In looking for Jobriath on Spotify (heās there) I also came across Ann Magnusonās āThe Jobriath Medley,ā which seems interesting. Iām listening now.
Jobriath the first gay music star? What was Liberace? Chopped liver?
OPENLY gay. Liberace denied it and sued anyone who didnāt back down.
Good catch, though. I clarified to make clear that he wasnāt literally the first gay man in showbusiness ever. Lol!
I grew up in the 70ās and I knew who Klaus Nomi was then and Iām from the deep South and this is the first Iāve heard of Jobriath.
Or Tchaikovsky for that matterā¦
I vaguely recall hearing of him. I was too heavily into Bowie, Kiss, Rush and the Dolls at the time (16-17) and missed him. Iām hoping someoneās got a torrent going because I lurv that '70ās glam proto-punk
I appreciated this paragraph of yours:
That said, thereās something too easy about a conceptual keystone often placed in the arch of Jobriathās rise and fall: the idea that Jobriathās ostentatious homosexuality was not just a failed gambit against the timesā homophobia, but that he was somehow betrayed by the inauthenticity of pop cultureās contemporaneous pretensions and transgressions. That he was too glam for glam.
I could go on further but Iād just start ranting about my problems with the movie Velvet Goldmine again, and who needs that?
Or you could, you know, actually pay for music.
I almost brought up Velvet Goldmine in the post, but I figured it would just confuse people.
Ooh! I want to know your critique (or, actually, any intelligent critique of that film that you would care to point me at). Iāve really enjoyed it a few times, but was only passingly aware of the internal logic of the scene it was satirizing.
Man I love that painting of Marilyn Monroe in Eddie Izzardās characterās office, that is really a painting of Eddie in drag as Marilyn.
Itās too late at night for me to figure out any way to respond to this that doesnāt make me sound like a hipster douchebag.
aha
ha
hahahahahahah
HAHAHAHAHA pay for music woo good shit man
Well (and stipulating that, yes, I am a big and chronic Bowie fan), itās not enough of a roman a clef to not be about Bowie, and the arc of the Brian Slade/Maxwell Demon characterāsimply disappearing until he reappears as the Letās Dance Bowieāignores what is to me the artistic zenith of Bowieās career, the Berlin albums, and since the film further suggests that Maxwell Demon is Sladeās ātrueā persona, Haynesā premise goes beyond wrong to simply broken. IMESHO.
I was being a bit cautious above because, in the past, people who knew that I was into Bowie wanted to talk about the movie and thought that I would love it as much as they did, and to say that I disappointed them would be putting it mildly. And the thing is, Haynes is a great director and the actors are good and I totally get that itās really about Christian Baleās character and how he experienced the era and how it affected him, and if Haynes had made just a couple tweaks to Slade, I probably could have accepted it. But, as it is, it reminds me of something that Bowie said in a Rolling Stone interview (ironically, done around the time that the āpresentā frame of the film is set), when the interviewer asked Bowie about the numerous unauthorized biographies of him floating around, and Bowieās take was that they all tended to be based on interviews with the same group of peopleāthe ex-wife, the ex-groupie, etc.āthat had a fun time with him back in the seventies, and were more than a little bitter when the party was over. That, to me, is the film in a nutshell.
whew. Better out than in, eh?
Ok, Fair enough. I have a real admiration and affection for Bowie and Bowieās work from the 70s and 80s, but the film was much bigger than Slade/Bowie to meā¦ so thatās probably why I got more of a kick out of it. I really like the ābitter when the party was overā metaphor. Thanks for entertaining my query.
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