"A truly inspiring voice …" —PopMatters
"The most powerful and provocative philosopher now writing …" —Cornel West
＊大卫·鲍伊（David Bowie）是英国代表性的音乐家，其音乐影响现今众多西方乐坛歌手，与披头士(The Beatles)丶皇後乐队并列为英国二十世纪最重要的摇滚明星！
作者Simon Critchley 是在1970年代，当大卫·鲍伊出现在英国当时最受欢迎的音乐节目Top of the Pops时第一次认识这位歌手的。鲍伊表演了”Starman”，完全迷幻了Critchley——这个表演多麽性感丶知性丶奇怪。Critchley的母亲两天後去买了这首歌的单曲；她不但喜欢这首歌，也喜欢鲍伊鲜橘色的头发（她曾经是发型设计师）。就这样，12岁的Critchley开始了长达他一生的鲍伊着迷。
在这本简介又吸引人的书中，作者带你游览世界上最伟大的歌星之一的一首首歌曲。作者Critchley的哲学作品受到各界的好评，他在书中也加入他的哲学理念，以及鲍伊本身的成长故事，他如何从英国南部的单调一路走到现在的巨星地位。透过他的歌曲，我们可以看到鲍伊在作品中如何用哲学的角度探讨真实性以及身份的意义。
关於作者：
Simon Critchley是纽约New School for Social Research的哲学教授。他写过的书包括：On Humour, The Book of Dead Philosophers丶How to Stop Living and Start Worrying丶Impossible Objects丶The Mattering of Matter 丶The Faith of the Faithless, 以及Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine 。他的实验性新书Memory Theatre即将出版。他是纽约时报的哲学专栏The Stone的系列主持人，自己也时常撰稿。
书摘：
The Art’s Filthy Lesson
After Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, he said, “Before I was shot, I suspected that instead of living I’m just watching TV. Since being shot, I’m certain of it.” Bowie’s acute ten-word commentary on Warhol’s statement, in the eponymous song from Hunky Dory in 1971, is deadly accurate: “Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels. Bowie repeatedly mobilizes this Warholian aesthetic.
The inability to distinguish Andy Warhol from the silver screen morphs into Bowie’s continual sense of himself being stuck inside his own movie. Such is the conceit of “Life on Mars?,” which begins with the “girl with the mousy hair,” who is “hooked to the silver screen.” But in the final verse, the movie’s screenwriter is revealed as Bowie himself or his persona, although we can’t tell them apart at all:
“But the film is a saddening bore
‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again.”
The conflation of life with a movie conspires with the trope of repetition to evoke a melancholic sense of being both bored and trapped. One becomes an actor in one’s own movie. This is my sense of Bowie’s much-misunderstood lines in “Quicksand”:
“I’m living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality.”
Bowie displays an acute awareness of Himmler’s understanding of National Socialism as politicalartifice, as an artistic and especially architectural construction, as well as a cinematic spectacle. Hitler, in the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, was ein Film aus Deutschland, a film from Germany. As Bowie put it, Hitler was the first pop star. But being stuck inside a movie evokes not elation but depression and a Major Tom–like inaction:
“I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore.”
In “Five Years,” after having received the news that the Earth will soon die, Bowie sings, “And it was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor.” Similarly, in one of my all-time favorite Bowie songs, “The Secret Life of Arabia” (outrageously and ferociously covered by the late, great Billy Mackenzie with the British Electric Foundation), Bowie sings,
“You must see the movie
The sand in my eyes
I walk though a desert song
When the heroine dies.”
The world is a film set, and the movie that’s being shot might well be called Melancholia. One of Bowie’s best and bleakest songs, “Candidate,” begins with a statement of explicit pretense, “We’ll pretend we’re walking home,” and is followed by the line, “My set is amazing, it even smells like a street.”
Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion. Bowie’s world is like a dystopian version of The Truman Show, the sick place of the world that is forcefully expressed in the ruined, violent cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs” and more subtly in the desolate soundscapes of “Warszawa” and “Neuköln.” To borrow Iggy Pop’s idiom from Lust for Life (itself borrowed from Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might well be its implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger who rides through the city’s ripped backside, under a bright and hollow sky.
- 鲍伊
- Bowie
- 作者：Simon Critchley
- 出版社代理人：OR Books （美国）
- 出版时间：2014年6月
- 页数：100页
- 已售版权：
- 版权联系人：tina@peonyliteraryagency.com
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