Shaar Murray, Bowen, Stencil, and the Bowie of "Low"

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

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[...]
[DB:] "Low" was a reaction to having gone through that peculiar... that
dull greenie-grey limelight of America and roll and its repercussions;
pulling myself out of it and getting to Europe and saying For God's sake
re-evaluate why you wanted to get into this in the first place? Did you
really do it just to clown around in LA? Retire. What you need is to look
at yourself a bit more accurately. Find some people you don't understand
and a place you don't want to be and just put yourself into it. Force
yourself to buy your own groceries.

And that's exactly what I do. I have an apartment on top of an auto shop
in an area of the town which is quite heavily populated by Turks, and I
did that for a bit.

[CSM:] Two relevant quotes: the novelist Elizabeth Bowen once wrote:
"Anywhere, at any time, with anyone, one may be seized by the suspicion
of being alien - ease is therefore to be found in a place which nominally
is foreign: this shifts the weight" which is as good a thumbnail sketch
of the obsessive traveller as any I've encountered.

And the there's a character of Herbert Stencil in Thomas Pynchon's V:
"Herbert Stencil, like small children at a certain age and Henry Adams in
the Education, as well as certain [sb. assorted] autocrats since time out
of mind, always referred to himself in the third person.

This 'Helped Stencil' [sb. helped "Stencil"] appear as only a personality
[sb. only one] among a repertoire of identities. "Forcible disolvation
[sb. dislocation] of personality" was what he called the general technique?
Which [sb. technique, which] is not exactly the same as "seeing the other
person's point of view"; for it involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil
wouldn't be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag,
living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars or cafes of a non-Stencilian
character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his
place: that is, in the third person.

[DB:] Ooh, aren't you well read! mocks Bowie, but his eyes show a flash of
recognition. I understands that completely! I completely sympathise with
the man! I know exactly why he did that, I think! So that initial period
in Berlin produced "Low", which is isn't it great to be on your own, let's
just pull down the blinds and fuck 'em all. The first side of "Low" was
all about me: "Always Crashing In The Same Car" and all that self-pitying
crap, but side two was more an observation in musical terms: my reaction
to seeing the East bloc, how West Berlin survive in the midst of it, which
was something I couldn't express in words. Rather it required textures,
and of all the people that I've heard write textures, Brian (Eno)'s always
appealed to me the most.
[...]
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http://members.ol.com.au/rgriffin/GoldenYears/771112NME.html

My bet is that the numerous slips appeared only when the original
NME text was digitalized. (The text seems also to have come out
in the CMS collection _Shots from the Hip_.)

>From the splendid "Low", Bowie and his band did "Be My Wife" when
my lady and I saw them at a Finnish rock festival week ago. Digging
it all. As a huge fan from 11 (summer '72) to 20 ("Scary Monsters"),
and occasional fan after 1980, I may be biased, but found the Reality
tour gig awesome; DB charismatic, relaxed, funny; the band (M Garson,
E Slick, G A Dorsey, S Campbell, C Russel, G Leonard) both skilled,
edgy and porous; and last but not least, the setlist starred with
sufficiently many old darlings, and the stuff from "Heathen" and
"Reality" OK too (27 pieces altogether).


Heikki