“There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie (/ˈboʊ.i/),
was an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record
producer, arranger, painter, and actor. Bowie was a figure in popular
music for over four decades, and was known as an innovator, particularly
for his work in the 1970s. His androgynous appearance was an iconic element of his image, principally in the 1970s and 1980s.
Born and raised in South London,
Bowie developed an early interest in music although his attempts to
succeed as a pop star during much of the 1960s were frustrated. Bowie's
first hit song, "Space Oddity", reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969. After a three-year period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley,
"challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created
perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture".[4]
The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved to be one facet of a
career marked by reinvention, musical innovation and visual
presentation.
In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer characterised as "plastic soul".
The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated
many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both
his record label and his American audiences by recording the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno. Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), and Lodger
(1979)—the so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums—all reached the UK top
five and received lasting critical praise. After uneven commercial
success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single
"Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), and "Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance,
which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s,
Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. He stopped touring after his 2003–04 Reality Tour, and last performed live at a charity event in 2006. Bowie released the studio album Blackstar on 8 January 2016, his 69th birthday, just two days before his death from liver cancer.
Bowie also had a successful, but sporadic film career. His acting roles include the eponymous character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos.
David Buckley said of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in
popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any
comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million records worldwide.
In the UK, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications,
eleven Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven
Gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. wikipedia
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The Wind Rises is directed by Hayao Miyazaki, whose previous films include My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. It was the first film that Miyazaki solely directed since Ponyo in 2008.
Miyazaki began to conceive a story to illustrate the life of Jiro Horikoshi in 2008. He published the story as a manga series in the monthly magazine Model Graphix from April 2009 to January 2010, with the title borrowed from Tatsuo Hori’s novel The Wind Has Risen (風立ちぬ?).
The story in the manga follows the historical account of Horikoshi's
aircraft development up to 1935 (the year of the Mitsubishi A5M maiden
flight),[ and intertwines with fictional encounters with Caproni and Naoko Satomi (里見菜穂子?). The scenes with Naoko in the manga were adopted from the novel The Wind Has Risen, in which Tatsuo Hori wrote about his life experience with his fiancée, Ayako Yano (矢野綾子?), before she died from tuberculosis. The name Naoko Satomi was borrowed from the female protagonist of another novel by Tatsuo Hori, Naoko (菜穂子?). The character of Castorp is named after the protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain.
After the release of Ponyo, Miyazaki wanted his next film to be a sequel, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea II, but producer Toshio Suzuki proposed to adopt the manga The Wind Has Risen
instead. At first Miyazaki rejected the proposal because he created the
manga as a hobby and considered its subjects not suitable for children,
the traditional audience of the feature animations from Studio Ghibli.
However Miyazaki changed his objection after a staff member suggested
that "children should be allowed to be exposed to subjects they are not
familiar with".
Miyazaki was inspired to make the film after reading this quote from
Horikoshi: "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful". wikipedia imdb
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