Stardust to Stardust
The death of an icon eclipses everything. The news broke while I was writing a piece on Golden Globes fashion. A friend sent me a text: David Bowie is dead — question mark. As hoaxes are not uncommon, I did what anyone else would’ve done. Googled. And there it was on his website: David Bowie has passed peacefully. Suddenly the atrocious color of Jennifer Lopez’s dress meant nothing. David Bowie is dead. Wear anything you want, eat anything you want, don’t brush your hair, don’t come to work. A star has left the space of the living. I quickly turned to my best friend, the biggest Bowie fan I know, and broke the news with care. I wanted to say, “Condolence,” but I needed it for myself.
Cut to 2012: in a karaoke bar, a friend asked me: “What’s your ‘end of the world’ song?” “Starman,” I replied — a hazy cosmic jive playing as buildings and bridges collapse, waves swallow cities whole, the ground breaks and we start losing our minds. Bowie paints a vivid picture, and it’s a different one for each of us. Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen how we’ve all met a different Bowie. The musician, the style icon, the collaborator, the creator, the scary dude from Labyrinth, the scarier dude from Lazarus. No Bowie is inferior to the other; nobody knows him better than another. I’ve avoided reading posts on social media because I don’t want to see him as anything else but the Bowie I knew: the man who made songs that make me cry for no reason, who had in him a spirit that I’ve always wanted to have, the gall to not care, an interest in people, an eye for the odd, the stamina to keep creating till death.
This was supposed to be an article explaining David Bowie to millennials. But how do you explain David Bowie? He is not from this planet. Other than the fact that he wrote the song that was playing during the bridge scene in Perks of Being a Wallflower, or that helicopter scene from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, or more recently, that one happy scene from The Martian, I have nothing. Do I tell you he had (insert number) albums? Do I tell you he was in Tron? (Nope, that wasn’t him.) Do I say that lightning bolt Dakota Fanning painted over her eye in The Runaways was a reference to his sixth album? I don’t know all his songs. I don’t know how to play any of them. All I know is that I liked who he was, how he tried to be everything.
Now the only way to experience Bowie is through the things he’s left behind — but it’s been this way for most of us anyway, even while he was living. The closest thing I’ve come to meeting him was seeing the “original” Bryan Duffy photo for “Aladdin Sane,” the “Mona Lisa” of rock album covers, and seeing the house where he was born, all from aboard a tour bus somewhere along Portobello Road in London, a week too late for the Bowie retrospective (“David Bowie Is”) at Victoria and Albert Museum. All that was left from the exhibit were tangerine erasers with the message: “DAVID BOWIE IS CORRECTING THE SITUATION.” I bought all 16 of them. I took one out on Monday; a situation needed correcting. But it was permanent.
The last time I cried over a famous person’s death, it was Heath Ledger’s. It’s an odd feeling, to mourn for someone you had never met but was more important to you than you even realized. You feel like a fraud, a pretentious trend-rider. You start to think: did I even really like him that much? But I’d like to think Bowie would be the first to say all your feelings are valid. In a cab stuck in traffic on Monday, I listened to Starman over and over again, heartbroken over the idea that he will never make anything again — but to his last breath he was making sure we had enough of his oddities to live on, a trust fund of art to nourish us as we continue to exist in a Bowie-less Earth. Ziggy may be stardust, but his memory rocks on.
Libations for everybody.
