David Bowie R.I.P

here are my dumb bowie feelings. i slowly got into a few albums, mostly the berlin trilogy, ten years ago. then i stopped listening. now he's dead and it's the reason i'm re-listening to station to station right now. it's incredible, way better than i remembered. it really sucks that he's dead. the end.

it's pretty weird how compelled people are to tell their bowie stories, like everyone's got one and it's always this indelible memory from their youth that (usually) isn't actually that interesting to other people, like the people i heard on the radio today (callers on local npr station) -- one caller was like "i used to sing 'the little drummer boy' with my cousin and that's why we love bowie" and another said "i listened to david bowie with my son, who is now 32" and her big claim to bowie expertise was having been raised in england. my own memories are precious to me, but utterly mundane and not really worth sharing. and yet i found myself contacting my old friend from 8th grade to reminisce about how we used to listen to her brother's records and jump on her bed. it's like bowie was always there being totally amazing even when we were super boring. that's part of his charm imo!! his excellence elevated reality in that way, at least he did for me.

i also admire his ability to remain a private person.

mattresslessness otm

i did a report on Mars when i was in 3rd grade and titled it "Is there life on mars?" and my mom introduced me to Bowie then

his excellence elevated reality otm

Lorde, on FB:

When a hero dies, everyone wants a quote. I woke up this morning with a tender head from tears and that big red cup of Japanese whiskey, gulped last night just after the news came. People were already asking me what I thought. It feels kind of garish to talk about oneself at a time like this, when the thing that has happened is so distinctly world-sized. But everything I’ve read or seen since the news has been deeply intrinsic in tone, almost selfish, like therapy. That’s who he was to all of us. He was a piece of bright pleated silk we could stretch out or fold up small inside ourselves when we needed to.

Mr. Bowie, I guess right now we have to hang this thing up for a minute.

The night I met him I played at an expensive Vogue benefit with a lot of fresh flowers, honouring Tilda. I was not quite seventeen, America was very new to me, and I was distinctly uneasy and distrustful toward everything happening in my life that was putting me in these flat-voiced, narrow-eyed, champagneish rooms. I played my three songs, thrashing and twitching in platform boots. Afterward, Anna clasped my hand and said “David wants to meet you,” and led me through people and round tables with candles and glasses and louder and louder talk, and he was there.

I've never met a hero of mine and liked it. It just sucks, the pressure is too huge, you can't enjoy it. David was different. I'll never forget the caressing of our hands as we spoke, or the light in his eyes. That night something changed in me - i felt a calmness grow, a sureness. I think in those brief moments, he heralded me into my next new life, an old rock and roll alien angel in a perfect grey suit. I realized everything I’d ever done, or would do from then on, would be done like maybe he was watching. I realized I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his. And I know I'm never going to stop learning dances, brand new dances.

It's not going to change, how we feel about him. For the rest of our lives, we'll always be crashing in that same car.

Thankyou, David Bowie.

That Lazarus play director also revealed, on Dutch radio this time, but he plobably shouldn't have, that it was liver cancer btw (article in Dutch).

http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/35902/David-Bowie/article/detail/2580998/2016/01/12/Regisseur-Ivo-Van-Hove-Bowie-had-leverkanker.dhtml

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)
Posted: January 11, 2016 at 6:02:51 PM
I teared up for the first time today reading that excerpt.

Me too

It should not be so jarring that a guy with cancer does not want to die but I can't take reading it

aw lorde <3

Celebrate! New mix from Stirmonsterrrrr https://www.mixcloud.com/JD_Twitch/strung-out-on-lasers-and-slash-back-blazers-bowie-mix-by-jd-twitch/

So many older misfits on the soc media showing deep love for this man at the moment. It's special. Gotta love the Interwebs at a time like this.

To discuss his film performances for a moment: rather good as Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, a magnificent camera object in The Man Who Fell to Earth, dotty in the best sense in The Prestige, and believably ravaged in The Hunger. My best friend and I watched The Linguini Incident in early '94; the Blockbuster employee actually snickered.

With Rosanna Arquette?

yes

and Marlee Matlin

awkwardly southern in FWWM

AHHH'VE SEEN SOMETHIN

oh -- excellent as David Bowie in a Japanese internment camp in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

i feel like a goober for blarping my boring bowie memories on fb this morning but I was so sad and stuck at work & i didnt know what else to do

i love reading about interactions people had with him. he seems to have had the same warmth about him that i heard mccartney has, putting people at ease & being ok with everyone turning to jelly in their presence & patiently, sublty diffusing the weirdness. and i like hearing how funny he was.

also he is one of the few men i've stayed in love with my entire life, like i never really went off him, i just found new ways to think he was great. i mean music & writing & performing he's the bees knees obv but then fashion! all those iconic, incredibly artful looks, plus just his bloody walking-around clothes he was always so put together & interesting...

i already hate using the past tense

Bowie in FWWM is wrong in the best sense. Almost out-Lynches Lynch for weirdness. And the extended stuff they released a couple of years ago makes it even more 0_O

I like his cameo in Into the Night. Rewatching it now he reminds me of Ricky Gervaise.

Townshend:

Woke up to the awful news that my lovely friend David Bowie passed away. I am so deeply sad, but he just completed a radical and audacious new album, and that is a great thing. Personally I am grateful to him for doing it.

For those who were his fans he was a charismatic and exotic creature and still gloriously beautiful even as he approached 70. But face to face he was funny, clever, well-read, excited by the arts, and really good company.

In a Japanese restaurant we once ate tiny live crabs sent over to our table by a businessman fan. David said we must try, out of courtesy. I wouldn’t have done it with anyone else on the planet. Delicious, of course.

He was simply a joy to be around, so good at making everyone feel at ease. I’m sorry to hear it was cancer that got him. I knew he had been ill for several years but didn’t know the details. My thoughts now go to his family and close ones, and to so many of his fans who will be beyond distraught today. We have lost a monumental figurehead of the British arts scene. We have also lost a wonderful clown whose combined sense of mischief and creativity delightedly touched our hearts. David Bowie was my Salvador Dali. He was also one facet of my perfect Ace Face.

Pete Townshend, 11 January 2016

;_;

love Townshend's solos on "Because You're Young" and "Slow Burn."

Every time I think about him making Blackstar as a parting gift to us the tears come. It's so beautiful and tragic, him leaving us like this. I can't get over it. I feel like I didn't appreciate it the way I should have upon the first listen.

gosh. What a day.

Just noticed that on RateYourMusic all the ratings are in black stars today.

So glad that I already had Bowie on my mind this morning... Thought about him last week on his birthday while listening to Blackstar... Joking around with some of you about that Magnavox CD player ad from the 80s that had a quasi-Bowie rocking out next to a quasi-Willie Nelson...

Even this weekend, I forgot how we got on the subject, but Sunny and I were talking about a close relative of mine who told me goodbye without my realizing it until two weeks later when they died. How I get to have that conversation in my head now instead of anything else.

And hell, the surprise of it all... "not doing interviews because he wants the record to speak for itself, etc." This guy, what a performer.

love Townshend's solos on "Because You're Young" and "Slow Burn."

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 11, 2016 7:38 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ditto; his playing on "Slow Burn" is so fucking blinding.

btw, very moving piece in Spin, Al, and glad to see love for "Jump They Say." Always thought it was an underrated track of his; it's an all-time fave for me (and the trumpet solo is by none other than Lester Bowie).

"jump they say" is a fuckin' all time jam

Hours later, and I still don't know what to say... I guess I'm still very much stunned and shocked by the news of Bowie passing away and it's going to take days to process it all. Not only am I a huge fan of his music, but the man was a huge influence on many of my all-time favourite artists, alongside Kraftwerk and Roxy Music. Part of me imagines that this is how it must have felt when the world lost John Lennon, but... for many, many reasons the loss of Bowie feels greater, much greater.

Today I was hit by this really precise memory, which is probably fake, or an amalgam of several memories, where I am walking to golf practice in high school listening to "Ashes to Ashes" on my ipod mini. In the memory, I am really focused on the part where Bowie sings "I've never done good things, I've never done bad things, I've never done anything out of the blue." It seems like a warning, written just for me, about the regrets i would have down the line if I continued down my current path, going through my days with my head down trying not to attract undue attention, good or bad.

I don't think I actually heeded Bowie's advice, certainly not at the time. The song didn't make me a bolder person. But it made me want to be one, which is still a really powerful thing for an mp3 to do to a shy sixteen year old.

speaking of Lennon, he says nice and touching things about Bowie at the one hour and 10 minute mark here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaTy3kSxyoo

"He writes in the studio. He goes in with four guys and a few words....I like that track, and I must say I admire the vast repertoire of talen the guy has..."

btw, very moving piece in Spin, Al, and glad to see love for "Jump They Say." Always thought it was an underrated track of his; it's an all-time fave for me (and the trumpet solo is by none other than Lester Bowie).

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, January 11, 2016 7:55 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"jump they say" is a fuckin' all time jam

― HYPERLINK TO RAP GENIUS (BradNelson), Monday, January 11, 2016 7:56 PM (11 minutes ago)

I can't deny that part of what drove me to write it was giving "Jump They Say" its due in the canon. In the two-disc Rykodisc comp released in 1993 that is, to me, his best comp, it BELONGS.

I'm listening to "Voyeur of Utter Destruction" a lot today. One of my favourites.

I SAY.

What rarities/live shows/other are you all hoping the Estate will put out? I'd like a proper release of the Cracked Actor doc, a good show from the 1974 tour, and any and all Young Americans outtakes!

I tend to think he has no hidden material, given his penchant for recording in the studio.

I would like more live stuff like this. I love how much he enjoys Belew's playing in this clip. You can tell he loved working with hot-shit musicians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tWyIug2qP0

I've run across snippets and fragments of YA songs that haven't been on any reissues afaik--Shilling the Rubes is one I remember. But yeah, maybe there's nothing there. Related, isn't there quite a bit of unreleased Scary Monsters stuff?

I can't help but wonder, now that we've sadly reached the point where Bowie's discography is very much a "finished" thing, if people will be more willing to give some of his post-Let's Dance output more of a chance. How likely is it that we'd get any posthumous rarities/archival releases? Did, or does Bowie really have much in the "vaults", as it were?

I haven't even started to listen, tipsy, but yeah, Stay is such a killer live one. I love the Nassau '76, such a workout.

What's the earliest tour any ILMers saw him on? I saw the Let's Dance tour, Hartford, CT, good seats. The hair and the suit were what hit you first. I wasn't that old but even I felt like, wow, this is the 1980s.

My Bowie concert history is a comedy of errors. I missed his epic, legendary Ft. Lauderdale show in October 1997 (almost four hours) because my grad school had dropped my courses. In 2003 I was gonna see him in Philly until he canceled the show. I got credit for his Miami show in June 2004. I was grabbing a beer in the lobby when we learned that a roadie had fallen and died, forcing him to cancel the show.

I can't help but think that Bowie must have had a fair amount of abandoned/unfinished projects over the years... like Toy for example.

He is one of those dudes that has been remarkably tight on outtakes and unteleased stuff, as far as I know.

I never saw him, but he's hard-wired into my first concert memory -- U2's War tour, I remember "Modern Love" blaring from the PA while we were waiting for the band. It was the first time I'd heard the song, it hadn't been released as a single yet. I loved the U2 show like any first-time-concertgoing 13-year-old would, but the next day I had "Modern Love" in my head.

I dunno, the Ryko reissues seemed very generous at the time -- lots of demos and unreleased tracks.

In retrospect, when an album reissue today gets a multi-disc boxed set, it's quaint to think of the Rykos as offering the goods, but Bowie was (iirc?) the first to fill reissue CDs with almost another album's worth of rarities.

xp

My first Bowie show was the infamous Glass Spider tour at Anaheim Stadium in 1987. I didn't think the show was as much of a clusterfuck as folks say now, but for an enormo-show that requires connection and a strong set-list, Bowie just seemed lost in the spectacle. Siouxsie opened up and had to play during the daytime. Oops.