A journey of sight and sound

Sometimes I try to write these posts to be a bit like an episode of The A Team with some deep meaning in the post and sometimes I don’t.  This one is more like an episode of Baywatch, a lot of jiggling and bouncing with no real depth but you cannot pull yourself away. Or a car crash, yeah, this one is more like a car crash.

This week we lost two megastars. Ziggy Stardust and Hans Gruber are no longer here, however they remain with us through sights and sounds that are a part of our culture (well at my age they are). I was never a huge Bowie fan but that being said it wasn’t that I disliked his music, it just wasn’t my favorite. In all honesty as much as I love music and have a Bowie song in my head right now as I pontificate about this (bloody annoying I may add as I AM TRYING TO WRITE HERE MAJOR BLOODY TOM) I am definitely more a visual person. Yes I know Bowie was also a star of the silver screen but he wasn’t in the best Christmas movie ever. Bowie was a star when MTV actually showed music videos and people bought vinyl, and before you music nerds open your yap; I know that Bowie pretty much invented the outrageous stage show aspect of the rock'n'roll experience and the extremely visual rock sub-genre known as Glam.  I also am aware that he did this in the early 70's long before anyone knew what a music video was much less a TV station broadcasting them 24/7. 

My favorite Bowie story is from when I was a wee lad of about 13. Bowie was touring New Zealand and a certain enterprising (probably lying sack of shit) person at school said he had a connection to Bowie and offered to get his signature for a few of us, for of course a suitable fee. I think I got suckered into buying a signed piece of paper for $5 but not sure, a good friend spent some cash getting what was supposedly a signed album (hi Greg) as he was a bigger fan with a bigger allowance but we have no idea (now) if the signatures were real. I guess we will never know. David Bowie was an exceptional artist, but I see his art with my ears (yes that makes sense).

As for Mr Hans Gruber (or Snape in those movies I haven’t watched), he was an artist of sight and sound. I have no idea if he could even hold a tune but the boy could act. Seth Meyers twitted or tweetered or whatever you call it ‘There are few things I enjoyed more than watching Alan Rickman sigh in a movie’ and that is absolutely spot on. He made Hans Gruber, well, Hans Gruber. As the Sheriff of Nottingham he was spectacular. He didn’t make people bad, as he said; he made characters that you are not supposed to like. The way he spoke his name is as iconic as anything he did. He didn’t do a whole lot of movies but the ones he was in he owned. He would have been a fantastic Bond villain and I am slightly upset that we will not see him in The Expendables 6.

So what does this have to do with Poets Day? Nothing - did you not read the first paragraph? However Hans has left us with some words of wisdom that resonate with me. Here are a couple of them:

‘Talent is an accident of genes – and a responsibility’ – obviously talking about me

‘I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure’

And probably my favorite

‘I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously’ – that one is perfect

So maybe there is something in this weeks post that means something, crap. There wasn’t really meant to be. It was meant to be a bit of a memorium for a couple of amazing talents. Unfortunately, as The English Major pointed out, there will be more of the icons of our youth passing because we are getting older. So thank you Hans, thank you Ziggy, thank you to all that have let us escape for a second into the journeys you take us on. Artists are vital for society and the good ones really make a difference. The bad ones, well you can always change the station or the channel :)

So work hard, play hard and earn your inspiration – or borrow it from an Artist :)

Happy Poets Day