VIDEORGY: If you spend a lot of...

VIDEORGY: If you spend a lot of time in downtown L.A., you’ll see a lot of familiar places and faces in “Day-In Day-Out,” David Bowie’s current video and one of the month’s great visual treats. Directed by video wiz Julien Temple (who also did last year’s “Absolute Beginners”), the clip takes us on a twilight tour of Broadway, with colorful shots of porno theaters, credit dentists and bridal shops, plus a host of Bowie performance footage shot at the old El Dorado Hotel. But how did an Englishman like Temple discover such offbeat locales?

“That’s what happens when you hang around Hollywood, waiting to get a green light on your feature film,” explained Temple, who is set to shoot his new feature, “Earth Girls Are Easy,” this summer. “Actually, in a strange way, downtown L.A. reminds me a lot of London. When I get homesick, I go wander around downtown. I find it very incredible--it’s sort of all that’s left of what could’ve been a remarkable city.”

Full of dark, disorienting images, the video chronicles the unsettling adventures of a young woman attempting to extricate herself from a life of crime and prostitution. The original version of the clip also features several scenes that have been trimmed from the version provided to MTV, including a sequence where a street person urinates on Ronald Reagan’s star on Hollywood Boulevard.

“The video really echoes the mood of David’s song,” Temple said. “He still believes in taking risks and saying what he feels, as opposed to what the record company might feel. One of the unfortunate things about music videos today is that they’ve taken most of the anger and rebellion out of rock ‘n’ roll--it’s as if they’re merely aimed at 5-year-olds who are only interested in fancy technology. But I think video should bring out the edge in the music instead of just looking like a fashion clip come to life.”