David bowie

If you count among the Anglophiles emerging from Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale misty-eyed, you might be interested to hear that London's cultural calendar is having a maximalist moment. Harking back to eras of pomp, excess and pouffy outfits, two exhibitions showcase icons who made extravagance an art form: David Bowie and Marie Antoinette. In South Kensington, the Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting Marie Antoinette Style, dedicated to the most fashionable teen queen in history. Across town, the David Bowie Centre in the brand-new V&A East Storehouse space (bigger than 30 basketball courts) reveals over 90,000 items from the singer’s archive.

When the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar first met David Bowie, he didn’t think a man could turn a whiter shade of pale. The singer looked emaciated; his complexion teetered on translucency, and weighing only 95 pounds, the only signs of life were a pulse and a mop of orange hair. It was the mid-Seventies, and Bowie was touring America deep in the throes of addiction — the “darkest years” of his life — surviving on a paltry diet of red peppers, cigarettes, milk and cocaine. Yet somehow, through the haze of these drug-fueled years, Bowie underwent a chameleonic reinvention of self and sound — and finally broke America. Bowie had cast a sheen of suspicion over America as an aspiring artist, even admitting to hating it initially.

There is a strange rule in contemporary Hollywood that filmmakers ignore at their peril: biopics might be a popular dramatic form for directors, but they tend to be of little interest to audiences. In the past year alone, the likes of Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro and Golda have all under-performed commercially, demonstrating that however accomplished the filmmaker (including the Oscar-nominated likes of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Bradley Cooper), it is nearly always a non-starter to attempt to persuade viewers to spend their $15 on watching someone’s life story for two hours at the cinema. Oppenheimer proved to be a rare exception — though that’s far from the only way in which Christopher Nolan is exceptional.

I have lost hope in contemporary pop music. As someone who used to keep his finger on the pulse of new releases, and who went to gigs as often as I could, the absence of innovation has been one of the great disappointments of the past couple of decades. There really isn’t anything much out there, bar, of course, the sainted Taylor Swift. But ever since David Bowie’s death eight years ago (eight years...), the music industry seems to have been in a desperate downward spiral, where flair, originality and chutzpah are sorely missed. Surely it’s time that a new act could supply such things, complete with flute solos, songs sung in Albanian and an orchestral overture? No, I am not making it up.

If, in the spring of 1923, you’d somehow found yourself in the tumbleweed junction of Spokane, Washington, you might have shaken the dust from your feet at the strange and magnificent Davenport Hotel. Still standing today, this vast folly, soaring up in the middle of town like a gaudily iced wedding cake, was evidently greeted by cries of disbelief upon its opening in 1914. In the rural west of the early twentieth century, the Davenport was the last word in luxury and refinement. The lobby was a work of art in itself, with lamps in alabaster shells mounted on a twisted bronze column in each corner, and an Italian marble fountain set under a chandelier that tilted at a slightly drunken angle, like one of those ghostly photographs taken onboard the wreck of the Titanic.

In a world gripped by Nineties nostalgia, everything old is new again. Bootcut jeans and birkenstocks are back; old Nickelodeon classic cartoons are being rebooted for a new generation. But the strangest renaissance in this throwback moment is a moral panic: Marilyn Manson, the creepy goth-rocker with a startling appearance and a voice like synthesized nails on a chalkboard, is once again up for cancellation. The difference is in who's doing the canceling — and that this time, it seems it might actually stick.  Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Manson was the guy whose albums you hid in your underwear drawer lest your parents find them and freak out. It wasn't just the music itself but the man who made it, and what he seemed to represent.