R.I.P. Mr. Lawrence- the Death of a Rock 'N Roll Polymath

18th century food philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Severin, famously enjoined epicures, "When gourmandise becomes gluttony, voracity or debauchery, it loses its name and attributes, falling into the hands of the moralist who will treat it by advice, or the medical man who will treat it by remedy."


David Bowie, rock music's grand iman of glitz mixed with an indefinable serene austerity, passed January 10th, 2016. He canalized the excesses of his epoch with a disciplined talent for reinvention and motion. Bowie WAS excess, debauchery, elegance, and art. Unapologetic and forever on display, Bowie's cultural iconography traipsed comingled worlds in entertainment. He was a Levi-Strauss Structuralist for the 70s and 80s, tapping into the archetypes of identity and being, all within a world gone mad...




Few singers reached as many fans for as long, as intensely, or as fungibly as David Bowie did in all his incarnations, God rest his soul. An inveterate persona, he drove music, style, theatre, and consciousness in wonderful, absurd and contemplative directions. But what fewer appreciate are his considerable contributions to film.

Labyrinth, 1988

Bowie's additions to the cultural lexicon are numerous and cult-like. He cut a figure unlike Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, or Roger Daltry. Whereas their additions to film (Performance, Man with the Golden Arm, Lisztomania) were temporary salutes to the tawdry phantasms of gangster life in Britain, drug addiction, and lusty-biopic-about-bête-noir-composers-from-Hungary, respectively, one had the feeling that these were ego pieces, handpicked for cultural fetish value.


Not so with Bowie.

playing Warhol in Basquiat, 1996

His roles were notations in post-modernism. Bowie's character studies involved isolated eclectics, at odds with the worlds around them, played with an elan and direction that he channels. They were often quasi-mystical figures (Labryinth, Warhol, Twin Peaks franchise) imbued with preternatural abilities that clarified the protagonist of the film's mission. There was an onscreen evolution going on in his films, but the ones evolving were the other characters. Bowie was the enigma-cum-Rosetta Stone.

Fire Walk With Me, 1992


Bowie's characters were "wild cards," and added weight, complexity, and depth to the movie's narratives. IMDb lists Bowie with 40 acting roles, FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR SOUNTRACK credits, and 3 production credits. He acted in jarring, often unnerving films that poked into the social and universal conscience: The Man Who Fell to Earth,  Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Hunger, Absolute Beginners, The Last Temptation of Christ, Zoolander...




What Bowie brought was a familiar face that we just didn't know much about. If we acted like we understood Bowie's instincts, well, we were just kidding ourselves. We can smell talent when we see it, and we get synesthesia when we have a prolonged dose of David Bowie.




He was a talent that comes by once, maybe twice in a generation. He was a helluva singer, a curious actor, and a throwback to a time when the most talented minds tackled the problems of their era. Think Georg Lichtenburg in the 1700s or William James in the 19th and 20th century in America. These were men who did it all, and did it well. Bowie was one of them.