the bakery down by Georgia State U. is staffed by students, young black ladies. for a while i’d be in there once a week, one of them seemed pretty cool, we might chat here and there. i went in this last halloween and everyone’s dressed up. the one girl had that hairspray stuff that gives you temporary dye in red and some red and blue face paint. this is a short, plump black woman, probably no more than 20. i say hello to everyone during the transaction and i’m putting up my change, about to walk off, when i’m dumbstruck:
“Wait… you’re BOWIE?!”
She was Ziggy, alright. Apparently, her coworkers had been giving her grief, not knowing who he was. i was the only one all day who recognized. it was definitely a bond.
Totally understand, a lot of his tunes from the 70s have been played so often that they don’t have the same oomph. I really enjoy his album Earthling, actually, and if you haven’t gotten a chance to hear any of the new stuff from Blackstar, it’s chilling, great stuff, though I prefer the original orchestral version of “Sue” to the one on the album.
[quote]"For the last 18 months (we learn only today) David Bowie has known that he was dying. He kept that information private, while spending his final months doing what he’d done his whole life — making outrageously original, beautiful, complicated art. He made a gorgeous album. He created a show, playing right now in New York. And then he released this, his final video (LAZARUS), just a few days before he died — on his 69th birthday. “Look up here,” he sings, “I’m in heaven.”
Can you imagine, to be making art like this (fearless art that both comforts and challenges) right up to the moment of your death? How do you do that? How do you BE that? To work with your death so imaginatively, in order to perfectly time out the last beats of your life? What a magnificent creature of creation, right to the end. I am sad today, but mostly I am overwhelmed by awe. This is what it means to be a great artist.
From the beginning, this was a man who showed us how to do life differently than anyone had ever done it before, and now look how he has done death.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Inspiration, to me, is THIS. Goodbye to the master, and onward for the rest of us."[/quote]
I’m a few weeks behind on my Escape Pod stories. On the way home today, I finished listening to the episode I had started on the way into work. In the outro, Alasdair Stuart was giving the closing quotation. When he started saying “… and our quote this week comes from one of the best movies and finest musicians of all time …,” I had a very strange feeling the I knew from whom the quote came, then got a bit of a shiver when he recited it. I’m mostly an atheist and I know damned well that episode was recorded weeks ago, but damned if the universe doesn’t line up in odd ways sometimes.
Here is my guess what that was all about. In his early struggling days, Eno performed in a stag film or two to make ends meet. (This part isn’t completely made up out of whole cloth. In an early interview with Chrissie Hynde, he alluded to such work.) Later, when someone recognized him in a film and asked him about it, he came up with the “preserving my technique” quip.
What a god damn shame. While I wasn’t a huge fan of his later works I could always appreciate his massive talent and constant reinvention. From everything I read about him he seemed like a real class act too. Fucking cancer, man.
I was just reminiscing by listening to “Space Oddity” with the kids and explained to my 5-year-old son that the song is the ballad of a lone astronaut who faces an unexpected problem in space. His response: “did he know how to grow potatoes?”
I’d forgotten all about telling him an abbreviated version of The Martian as a bedtime story.
