. Messing with your own mind. Enlightenment. We were all about that shit. 

We got stoned, loaded, wasted, fucked up, shit faced, bombed out of our minds.

We went through some serious changes — dude.

Dude was a word that looped around in weird ways. Changing a lot and do the young people still use it, my dude? There were no fellas and very few guys. But dudes -- yes.

Females were chicks to some. Gays were queer, and queers were gay. Even the young and the hip were still processing homosexuality. That was new to us but in keeping with new and enlightened times we were accepting — eventually.

There was a time that our Black brothers and sisters were Afro Americans. I liked that term but it went away and was not my call. 

Ziggy played guitar jamming good….

Love and peace were serious themes. Do we talk about them anymore? I mean we were serious about them both. They were what it was all about. Give Peace a Chance and All You Need is Love, said the Beatles. They were the main spokespeople of our generation, hell, they pretty much formed our goddamned generation. 

Course there were others: Hendrix, Joplin, The Doors, The Who, Marvin Gaye, Bowie, Stevie Wonder, the Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Neil Motherfucking Young. Even the Beach Boys — Pet Sounds, y’all. Yeah, we had our voices and they were cool beyond words. Rhythm. We danced like crazy and the dancing was CRAZY. But you knew that.

Woodstock!!Z!!

But some shit was nasty like Charlie Manson and the poor saps he hypnotized. Murdering bastards. Totally uncool.

Vibes were super important. You wanted good ones.

The Black Panthers were at the vanguard. 

But there were serious enemies. The pigs. Hoover and the Fucking FBI. The CIA. The Military. Nixon, Reagan. Mayor Daly. So many. The uncoolest.

We were right, though, ya know. We had it together. We were right and righteous. It was our time. We changed the world. No, not so much the U.S. power structure, it looks like rich, corporate, militaristic bastards will always hold sway. But we created the culture man. We made movies, and music, and TV and literature and art and liberated teens, and sex and language and clothes and hair. Hair, man.

We did a number on that. 

People should totally thanks us.

Ziggy, out.

Ziggy Still Plays Guitar Jamming Good With Weird and Gilly

There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
There's a starman waiting in the sky
He's told us not to blow it
'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile
- From Starman by David Bowie

In junior year of college I came home one night and one of my roommates had all the lights out and was blasting David Bowie on the stereo. He swore by the lyrics saying that they were a path to enlightenment. I agreed and nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind.

I occasionally need breaks from certain kinds of music or performers who I generally love. But I never weary of either the Beatles or Bowie. Anytime, anyplace. In fact Bowie, along with Neil Young, is who I listen to when I need inspiration to write. On many previous occasions I've used lines from Bowie songs to introduce blog posts.

He's meant a lot to me.

Bowie's lyrics are poetic, bombastic, spiritual, biting, prescient, brilliant and evocative. Yes I could use many many more adjectives. There is an angelic magic to his songs and his voice. I feel emotionally uplifted by songs like Ziggy, Life on Mars, Changes, Starman and dozens more. There is a beauty and power and gentle streams of vibrant radiating colors flowing out of music and swirling forever and ever around minds and hearts and souls and wonderful tears of gladness.

He is technically deceased but that music and spirt will live on and continue to inspire and move and rage the delights of a million stars dancing on psychedelic rain drops.

Ziggy Hitchhiked on Acid And That Was Me 40 Years Ago a Mostly True Story With Lots of Gabul Fabbing

Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Wierd and Gilly,
And The Spiders from Mars.
He played it left hand, but made it too far,
Became the special man,
Then we were Ziggy's Band.
-- From Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie


In the middle of bad acid trip and hitching down highway five on a hot Spring day in 1974. The decision to drop LSD before thumbing back from Chico to Berkeley seemed fucking crazy as I watched cars that looked like metal monsters zoom past me. Especially since I was hungry, had no money, no beer and no one with me. Bowie's Ziggy Stardust was flowing up and down my brain although the lyrics were looping around themselves not making any sense and my thumb at times looked like it was the size of  a football and the heat felt like it was frying me and my shirt -- oh my fucking god my shirt -- it was a light gray with white buttons but it was pulsating -- I swear to god. I couldn't tell the difference between my sweat and my breath which was a weird thing to think about making -- as it didn't  -- any sense. No sense. Then a cop pulled over.

He was small town local cop from whatever the hell little city this was I'd been let off near by a friend who was visiting an uncle in the town. The cop got out of his car and looked about nine feet tall and a thousand pounds and had tusks and sunglasses that reflected the universe and I was more in awe than scared. I put my arm down. It felt futile to hitch with a cop approaching me.

Ziggy really sang, screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo
Like some cat from Japan, he could lick 'em by smiling
He could leave 'em to hang
Here came on so loaded man, well hung and snow white tan.

"Hey there son," he said in a voice that sounded like 12 echoes reverberating through the whole Sacto Valley. The cop was trying to seem friendly, he even smiled but it was awkward and had he just turned into a pig in front of my eyes? No way he was like a pig cop which was too weird given how some people referred to cops as pigs back then. I said something to him like "glthchplfllg." I hoped it sounded intelligible and not insulting and he was growing as he approached me then shrinking to the size of a turnip and I was freaking out but what could I do standing there with a cop approaching me and cars careening past with waves of steal flowing out of them.

"Son, you know you can't hitchhike on the highway?" The words swirled around outside my ear and zipped through my brain yet somehow registered. I hadn't mentioned that I was tripping on acid to him, had I? But he knew. I knew he knew. Why play this game with me? I was going to jail for drugs for trippin' in public. I was toast man, toast. I was also thinking how Nixon was president and that he was an asshole and this cop and Nixon were probably friends. Both pigs and assholes and pig assholes and I was just about to go to jail forever. My dad would not understand and I was never coming down from this acid trip which was now starting to mix with bad reality to be really really bad -- I was fucked.

"Sorry officer I didn't know there was a law about that. I thought you could hitch anywhere." I got that out and it sounded coherent and I couldn't believe I'd done it. I was so fucking relieved.

"Well you can't. You can be at on ramp gabul fabbing roxtlyem schlpooopm...." I had started to lose what he was saying and it was freaking me out then...Then. He searched me. Thank whatever that I wasn't holding though I'm pretty sure he was checking for weapons. As if. "Gabul fabbing...nxchpuky, there son, okay?"

Then he told me that he should bring me in as in arrest me -- implication: he's a nice guy -- but that he wasn't going to be a hard ass with me because...again I don't know, I was just trippin' off the fact that his hat was growing straight up and had reached a cloud. Why didn't he feel this happening? And had he been talking to me for like two days and was I over their on the overpass watching this conversation or was I here the whole time and holy hell I would never get acid from Ned's friend again; hell I would never ever touch the stuff again. Ever. That is if I ever came down from this trip. Hell no I wouldn't so much as have a glass of wine with dinner if I ever managed to come down off this. And why did he keeps saying "gabul fabbing nouyiexch pglifft"?

So where were the spiders while the fly tried to break our balls?
Just the beer light to guide us.
So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands?

Next thing I know I'm sitting in the backseat of the cop car which is weird because its like a cavern inside and I was looking at me from somewhere else. It was in reality (whatever that is) a really short ride though for a second I think he's taking me all the way to Berkeley. The giant pig cop drops me off at a place where I can hitchhike and wishes me a nice day and shit and I thank him a whole lot and he speeds off and I wonder did I say anything really bad like calling him a pig and guess I didn't because he was nice to me and is my hair sweating, is oil coming out of it? Where am I? Is this me hitching or am I watching me and if I am where is my body I can't find my body and am I in it? Oh I'm not so sure and there are trails coming off the passing cars....

Then one stops. It's a big van. The door on the side slides open. "Hi"  comes from these shrill girlish  voices and it's a bunch of young queers. "We're going to San Diego!" they trill. "Come on in." "Uhh no thanks I'm just going to Berkeley." The door closes and the van is gone.

That was too weird in normal circumstances. Trippin' it was utterly outrageous. If it really happened. Who could tell. But San Diego sounded normal, so I think it did.

Ziggy played for time, jiving us that we were Voodoo
The kids was just crass,
He was the naz
With God given ass
He took it all too far
But boy could he play guitar.


My arm goes back out with a thumb up and it looks like its elongated. The sun is changing colors and why did I drop acid in the morning a morning I was going to hitch 175 miles? It was a few minutes or a few hours or maybe a few months later that another car stopped. Two guys in the front each several years older than me. They say nothing as I get in and tell them I'm going to Berkeley. "Your lucky day we're going to Oakland so you're set."

I finally felt relaxed as they pulled onto the highway. Finally feeling fine except I couldn't tell if someone was sitting next to me and it was me sitting next to me. The guys up front were talking as if I wasn't there or at least as if they didn't give a rat's ass if I was hearing them. From what I could gather in my psychedelic state they had shared a woman the night before.

It was hard to sort out the circumstances and whether the woman in question was a prostitute but it was pretty clear they had enjoyed themselves had a lot of sex with her and were reliving the glory. Even stone cold sober and undrugged this discussion would have been strange to me but heavily under certain influences my mind was awhirl at what they were talking about. I was 20 and had long since lost my virginity but a threesome seemed like something from movies and not anything in real life. But it also occurred to me they were just making shit up to mess with my head. If so I could have assured them that they didn't need to do a damn thing to mess with my head given the state it was in.

Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah
When the kids had killed the man
I had to break up the band

I'd been with them for maybe 20 miles maybe 200 maybe 2000 light years when -- without checking with me if it was cool -- they pulled off to stop at a market. I'm sitting there feeling everything but the worst part is when its nothing like I'm straight all of a sudden and I know this isn't right that I'm still in the middle of the trip so feeling normal isn't at all normal and is ultimately quite terrifying and why should they have asked me if it was cool to go to a store. It was their car. Gabul fabbing. One of 'em dashed into the store and minutes later returned with a bulging shopping bag. The passenger pulled out two long necked sweating bottles of Budweiser. It was at that moment that I realized my mouth felt like the Mojave Desert. When the driver asked "you want one, man?" I do believe I was the happiest person on the planet Earth. I gladly and gratefully took a bottle and nothing has ever tasted better.

Best of all, fears of a total mid acid trip freak out had vanished. My high had mellowed instantly.

The rest of the car ride was like skimming down a water slide in slow motion with colors dancing above my head. They were talking but it all sounded like "gabul fabbing and blahs and yaks" so whatever. It was getting cooler outside as we neared the Bay Area. When we got to Berkeley I was coming down from the high and it was a soothing nestling back into Earth. Onto. Among. I don't know maybe amid or amidst. Anyway I was on Earth, even my brain was settling into a semblance of normal with very little gabul fabbing. Though still some.

They dropped me off in downtown Berkeley about a twenty minute walk from my Dad's house. I couldn't go straight there though because my mind was still spending some of its time dancing in the cosmos. I walked over to a park and bummed a smoke off some hippie and we talked for a little bit. After awhile his old lady showed up and she was really nice and I ended up telling 'em about my trip and how the acid was wearing off and I was killing time before going to my Dad's place. They thought I was a really cool dude which some people did back then when I was high. Finally they had to split and I was ready to go too.

My dad was glad to see me and gave me beer and after I showered we went out to dinner with my step mom. It had all worked out, the day I mean, and I went to sleep thinking the world was a pretty okay place if you were at all lucky.

Ziggy played guitar

Ziggy Played Space Alien Jamming Good with Humans and the Bizarre From the Earth

I've been missing The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) for 35 years. Until today. Somehow it got another brief theatrical release so I got to see it on the big screen. In a theater replete with pop corn munchers, talkers and chair kickers. Well.

Despite the film's presence on this planet for all these years I'd managed to accumulate virtually no knowledge about it. Except: David Bowie plays a bloke from another planet who walks the Earth in human form. Just a few days ago I read that he was an alcoholic alien. But of course.

So I went in fairly cold. And I write this without having poured through the plethora of reviews, critiques and comments that the film has engendered these past three and half decades. This then is my thinking on the just-viewed movie without influence from other voices.  Goodie.

Isn't it odd that we try to quantify the experience of watching a film? Give it a 7 out of 10 on IMDB. Three stars of five on Netflix. Tell a friend that a film was terrible or okay or good or a classic with the bare minimum of additional comment. A word, a number to sum up two hours of cinema. Still it can be and is done. But in the case of TMWFTE, I could no more assign it a number or phrase than I could the feeling of pulling a muscle during love making.

I really li-lo-ha-dis-?-!-@-#-hmm-ed the movie.

For one thing it jerks about like a spastic howler monkey. It is deep and profound and silly and trite and beautiful and amateurish and avant garde and hey there's a spider on the wall. I was bored at times and enthralled at others and I guess -- no, I know -- there's far worse things one can say about a movie.

The Man Who took a tumble from another planet and landed on this one is a curious piece of 1970s cinema. It has some of the classic Seventies elements such as paranoia and you can't trust THE MAN. It is particularly odd as science fiction, being so liberal with science that it thumbs its nose at it. The fiction it's got down to a science, if you'll excuse me saying so.

The Seventies, you know, were the high water mark of American cinema. There was experimentation yes but it was remarkably restrained and successful and trend-setting. Experimental movies have a tendency to be unwatchable for those who aren't addicted to narcotics. TMWFTE is forever dipping its toe into experimental waters but never really takes the plunge. And at the same time it gets mawkish trumpeting the virtues of family in other solar systems, particularly in comparison with corporatized America and its decadent TV soaked culture.

There are, for that matter, some pretty strong sentiments expressed about TV. But I'll be damned if I could make heads or tails out of them.

But.

The faller to Earth was played by David Bowie, a rock star among rock stars, a bit of casting that was inspired. I mean risky. That is to say catastrophic. He was as good a choice as any for a film that was saying ten things at once. That he did not go on to enjoy a critically acclaimed career as a thespian says everything and nothing about his performance, strange as it was, in TMWFTE. Yes he had other film roles but this was the rock star as alien. Beat that.

This is just one of the imponderables about movie that mixed in our alien's ability to see into the past seemingly for the hell of it. There was also stuff about elevators, gin, religion (I know, right?) and a horny prof.

You know I can't even tell if any of the sex or nudity was gratuitous, although I'm damn sure I could have done without seeing Rip Torn's pecker. Buck Henry was in the film too but remained fully clothed at all times. Candy Clark was quite naked. So let's see we had a cast that featured Rip, Buck and Candy. Sounds like a porno movie.

I generally don't like doing plot summaries, you can always look it up on IMDb which I link to every film I mention. A plot summary of THWFTE would seem utterly ridiculous anyway. Alien trapped on Earth, starts a corporation that builds a space ship but....

Never mind.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is kind of like Blade Runner (1982) for tripped out hippies who've been listening the Dead all day. The Man Who Fell to Earth is is like ET (1982) replacing cutsie with Bowie, Drew Barrymore with a slattern and a John Williams score with what you hear while driving to Idaho. The Man Who Fell to Earth is like Shadows (1959) if John Cassevetes was an acid head.

It's as much about mood and feeling and reaction as it is about plot. More so even. It's as if Terrance Malick and Jackson Pollack co-directed a movie.

It may be an allegory about Jesus or it may be that director Nicholas Roeg just got drunk in the editing room and had at it.

I liked the film. What, you couldn't tell?

Ziggy Stardust Helps With Homework

I'm currently "rocking out" to classic David Bowie. I'm working on a paper for my class in Cross Cultural Communication (okay so right now I'm taking a break to write this). The wife has "West Wing" on the telly. I hate that show. I think its the totally unrealistic rapid fire dialogue with everyone being so bloody smart 24/7 and speaking as if reading from a script. I don't want to hear it while I'm trying to write so I put the headphones on and have Bowie blasting in my ear. Bliss.

Part of the allure of listening to this and similar music from bygone days is that recalls those bygone days. Bowie takes me back to junior year in college. I thought Bowie was really deep then and I'd achieve enlightenment by listening to him (I thought that about a lot of music). Now I just think he sounds really good. I've long since given up trying to find enlightenment from rock music. Or any other kind of music for that matter.

Truth to tell I'm not all that keen on enlightenment anyway. It was a big deal when I was young. I guess its a big deal when everyone is young except for Young Republicans. I guess what's big to them when their young is how rich they're going to be when their old and electing people who will further the aims of the well-to-do.

If I were to seek enlightenment I think I'd just redouble my reading and watch less sports. It'd be cool to have more reading time, but I don't feel a burning desire to achieve enlightenment. Frankly I no longer know what it would mean. Just to contradict myself I am understanding more about me, different cultures and the world through the two classes I'm taking: Cross Cultural Communication and Linguistics for ESL teachers. I have the same professor for both courses and here's a shout out to him, Dr. Steven West. He makes ordinary blokes like yours truly smarter just by yakking at us. He gets us to think and talk. Hmm, so maybe education, whether formal or not, is the key to enlightenment.

I'm taking these classes towards an ESL certificate to go along with all of the other educational crap I have (two BAs and MA a teaching credential, since you asked). The certificate along with my EU citizenship could land me a job teaching English in Europe some day soon. Maybe in Paris where the family and I will be spending Christmas this year. (Stay tuned to this blog for posts from there.)

I like being a student now. It's a lot easier to learn when you've got a lot of life experience. I'm more patient now. More open to ideas. More eager. And I'm not drinking massive quantities of alcohol on weekends or any other time.

So I've babbled here a bit and have not mentioned movies. Fair enough here we go: earlier today I watched a 1934 comedy starring Carole Lombard (God, she was gorgeous) and May Robson called Lady By Choice. It was pretty bad. That's okay, Lombard more than made up for it in umpteen other films.

Okay, I've got to get back to my paper. Bowie still singing to me. The wife still watching West Wing. Life is pretty good.

Peace.