David Bowie as Nikola Tesla is a crafty piece of casting. He his elusive character sheds a vast, unifying, enigmatic glow across the film's tortuous narrative.
Tesla was a unique and divisive figure in the early 1900s.
All his AC current, though he was variously considered genius, quack, charlatan and showman. A century later, well, let's just say that David Bowie has certainly illuminated a few more corners.
Nearing 60 and playing himself, he looks very much the aged oracle in Wim Wenders' short film, The World's Greatest Record for sagging jowls.
His hair is a mousy brown coif where crazy styles and colours have come and gone. A black skivvy abdicates his longstanding fashion-icon credentials.
Bowie's voice is weathered too, as he makes comments between a Sao Paulo to Tokyo, Chicago to Brisbane.
"Hearing these people talk about their jobs working in record stores is really exhilarating," he croaks wistfully, like a man watching his youth flash before him in the half-light.
before. Listening for new things is a real driving force for me, listening," he smiles, like a fading, affectionate uncle.
Bowie's strange new gig is in the employ of Nokia, whose record shops like these are closing daily. Wenders' film, screened to an invited audience in Melbourne in December, is hence a profoundly ironic advertisement for Nokia's new online initiative, musicrecommenders.com.
But from Ziggy Stardust to Nikola Tesla, David Bowie has always been a profoundly ironic kind of guy.
He's the appointed "godfather" of Music Recommenders, a site dedicated to expert, independent advice on new music, continually updated by 40 hip music stores around the world - and Bowie. The sounds and technologies for 51 years.
Well, that long in his dreams. David Robert Jones was nine when his father brought home his first stack of 45s by the Moonglows, Fats Domino, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Platters, Fats Domino and Little Richard. He told biographer David Buckley he had to play them on a 78 rpm gramophone, spinning them with his finger particular gift to rock'n'roll come the 1970s.
Though often derided influences that commercial forces might never have entertained.
Pop's Stooges who, without Bowie's recommendations, might never have reached the ears of Sonic Youth, the Pixies, REM, Nirvana and countless other architects of '80s and '90s youth culture. Less with Young Americans circa '75, a chart-topping entree for the Bee Gees' earth-shattering disco crossover.
By that time, he was hearing new music again. The relatively few Berlin were among the first kids to hear NEU!, Kraftwerk and other robotic drones, textures and techniques that would infuse the new romantic, hip-hop and dance music waves of the future.
He was the seer, the recommender, the restless agent provocateur, and nobody's dancing monkey.
Under that kind of pressure, it's easy to see why he killed Monsters album at the end of the '70s, and why, exhausted and underpaid for his efforts, he opted to pander to the lucrative mainstream with Let's Dance onwards.
Ten years ago, Bowie shrewdly threw his own 50th birthday party at Madison Square Garden.
Any interim suggestion that he'd tug a forelock.
There are no such celebrations planned this weekend. Bowie has 2004.
We were told it was only a pinched nerve, but a week later he world tour.
He has posted just seven brief blogs since, and apparently stays close to home on Manhattan's lower east side, where he's rarely photographed at the opening of a play or opera with his wife, Iman, or glimpsed at a gig by Arcade Fire, Deerhoof or TV on the Radio. "I've never seen (13-piece avant-garde ensemble) Icebreaker," he volunteered to Q magazine in November, "but would drive a mile or With convincing portrayals of the elephant man, Pontius Pilate, Andy Warhol and Nikola Tesla behind him, he's about to appear as two cartoon characters, first in Luc Besson's Arthur et les Minimoys, then alongside Spongebob Squarepants.
In May he'll curate New York's inaugural High Line Festival, for with the industry" at the end of a fallow '05. Instead, "I've been them a place in the festival," he says.
And so here he is, a moist-eyed seer in a darkened room, telling Wim Wenders about his undying love for Chicago blues, the fabulous experimental momentum of hip-hop, a wonderful samba version of Ziggy Stardust he heard recently.
Ultimately though, there's also the rather deflating disclaimer that, as far as the rest of his "to-listen-to pile" goes, "there's Cripes, not you too, David? Oh well, many happy returns.
1964: Secures first national TV exposure at 17, capitalise on Apollo moon landing.
Played throughout BBC telecast, "My sexual life is normal," he insisted. story: "I'm gay; always have been." Stardust, a self-fulfilling prophecy of success.
1975: Least comfortable moments in pop, No.1: 1977: Least comfortable moments in pop, No.2: exclusively on the internet.
Telling Lies clocks 46,000 website, includes unprecedented degree of personal input from Bowie. Bowie Bonds issued, backed by future revenues of his first 25 albums. $US55 million windfall ranks him high on Forbes' richest Bowie.
Extensive album reissue campaign scheduled.
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