• Note [RX/ATU:4.CSW-068SW.2022_01_21.18:05] from Sharon to supervision log B reads: Met ATU client residents at Lemon Tree today. Discussed plans. Informed Dr Raafat about not sure they’re listening to us. Advised Open College media course interest in ideas such as idents but not taken seriously mentioning sending TV signals into space & back through time !!! Steve Wilson confirmed happy to tidy up presentation of feature-length film proposal from Recovery Syllabus’ creative writing course {see attached].

Our presentation

to denizens of the Kemptown capital bar

Our Proposal for a Movie in Three Parts

In The New York Times (on November 1st, 2013) Guy Trebay described Lou Reed’s "Walk on the Wild Side" as the ballad of those many misfits and oddballs who had been hanging around Andy Warhol's studio - the Factory - in the early 1970s. It had been - wrote Trebay - a New York so long forgotten as to seem imaginary.

___

When K was a boy she had been on trial for her life. She had identified with the character in a Franz Kafka novel, persecuted but without knowing why: But then, in 1971, she had changed her name (to Kay José) and moved to New York City. And that’s where, one night, after hanging around with some extremely exotic trangender barflies, and with an invite to Andy Warhol's studio, she had met and dated David Bowie (who, at the time, had been a relatively unknown artist). But their brief encounter hadn’t been ‘a serious date’. It seems Warhol had just invented a new party game that would come to be known as Speed Dating.

Now, regarding David Bowie, Kay José often says, “I guess you’ll say I was infatuated. It was an unrequited love.”

And now, this evening [on this date] we’re in Kemptown, in Brighton on this southern coast of England, in this capital bar amongst [mixed and transgender] communities to whom Kay will say, “I’m looking for an actress to play me in this movie about my life.”

FIRST ACT : HAVING NO CONFIDENCE

For their audition, each actor will be asked to mime to Lily Moore’s I Will Never Be whilst holding on to and addressing a favourite photograph of David Bowie.

You’ll see, in that video, Lily Moore is wearing a red top. And she’s singing about putting on a red dress. And in our next choice (the second of three YouTube videos, Miranda Lambert’s Little Red Wagon) yet another singer is wearing yet another red top. And so, there you have it: a theme; and, if our little movie can be about nothing else, then such a theme will suit us dandy.

SECOND ACT : MAYBE HAVING A LITTLE TOO MUCH CONFIDENCE

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Kay and her ‘band of brothers’ were touring and performing their cabaret act on stages, in small venues, to a cult following. Even David Bowie had (on at least one occasion) gone along to hear them play - although he’d been standing there, incognito, next to the bar at the back of some faux candled nightclub. So we can’t be sure that Kay had ever known he'd ever been there. But we’d like to think she could have been addressing Bowie with that song about her Little Red Wagon.

And there's our second theme, right there: With both songs, Kay would have been singing to Bowie, but he hadn't been singing to her.

THIRD ACT : NO LONGER GIVING A FLYING FIGG FOR YOUR SELF-ACTUALISATION

Then, for this, our third and final act - set in 2021, Kay imagines this time it's Bowie who's singing to her. She's now a terminally bored old lady in her mid-seventies, and incarcerated in a nursing home - where, one afternoon, she has managed to convince two fellow resident to take LSD; and then to join her in their home’s communal lounge to sing along to David Bowie’s Laughing Gnome whilst it’s being played on some suitably amplified gramophone.

THE END

• Click here to read more about the Laughing Gnome's revenge.

We’re currently voting: Which Bowie song should accompany the closing credits at the end of this movie?

Suggestions so far:

1. From Terry Dalglish: Oh! You Pretty Things.  Current votes = 1

2. From Peter Sharrock: Amazing.  Current votes = 1 [disputed]

3. From Ygor Bedmitz: Diamond Dogs.  Current votes = 0

4. From George: Life on Mars.  Current votes = 1

5.  Coming soon, a web page upon which anyone can vote and/or make suggestions