Bowie @ 60.

He lived out his dreams of youth in Berlin. "The first film that ever moved me," he once said, "was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I was around fourteen. Later, I saw M and Metropolis and films by Pabst, Murnau, and they all came from Berlin." He becomes deeply enthralled with German Expressionism, rides his bike to the Brücke Museum in Grunewald, paints: a child in the stairway, a Turkish father with his son, Iggy Pop in front of bare trees, halfway decent imitations of Müller, Kirchner and Heckel, whose woodcut portrait of Kirchner, Roquairol of 1917, is mimicked on the cover of "Heroes".

Updated, 1/9.

Near the Hansa Studio, on Köthener Strasse, corner of Reichpietschufer, there's now a sign indicating distances: "Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 1750 Meter," for example, "Stauffenberg-Gedenkstätte 1200 Meter," "Kulturforum 800 Meter." That's Bowie's system of coordinates in Berlin, the radical modernity of the 20s, but also the downfall, the war, the dead, the blown apart and carefully reconstructed legacy. In David Hemmings's 1978 Berlin film Just a Gigolo, Bowie plays a Prussian officer back from the First World War, vulnerable to Nazis and women. A drama of decadence and a grand failure, "all my 32 Elvis Presley films in one go," Bowie's said himself, but even so: Marlene Dietrich's last performance on film. And Bowie at her side. He had pulled off his masterpiece. "A New Career in Town" is the most beautiful instrumental track on Low. It's the theme song of his years in Berlin.

Related: That Little Round-Headed Boy dissects "Changes"; the site.

Update, 1/9: Owen Hatherley: "My occasional contention about British pop - that only in the late 70s did it catch up with the formal extremism and occlusion of human warmth that the country's architects achieved in the late 50s - is supported by how seemingly everyone with something interesting to say in pop from around 1977-83 inhabited an East Berlin of the mind, barricading themselves into a synthesized plattenbau."

Posted by cphillips at January 8, 2007 9:23 AM