David Bowie

6 fucking years. Wow.

I'll never forget it. I had just staged an intervention with my eventually-to-be ex-wife. Her parents flew out from the Midwest and the three of them were staying with me, in what used to be our home (and thankfully was now just mine). Her stuff was stacked all over my living room, and I'd graciously given up my bed so everyone else could have a good night's sleep after their long ordeal and drive out of the high desert. In other words, my life appeared to be in a shambles, but in reality, the shambles was well and truly behind me. She was probably at her lowest point, but I was on an upswing. I'd had a fabulous weekend. I had prospects for a social life. I had friends. I sat on the chaise lounge watching Chef starring John Favreau with my outgoing father-in-law (nice guy), trading texts and emails with prospective new love interests, friends, laughing and drinking beer well into the night, even though I had to be up at 4:30 AM for work.

Cut to when my first alarm went off. I was sleeping on the couch, my phone was beside me on the floor. I snatched it up as soon as I heard that tell-tale wake-up chime and silenced it. This would have been before I switched to an iPhone, so I was in Android country. Not sure how that factors, other than it's a detail I remember, so it fills the scene in. A moment later the phone buzzed again - too soon to have out-distanced my snooze - and when I picked it up, I saw a text from my friend Tori. It said, simply:

Dude. David Bowie died. 

I felt at that moment that all the progress I'd made, everything, was for naught. David Bowie taught me how to age - how to grow older with grace. How to navigate life's unending menagerie of madness with tact. I'd just exhibited this lesson in the two-and-a-half years it took my marriage to end, to get to the point where I was, about to send my ex and her family off into the negative zone outside my own peripheral existence. And now, my teacher was dead.

Fuck.

Six years later, we return to the same stage - it's Sunday night while I'm typing this, the long-delayed love of my life curled up on the sofa by my side, Black Star playing on the stereo. I lost three cats, gained one, started a bunch of podcasts, ended one big one, gained friends, lost some, turned my back on others. Life continues to throw its curve balls at my head, and I duck and pop back up and smile.

Just like David Bowie taught me.

 

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Watch:

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Playlist:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F# A# ∞

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

Tennis System - Technicolor Blind

Tennis System - Lovesick

Tennis System  - Bitter (Single)

PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love

Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Depeche Mode - A Question of Lust EP

Boy Harsher - Careful

Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars

Ministry - Moral Hygiene

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

Beach House - Once Twice Melody (Disc 1)

Felicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Un Hiver En Plein Été

Fleet Foxes - A Very Lonely Solstice

Chet Baker - Baker's Holiday

The Yellow House - Refurbished

David Bowie - Black Star

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Card:

Transformation. 

2018: February 21st, 4:23 AM

More Bowie in my head upon waking. It's a wonderful way to open your eyes:



Playlist yesterday:

TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
Darkness Brings the Cold - Devil Swank Vol. #1
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
Somnium Nox -
David Bowie - Dollar Days*
Deafheaven - Sunbather
Roy Ayers - Ubiquity
Playlist: K**

.............

* I had been thinking about listening to David Bowie's Blackstar to start off my writing session but was tired and a little out of sorts so I figured I should stick with the music I know works for these sessions, i.e. lately Deafheaven. However, before I could choose one of their albums, my iTunes jumped into random and picked Dollar Days. I treated this as something of a sonic Tarot pull and listened to the song. Lyrics for it are HERE - I'm not sure how these pertain to my life at the moment, rather hope they don't. It's a great song, one of the saddest deliveries on a final album filled with sad deliveries. I'm going to re-engage with the album today, as my original impetus for almost picking it yesterday was realizing it'd been quite a long time since I had, preferring for the last year or two to stick to Bowie's older material and also some of his more obscure, probably because as awesome as Black Star is, it's an emotional tour de force.

** The second or third CD I made for K after we started dating. The part of the playlist we made it through before dinner looks like this:

Card of the day:

Interesting interpretation when I juxtapose this card resurfacing with the 8 of Swords almost popping out of the deck as I shuffled (I always shuffle three times - unless I'm around a lot of people I know, like at work, and want to avoid being super ostentatious - and cut once). The 8 of Swords is, of course, Interference, and in keeping with that we are poised to move but have a sudden setback. The 2 of Disks coming up confirms putting our heads down and plowing through.

David Bowie - Black Star

Mr. Brown sent me this at least a week ago and I've only just gotten around to watch it. New Bowie is always a good thing, and with what I keep hearing about the upcoming album of the same name (Out Jan 8th, 2016) being the 'weirdest' Bowie record in a long time, I for one am more than eager to have this in my hands.



Some observations:

I LOVE the return to the sax. Saxophone was once synonymous with Bowie - for me at least - and I feel like he hadn't really found a way to incorporate it into the new sound he's been toying with since 2005's Reality. No longer the case. Hopefully there'll be more on the record.

I also LOVE the return to utilizing synths and some of the overall aesthetic he experimented with in the 90s during his "industrial" phase.

This is weird as fuck and I LOVE it.