This is a bit of a sloppy post, it was written over many different periods, and I will refine it much more in the future, but want to just get it out there. Basically, this is about all the different periods in which David Bowie has made an almost “personal” guest appearance throughout different stages of my life and seemingly at random. The general idea is that we can be connected with someone’s art and story, and that the goal of an artist is to make their fans feel inspired and personally connected to them, despite the ability to ever connect with them one on one. So this is a self-focused research project showing that David bowie has indeed succeeded in this mission
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 got a drink 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 in the Schoneberg apartment, which would be unknown to the unknowing. One generation back, there was a human-to-human connection in my bloodline.
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 half an hour ago and how this stranger, with whom I had now formed a deep, almost personal connection, 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 identify 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.
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”.
3 years later -
So I wrote all of that in the midst of the pandemic when I was working on various creative projects trying to ride out my time in the pandemic. A lot of life has happened since, but recently something Bowie-esque happened that made me want to revisit this post and update it. And it’s not like “Oh this one Bowie thing happened to me and here I am” but rather a steady Bowie drip.
After a tumultuous end of 2020, 2021 turned its head. I decided to commit to a little project in Jan 2021 (see January Blues for my full feelings on January) dubbed “Starman-uary”, and alongside being pretty deep in the pandemmy and for some reason committing to dry-January, I also decided to complete the task of listening to every studio album by David Bowie. This was quite an undertaking as he has about 25 albums, so it was roughly an album a day commitment. And David is a musician with a lot of output. I won’t say that all of David Bowie’s Music is great, because there are definitely some duds, but it was so cool progressing through Bowie’s entire musical career and I discovered some albums and tracks that I had been ignorant to (specifically I found Heathens quite good). Since this post is more about my relationship with Bowie and his reverberations, rather than about his music, I won’t go much into the details, but my ranking would generally go something like this:
I made this out of memory, but I know the S tier is absolutely as it stands. Basically, David Bowie was the musician that got me through the January Blues of 2021, and ultimately, he was my artist of the year at the end of the year Spotify wraps.
But David Bowie came up again in my life coincidently, and this was through the relationship I formed with my best friend when I was in Glasgow. Basically, through a convoluted turn of events due to a housing crisis for university students in I found myself with a stranger on a Facetime call discussing trying to find a flat together. Somehow the topic of Bowie came up and we started singing the praise of David “1. Outside” a super underrated 90s project which I probably would not have listened to had I not had Star-manuary earlier that year. This connection really solidified a bond and my time in Glasgow was significantly influenced by this relationship and we remain close to this day.
This last Bowie special moment occurred a couple of weeks ago. I had just moved to Philadelphia. One day, my friend had noticed a hole in the wall bar a day earlier and suggested we visit. I put on my David Bowie shirt, something which I don’t do too often, and found myself with my friend outside of “Doobie’s”. We didn’t know what to expect when going in, but what we were accosted with was several images of David Bowie’s face and album covers. “Cool,” I thought, “this place rules”. The bar was small, a couple of mitch-matched tables and board games. Low lighting, cat paintings, and funny and occasionally cryptic signage (e.g. no dancing here). Besides a couple and a lone woman reading a book, we were the only patrons I had forgotten what I was wearing until the woman commanding the bar said – “Oh a Bowie Shirt, what a coincidence”. The coincidences only piled on. The couple gave me a dollar to pick three songs on the jukebox – I felt like I needed to pick one by the bag man so the obligatory David Bowie song I picked out was Teenage Wildlife, but then I put on “Wichita Lineman”, and “Waiting for the man”.
As the music played, I narrated all the earlier paragraphs to my friend, who was generally unaware of my Bowie Fandom. Again, I’m a big David Bowie, but I’m not a huge one. There are many musical acts with which I identify more strongly. But in terms of the figure that is David Bowie and the shadows he casts over his fans, I think that’s almost unparalleled. I think only a handful of people who know me are fully aware of my Bowie connections. By the time I was done relaying my story and we had finished our first beers, the bar had transformed from an empty saloon to a bustling joint, at least 20 more people entering the Doobie’s in that short span.
Around this point, the bartender, Patti told her story about her own connection to David Bowie and why the bar had all these remnants of David Bowie. Patti said that she is a Sigma Kid, and she told the story about her connection to David Bowie to all the patrons sitting in stools at the bar. In 1975 David Bowie spent time in Philadelphia recording the Young Americans album at the Sigma Studio. This obviously was a huge deal for Bowie fans such as Patti, so she, and a couple other youths (perhaps, Young Americans?), would wait outside the studio hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of the superstar. Well waiting ended up being a worthwhile activity for the Sigma Kids because on the day that Young Americans was finished being recorded, David Bowie himself came down and invited the youth to come and listen to the final product (obviously, this can be a little sketchy, but let’s take it at face value and wholesome). It was from this point the Sigma Kids become almost legends within the Bowie fandom and emblematic of young Bowie fans in general.
48 years later, Patti certified Sigma Kid and owner of Doobie’s bar finished telling this tale to a bunch of individuals listening intently at the bar. The reverberations of that evening persisted and wound up through history, landing at that particular moment, and just another piece of evidence that Bowie still affects people day to day in a myriad of ways. Strange how it is – how Bowie keeps occurring in my life and in different places. And this is what a great artist is able to do, to make individuals feel like they have a unique personal connection to them. This is really the story of that, how at different stages of my life Bowie has felt out of time and almost personal – from eating sushi with deathly prophecies, to growing up with his music, from standing outside his Berlin apartment to outside of a mural near his birthplace, to developing relationships, defining periods of time, and shaping spaces, a random individual can show up often in the lives of those who he would never even consider.
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