the hypercube of happydalek

Yessss. So nice once in a while to do absolutely f*ck all one day and not feel guilty about it. That was today. It started when I got woke up by my ringing phone. It was my Summer Plans calling, haha. I've got myself a position on an archaeology crew for the summer/fall with PennDot! It's the internship thingie I alluded to previously (and the same sort of gig I missed by a narrow margin last spring), it will be full time for the season, and pay on a scale nicely above minimum wage.

After taking that call, I then decided that in celebration, I wasn't gonna do a damn thing that I didn't feel like doing today. Funny enough, I ended up doing a load of laundry in my bathtub because I didn't want to walk to the 'mat and pay with quarters. But I didn't even put real pants on, or go outside. I stayed in and mined youtube for documentaries and songs.

For today's Bowie appreciation, allow me to share his 21 minute short film for the single, "Blue Jean," off his 1984 album Tonight.  It's called "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" and is quite simply delightful.  Bowie plays two characters in the film, 1) the protagonist, a sweet dorky guy named Vic who is on quest to impress a girl he's just met, and 2) Screamin' Lord Byron, a drug-addled rock star that Vic's lady friend wants to meet.  Bowie is a quite talented actor, and plays both parts brilliantly.  His portrayal of Byron is especially awesome, in that Bowie is obviously mocking his own excesses from his Thin White Duke days.  I had no idea Bowie had ever done anything like this, and I just love it:

YOU GUYS.  DAVID BOWIE IS A FABULOUS ROCK STAR, GUYS.  Did you know that?  I KNOW IT NOW, TOO.

Also, this is a very lovely planet you guys have here.  Earth, you call it?  Not the prettiest-sounding name, but ok.  I'm really enjoying the variety of cultures you humans have here.  So much to see and experience!

Okay, then.  DAVID BOWIE.  I knew who David Bowie was from a fairly young age.  Of course I did.  I don't remember when I learned of him for the first time, probably one of those cultural osmosis things, but I know my idea of him was fairly well cemented by Labyrinth, which I saw for the first time in middle school.  So for me, David Bowie was basically Jareth.  Tight pants and mostly unpalatable (to me, at the time) tunes from the late 80's and early 90's.  I knew the song "Starman" and that he'd been some kind of glam rocker in the 70's, then played an alien in "The Man Who Fell To Earth" and then released more music in the early 2000's and had kind of ridiculous 90's boy band hair, and did that hilarious cameo in "Zoolander."  So yeah, I knew of David Bowie, and if anyone had asked, I would have said sure, I was a Bowie fan.  I liked Labyrinth, and that song of his they used in "A Knight's Tale."  So of course I was a Bowie fan. 

It turns out, however (and this should be painfully obvious to ANYBODY), that I had NO IDEA what David Bowie was all about.  So, a coworker who found out that I loved sci-fi stuff, was appalled to find out that I'd never actually heard all of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars," so he burned me a copy of it.  This happened at least six months ago.  Two months ago, I got a car with a CD player in it, and last month, I finally popped in the Ziggy Stardust CD and listened to it.  I probably wouldn't have if it hadn't been Bowie's 65th birthday in January and a friend of mine posted a 1972 performance video of Bowie performing "Space Oddity."  I did a little google-fu and found her the original 1969 music video of "Space Oddity," and it has changed my life.  I wasn't crazy about "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" at first, but over the past two weeks, it has wormed its way into my mind in that borderline dangerously obsessive way that such things occasionally do.  I developed a craving for more things Bowie.  I started at his Wikipedia page (don't judge), and that's when I discovered that he had an absolutely incredible career between the Ziggy I'd just met, and the "Zoolander" cameo I knew from just a couple years ago.  I started looking up songs and performances and interviews and suddenly I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS GUY'S MUSICAL GENIUS, GUYS.  He is everything I've always wanted in a musical artist but never thought could possibly exist in one person's career.

I want to share my newfound Bowie appreciation with you all, but it's 2 AM here, and I simply cannot do it in a single post, so consider this the first of probably several Bowie Appreciation Posts to follow.  For now, let me simply direct you to the video that started it all, both for David Bowie's incredible career and my new obsession over his incredible career, 1969's Space Oddity:

It's a rainy day, there are no good job ads in the paper (again), so I am bored.  This means that I've been sitting in front of my computer for hours, drinking entirely too much caffeine.  My accomplishment for today has so far been to discover the works of Daft Punk, including their quite good "silent" anime movie (on google video) Interstella 5555, which is based on their album "Discovery." 

( wherein I display my significant musical ignorance )

I actually had planned to do a review post for Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 book, Childhood's End, but apparently that's going to have to wait for another time when I'm less fixated on French techno anime and their terrifying robot puppet spawn.  So...yeah.  I hope you all found at least some of this interesting/enjoyable so I can feel a little bit less like I'm wasting my time.  ;-)