Er det noen HFS'ere som har funnet veien til London, nærmere bestemt Voctoria & Albert Museum og utstillingen "David Bowie Is" ?
Har lest så mye skryt om den at jeg klør etter en tur til London.
Paul Morley har hatt en par dager der som "live biograf"...eller noe;
“The solid book we wrote cannot be found just yet”
One of the more intriguing exhibits during the Bowie Weekender at the V&A over the last couple of days, was the installation of Paul Morley at a desk with a laptop, a pile of reference books, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies and a screen behind him with a live display of the mammoth task he has undertaken.
09.55 a.m.
Notes for a book about David Bowie to be written by me in a weekend in the Grand Entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum as a kind of temporary writer in residence at the David Bowie Is exhibition – perhaps, more exactly, notes for a ‘book’ to be written about ‘David Bowie’ in a weekend at the V and A. Perhaps the weekend should itself be ‘the weekend.’ I do feel as though I am also inside inverted commas, although not sure how to write that down. Maybe later, a photograph of me working at this desk, with some inverted commas elegantly draped around me.
First of all, I must explain more fully where I am and what I can see around me, to fully capture the moment, the reality of how for whatever reason I have ended up in the position of being expected as one version of an expert on the ways of Bowie to complete a book in a weekend. This situation is perhaps the equivalent of me going to work, from 10 to 6, and this is my wonderfully ridiculous office, filled with glossy marble, monumental columns and the larger than life light of the Gods. I am sat to the side of the Grand Entrance, and opposite me, hanging down many metres from the vaulted cathedral-like ceiling is Dale Chihuly’s alien-dramatic Rotunda Chandelier. Made in Seattle in 2001 from tangled, convoluted blown glass and steel, it could easily be a representation of something David Bowie would have worn at some point in 1972 to represent his subversive show off mind. On the other side of the ticket and information desk is the ghostly Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, 1350 to 1600, known to V and A staff as the Med and Ren. I had been warned not to enter these galleries before I began work, as I would be arrested. I took this warning seriously.
To my left, hanging below a majestic golden gothic altar, three large, tinted photographs of David Bowie overlook the ticket and information area. He seems to be licking his fingers with something that is not quite relish, not quite pure, deviant flirtation, looking both out of place and very much at home in the spectacular entrance, mocking the very idea he should be hanging in such a place, making it very clear this is exactly where he belongs.
11.14 a.m.
Adrian Deakes, a Performance Education Manager from the learning department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, passes my desk and tells me that he has been doing a study project with pupils from the secondary school in Bromley where David Bowie went as a youngster in the early 1960s. It was Bromley Technical High School when Bowie attended as David Robert Jones; it is now Ravens Wood School, although Adrian says Bowie would still recognise it as the school he went to, the same halls and corridors, and, no doubt, similar smells and sounds. “The same view over the playing fields to the large white houses beyond, the house opposite the school entrance, proudly stating ‘built in 1875.’ The 2012/13 teenagers were very taken when they visited the exhibition and heard the young Bowie, someone previously not that familiar to them, a distant rumour at best, how when he talked he sounded just like they did. He has travelled so far away from that time and place, through so many other times and places, sometimes to the other side of space, experiencing the illuminating, and deforming, white heat of fame, but he was still there, with them, for them, close by, as relevant as anything in their lives, ultimately, more so. They have made a film about their experience getting to know about someone they were delighted to discover actually went to their school. They have called the film ‘David Bowie is one of us.’
“David Bowie is a person who did exactly what HE wanted to do,” said one of the students, Jack Gordon, “Now look where he is . . . “