Klaus nomi funeral install#

It’s an odd, striking look that conceals much of Bowie’s angular, dance-y appeal. During the performance he had to be animated (literally carried across stage) by Nomi and Arias. Looking at the footage, Bowie’s immobile Tristan Tzara-inspired Dada suit looks a lot like Gort’s humanoid robot frame. Klaatu and Gort had arrived in the capitol Nomi and Bowie were on TV. And with it, the world must have stood still, too. “It was like New York was standing still,” Joey Arias later wrote of the career-making performance. That never happened, but the show did allow Nomi to finalize an image of himself as the black and white extraterrestrial from Planet Europa-here and not here at all.

Klaus nomi funeral install#

This moment was supposed to be the one in which Nomi’s star would climb over the larger U.S., not just New York’s downtown scene, and install itself next to Bowie’s.

(It consistently overpowers David Bowie.) It’s a stunning performance. Generously, Bowie offered Nomi and his friend Joey Arias a spot on the SNL stage, where Nomi’s deep space warble induced vertigo in its siren-like call.

When David Bowie played “The Man Who Sold the World” for his 1979 Saturday Night Live performance and sang “I thought you died a long, long time ago,” Klaus Nomi sang back, “Oh no, not me.” It was the first and only time they shared a stage, having met only a few weeks before. I can’t stand that they gone, but they are. I see him like I sometimes see Frank O’Hara or Arthur Russell, two other queer artists whose original incandescence flamed out prematurely. My sense of his belonging to this city structures, and encourages, the way I live in it. I don’t want to pay false homage with flimsy mystical feeling-I don’t “see” him in others, I actually see him out of the corner of my eye, just over the edge of a crowd, in the back the train. Like Bowie’s loner on the stair, I’ve passed him more than once at a party, on the block, at an opening, at a concert. He died long before I arrived in New York, but his absence feels like that of a friend’s. Klaus Nomi died alone, thirty years ago this month, in the breathless, late summer days of “gay cancer” at Sloan Kettering on the Upper West Side.

The question is: to whom did you lose it? But isn’t one history of economics a history of swindles? Of course, you lost control. The man who bought the world remains, in the end, the invisible Third Man who purchased the control the singer and the seller claim they never lost-or sold. Three decades after his death, the talented and influential performer Klaus Nomi remains enigmatic, haunting Visual AIDS guest writer, Andrew Durbin.ĭoesn’t David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” which supposes a “world” not so crippled with the overhead cost of its atrocities that it has a going price, suggest a deeper economic mystery of the buyer than the seller? What would ownership of the last thing (the whole thing) not for sale entail? David Bowie doesn’t seem to know: the speaker of his song ends up confusing himself for the seller (not the buyer) and loses track of the exchange entirely: “I thought you died alone,” he wonders aloud at the opening of the song “I must have died alone,” he concludes later.