David Bowie and Me
Written May 2020
The morning following the evening of my 23rd birthday I woke up in one of those cerebrally hungover states. Like, “wow I’m hungover but I actually feel kinda good and connected with the world” (this might also be called still being drunk). Strangely though, for the remainder of this story I failed to experience that horrid moment when you realize you are still actively drunk - that unfortunate transition to a true hungover state. Perhaps due to the revelatory events that followed? The evening of my 23rd birthday took place in Berlin and the drinks consumed the night before were mostly beer and mexicaners, a shot that hasn’t made it to the US in mass as of yet (maybe because of the name?). Imagine a Bloody Mary in shot form, and maybe that’s why I woke up in a more zen than vomit mood.
Anyway…earlier that summer, faced with the great unknown, I made a list of things that I wanted to do while I was in Berlin. Being a big Davie Bowie fan, I thought biking over to his former Schöneberg apartment would be the daily adventure. The apartment was about 15 minutes away from where I was, plus the 5 minutes in which I got lost, (maybe a symptom of my hangover). Lamely, (but in retrospect I’m grateful I was lame in this moment) I was listening to David Bowie on my phone while biking. At this point, my fandom was pretty much only his “greatest hits” so his deep cuts were not on my palate. And to clarify, the verbage “lame” does not mean bad. Lame simply means uncool. The state of subtle cringe of thinking back on the past you. I don’t resent my lameness, in fact I am embracing it. But if later that evening I were to go up to a 100% cool Berliner and told them what I did that day they would without a doubt say, cigarette in mouth, “oh man, that was pretty lame”. But that doesn’t mean I regret it. Not at all. I love my lameness in fact.
At this point in time David Bowie had passed away. It was 2017 so the year of the celebrity deaths was long over. Biking down Gneisenaustraße and then York Straße, I listened to “Lights and Music” (A song he recorded during his Berlin Years), “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” and likely some other songs that have fled my memory. Shockingly, I did not listen to Heroes during this bike ride. I briefly explored a building that, to this day, I have no idea what it’s called or its purpose (some type of fancy school is my best guess). I found a soot smeared cherub statue of which I took a picture of. My virginal ears were listening to “Blackstar” (the track) at the time. It was my first exposure to his last album and I was thoroughly enjoying the tune, the weirdness was especially appealing; I was in Berlin, I was open to weird. (And still am.)
In the Villa of Ormen, Stands a Solitary Candle
I was shook by how personal the lyrics were, and how closely they related to this man’s, this stranger’s, death.
Something Happened on the day he died.
I continued biking looking for Hauptstrasse 155.
How many times does an angel fall. How many people lie instead of talking tall.
I had a strange connection to David Bowie’s death; it was more than an “oh celebrity X has died, I liked them” type of thing. It was no surprise Bowie’s death was a shock to all, and I was a fan of the music. Many of his songs highlighted my college years. But I don’t think his death would have made such an impact on me had the following not occurred…
January 9th 2016 I was eating Sushi cross-legged on the floor with the woman I was dating at the time listening to Ashes to Ashes. This was a reunion with her after a period apart, so there was some significance to this moment already.
She asked me, innocently: “Is David Bowie still alive?”
And I responded, at the time, correctly: “Yes”.
The next day, waking up in my bed, I get on the internet, and the first thing I saw was “David Bowie dead at 69, two days after releasing 25th Studio Album”, and I was near livid, because I was 100% convinced that my girlfriend’s statement, somehow, on a cosmic level, resulted in the death of one of my favorite musicians. I knew that she was not guilty…but still, I sensed some foul play. Looking back on this sequence 1) I’m still not committed to the idea there is no blame to share and 2) It made the death of this man, someone I did not know, somehow more personal than it should have been ordinarily.
The song switched to Fashion and suddenly I was on Hauptstrasse. I saw the album art of Blackstar outside Berlin’s “Bowie Bar” Neues Ufer and approached 155. There was an almost incognito shrine there, a small glass vase with a dead flower and the scrawl: Our Starman – Missing You. Now, gazing at this monument to Bowie, I was feeling a deep personal connection with a person I did not know, a very humanizing vision of David Bowie. Maybe it was manifested by being in the space he so often occupied or by having his recordings from years ago pulsing in my ears, or by that rare ethereal hangover that only happens on the days after birthdays. I was feeling a kinship to this man; perhaps that’s the beauty of music and space and too many drinks.
My father told me that in the 80’s he hung out with David Bowie in New York. The details are fuzzy in his reiterations, but for the most part it seems like he dated David Bowie’s Record Producer’s sister and they got drinks in Manhattan on an occasion or two. I thought of this as I stood at this mini- shrine, which would be unknown to the unknowing. One generation back, there was a human to human connection in my blood line.
After some staring and listening to Life on Mars at the shrine (I do not redact my lameness here), I continued my bike ride to Flughafen Tempelhof. Now…Tempelhof may be my favorite place in the world and it is worth a bit of a tangent:
Flughafen Tempelhof was Berlin’s #1 airport for a while; a plethora of history. The airport itself is a prime example of Nazi architecture. Tempelhof was the location of the historic “Berlin Airlift”. European Lollapollozza was held there in 2015 (to which I was able to attend, and enjoy some “free” shows). It’s currently being used as an emergency housing location for displaced people. There is plenty of interest in the former airport itself. But the massive take off lanes, and fields were, in a classically German way, converted into a giant public park, and this public park is the most surreal and richly abstract place I have experienced.
When I describe Tempelhof to others I explain: “If you woke up there one day, you would think the world had ended and you were in a post-apocalyptic community - but in a good way”. Makeshift community gardens. Repurposed garbage mini-golf. Loads of crows. One time I witnessed a kite festival. Another, I watched people playing hockey while on bikes. There is a corner of runic seeming rocks complete with engraved zodiac symbols. During October through December a nearby cookie factory makes the south-east part of the park smell like sugar cookies. And the sky. The sky is idiosyncratically Tempelhof. Something about the refracting light, and the grandness of it. Like flight. A rare spiritual look up, the closest place to heaven, or at least the closest I’ve been. Really, if you, reader, are ever thinking of going to Berlin, you need to go to Tempelhof.
Back to Bowie…Where are We Now? had come to its conclusion as I entered the threshold of Templehof and heard the opening bassline to Lazarus. Now remember, I had not listened to Blackstar since it’s January 8th release date. I don’t know why I did not listen to it. Maybe I was less curious then? Maybe it seemed tiresome? But I truly think saving my baptismal listening to “Lazarus” in Tempelhof, in a susceptible state, just after visiting the man’s old apartment, was a moment of random destiny, chance collisions too chancy to be pure chance. I biked, conscious of the swells of instruments reverberating through me. Bowie sings:
“Look Up Here, I’m in Heaven”
and I looked up into that Templehof sky and felt a profound connection to the man and his music. I never knew the guy, but I felt his death and his life in that moment and felt connected. Almost tears in my eyes as he finished the song with,
“Oh, I’ll be free/Just Like that Bluebird/Oh I’ll be Free/Ain’t that Just like me”
To this day, it is my most significant listening experience.
My soul swelled with something. I set my bike down and climbed a haystack, (don’t really know why there was hay in this particular spot, but it’s Templehof so you can’t question it). I thought about my Dad and how he probably toasted with this man. I thought about the winter night the previous year, California rolls, and the last night of the man’s life. I thought about the door I stood in front of a half an hour ago and how this stranger, who I had now formed a deep almost personal connection with, had crossed through several times per his daily routine. The haystack meditation was a moment of thinking about time, and relationships, and space, and connectivity. And being truly, blissfully, hungover. And now hungry.
At that moment, I had this intrusive thought, which is lame, but I’m embracing lameness for these memories. I believed, in that post-Lazarus comedown that there are three parts of any relationship:
The time before I know you
The time when I know you
And the time I knew you
These were the last stanzas of a poem I wrote after coming back to my apartment from my David Bowie spirit quest. A poem that no amount of old-me lame-positivity can accept. The fact I wrote a poem after all this shows that I was absolutely in a state because I don’t write poems.
My point in writing this is to identity these various points in my life that have been highlighted by Bowie’s presence, and that even through time and space and celebrity it is still possible for me to feel a cerebral intimate (albeit one-sided) connection with a stranger and the various points of their life through intersecting points in mine. To provoke the thought that type of connectivity is a universal human experience (Please comment on your profound spiritual connections to strangers below!).
In December of 2019 I stood across the street from the Brixton tube station in London, next to a Christmas tree set up adjacent to the Jimmy C street mural of David Bowie. A portrait painted where he, David Bowie, grew up. It was my second to last day in London and I had a long series of possibly “last time”-level farewells. Many of those “know you” to “knew you” transitions. Too many for two days. There was an End of Days Preacher discussing how soon all of this will come to an end and we will all be in the glorious kingdom of God. I saw my friend; “Christ, every night he’s there,” he said, motioning off the eschlatonic speaking, “lets go get a drink”.
Comments