I love the Jason sketch. He's a favorite in the ANTSS household. Did you make Jason's Rocketship appearance? We may have passed like ships in the, um, comic shop, passing one another, like ships often do.

Nazi sympathizer? WHAT?

Man, I'm rethinking my pre-order of Powr Mastrs Vol. 2 right now.

Yeah,for a while in the '70s he thought it was cool to run around dressed as a Nazi. I don't know about "sympathizer" so much as "admirer of fashion sense."

The Dash Shaw one looks like Cate Blanchett.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden links to good journalism about bigotry and other things in '70s British rock. It looks like Bowie was engaged in galactically stupid efforts at being shocking, while others were being genuinely bigoted.

The Jason sketch delights me no end. The Little Prince needs more love. I wonder where my copy is...

Here are some actual quotes of Bowie's from the early Thin White Duke era about this subject. He was a bit of an idiot on the topic, but it was a lot more complicated than "Nazi Sympathizer" as you can see:

"I'd adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible."

"Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And, boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself."

"People aren't very bright, you know. They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler, because he would march into a room to speak and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock-'n'-roll concert. The kids would get very excited--girls got hot and sweaty and guys wished it was them up there. That, for me, is the rock-'n'-roll experience."

Much of this was from an interview in Rolling Stone with Cameron Crowe that ended with the following exchange:

"CROWE: Do you believe and stand by everything you've said?
BOWIE: Everything but the inflammatory remarks."

The main precipitating incident that sparked his rep as a Nazi wannabe was a photo of him in mid-wave while greeting a crowd at Victoria Station that supposedly made him look like he was giving a Nazi salute, but as best I can tell that photo is actually apocryphal and it was mostly ginned up by the ever-reliable British music press.

The bios I've read made it sound like he was pretty disheartened by how upset these kinds of statements made people, so after he cleaned up a bit (the Thin White Duke phase followed hot on the heels by a disastrous bout of anorexia, cocaine addiction, and occult lessons from Kenneth Anger in Los Angeles) he backpedaled away from these statements and was making songs explicitly critical of the fascist outlook as soon as Iggy's "China Girl" in '77(?), and quite explicitly in "It's No Game" from Scary Monsters.

"...he would march into a room to speak and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock-'n'-roll concert. The kids would get very excited--girls got hot and sweaty and guys wished it was them up there."

Thank God we don't pick our leaders like that these days...

You're right, Jim, Barack Obama is very much like Hitler.

Fuck you. Seriously. I wasn't comparing him to Hitler and you know it. I was making a joke about how cults of personality form. Again: Fuck you.

LOL GODWIN

Now I've got crossovers going in my head. "You are in a maze of twisty little voting booths, all alike. It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by Hitler. Somewhere in the distance, 'Raindogs' is playing."

While I'm at it: Jim, kickass defense of privacy over at Lawrence Lessig's blog. Sean, you might find the thread about Judge Kozinski interesting too.

Huh. I never knew all of that, but it still sounds not much more bad then Siouxsie wearing the swastika. When skinheads starting showing up at her shows she started wearing T-Shirts with the Israeli flag on them.

Looks like Bowie was just screwing around and trying to get under people's skins, and I'm willing to forgive him for that. C.F. apparently isn't.

I've always thought it a bit hypocritical that we heap scorn on folks like Bowie and Siouxsie for baiting the audience with far-right imagery, but we give artists who adopt far-left, but no less violent and extreme, imagery a free pass. Nobody gave Joe Strummer shit for wearing Red Brigade symbols, for example.

Honestly, I don't care if Bowie apologizes for his youthful political stupidities. What I want is an apology for his encouraging Scarlett Johansson by doing back-up vocals for her album.

I apologize for accusing Jim of violating Godwin's Law. He was making a general point about cults of personality, not being a tool. I'm sorry man.

Sorry, that was me.

Dan, good point about Siouxie. Sid too, though he was probably too dumb to think about it much beyond "hey, this is shocking!" I also get the sense that Nazi iconography has a different psychological effect in Britain than it does here, one as rooted in the Blitz as in the Holocaust. Cf. the "don't mention the War" Fawlty Towers episode. I can't speak with any certainty about that though.

And I apologize for overreacting. My underlying point stands, though: That really does look like Blanchett.

Sean, sorry I missed you at the show! I was actually keeping an eye out for you all weekend in the hopes of catching up.

The sketches look great! LOVE the Jason sketch.