All The Madmen: After Bowie

I am a pirate, a scoundrel. A sinner

I stole fire from the gods.

They tracked me down by my nighttime flame,

Shot me up on the darkling plain.

I shot myself down

You can’t live like that. It is not allowed.

So the ground rushed to meet me when my fall was over

I fell softly but firmly into white walls, hushed voices

And the occasional piercing shriek. It was obligatory

That one of us loosed it, from time to time. That

Is what the situation called for.

It gets old. So old

And, of course, so do we;

We learn (or don’t, depending on our propensity for fakery)

To pretend the gods hold nothing for us that we desire

Or don’t desire. We pretend that heaven is a place you go

For being good. It is not. Heaven is

In your neuroreceptors, in the eyes

Of the beautiful stranger, in our devotion

To strange practices and elaborate rituals that

Germinate in the dusty, empty halls of our short lives

And blossom us into magic: lush and intricate stories

Of detailed character and epic feats.

Heaven is make-believe,

And without it life is unbearable.

Having left this earth, David Bowie is not in heaven;

But he has left great heaven here.

David Bowie, back here on earth,

stolen fires everywhere

burn in your memory

Heroes

If there was anyone that somehow spoke into the heart of every openly or secretly fabulous creature on earth, someone who knew without thinking how to grab the hot pulse of zeitgeist before it even thought to name itself...someone who pulled songs out of our very dreams to spangle our dark-ringed, druggy, brilliant eyes...Oh, man. Bowie. It was Bowie. And he died yesterday.

I did not see this coming. Of all the random sorrows to jump up like the boogie and hijack me, this particular one hit so hard.

Attributed to Simon Pegg (but actually tweeted by Dean Podesta): "If you're sad today, just remember the earth is over 4 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie."

Ah, but.

The world I woke up in yesterday contained David Bowie. The world I woke up in today did not. Goddamn it! God. Damn. It.

I said that to myself as I drove home. Mug Shots, the coffee shop where I tank up to go make a douche of myself at the gym, featured a heartfelt, crudely drawn (yet undeniably "artistic") Ziggy hair/eyes/lightning bolts on their daily-specials blackboard. And I felt the sadness just wash over me again, like dirty runoff from Oroville's trashiest, most neglected street.

That's the thing, see. Bowie dealt in the feels. So it really is a huge loss, because we don't have so many epic artist/feeler/poets anymore; or maybe it's just not a marketable quantity without some kind of public shaming, or postmodern judgment, or hipster cynicism that accompanies it.

And too, there was something magical about David Bowie that only a few huge Rock Stars still alive can boast on: THEY'RE STILL ALIVE. He did All Of The Bad Choice Things. And lived to tell the tale; not only that, kept acting; kept making music; kept being David Bowie.

IT'S A WALKOFF!

For me, David Bowie was always drug music. Let me qualify that term: Music to do drugs by, made by people on drugs, with many thinly veiled references to drugs. But as we got older, Bowie and I, and moved out of that sturm und drang that drug-takers bring unto themselves, the songs remain as a testament to the intensity and craziness that humans can create and experience. The drugs are incidental. You don't have to have the glasses to get the special effects.

Even throughout the paranoid coke-fiend transmogrification of Ziggy Stardust into the Thin White Duke, the drugs were only a part of the brilliance of the whole. There was the Story, and the Show; and the depths and lengths that he was willing to go to in pursuit of those two things (which by all accounts became one, in the heat of the 70's, before the 70's became glacier-cool) --made his own human life the central jewel in the machinery of both.

Bowie dealt in the feels. Somehow, as Top of the Pops and a phenomenally successful recording artist, he managed to write the songs that we, the weird, the dispossessed, the artfags and secret geniuses, the ones who tried to front like we had tough, thick skins like everyone else even though we were walking around with our exposed nerves smashing into every coffee table--he wrote the best songs for us. 

Radiohead's very popular song "Creep" owes a conceptual debt to a central theme in Bowie's work: I am misplaced. I want acceptance, but I don't belong here. 

Maybe the enormous popularity of both Bowie's outcast songs and "Creep" is an indication that this outsider feeling is much more prevalent than the feeling of being "in with the In Crowd." NOW THAT'S A SHOCKER, HUH!

I think the real importance of a world that contained Bowie was this: that he believed in his own symbols; that he believed in himself, because the story told itself through him. And he believed in us, because the story needed us to be alive and true. As weird and distant as he felt, he brought us the songs and stories, because they wanted to be brought. And his absolute faith that he could be a conduit for that magic, that language, that movement (in every sense)...is such a powerful and visceral legacy; kind of a challenge, even. Can we trust ourselves in this same way?

"We can be heroes, just for one day

We can be us, just for one day..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBuwC4VJi50
(copy and paste the link; i cant seem to embed it--but I warn you, "Heroes" will probably make you cry.)

  Goddamn it.