The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.—David Bowie
I was eight years old. The music teacher in our school, whom we only saw once a week, wore a young, pretty face though her name didn’t stay with me past the end of the year. I was naive about the world of music, but curious. She was determined to teach us from a contemporary perspective. So, we’re sitting in her classroom one Thursday, with the lights off for some reason, and she puts on a brand new album she had just purchased. The album was Space Oddity. She mispronounced “Bowie.” The rest of the semester, though, we all used the phrase, “Ground control to Major Tom” as often as we possibly could, even when it made no sense.
This past Wednesday, January 6, received an email notice that David Bowie had released a new album, his 29th, called Blackstar. Other concerns were drumming my head at the moment so I made a note to listen to the album later and went on about my business. I find myself now regretting that decision if for no other reason than to have not experienced it first in a posthumous sense.
Perhaps I shouldn’t look at Facebook before I get out of bed in the morning, but I did today. There was only one theme throughout my newsfeed and I didn’t like what it was saying. Enough that this is a Monday and that temperatures are so horribly cold. Enough that the draft from the window left my old bones aching, not wanting to move. Seeing the news that David Bowie died was like being stabbed through the heart with a giant icicle that chilled to my soul. I’d heard that Bowie had been fighting cancer, but I wasn’t expecting this. Not right now.
Get dressed, shove everyone else out the door for the day, I search for and find that damn email with the link to the album. I click. I listen. I cry.
Blackstar is, much like Bowie’s life, full of improvisation. The title track is just short of being ten minutes long and fuses together two very disparate melody lines using some of the most complicated and beautiful jazz riffs ever devised. I will not be surprised if, at some point in the future, someone refers to this simply as his jazz album, because what Bowie does here is, once again, completely different from the 28 previous albums in his discography. Danny McCaslin’s searing saxophone chases Bowie’s vocals to the stars and back as though his very life depends upon it. Rather than singing in isolation, as vocals are most often done in contemporary studios, Bowie stood in the middle of McCaslin’s band, recording every track live. One can feel the interaction between them, even on pieces he’s done before, such as Sue (Or In a Season of Crime).
If I were reviewing this album under different circumstances, I would talk in esoteric terms about transitions and phases and how that, once again, David Bowie had managed to not merely remain contemporary, but a couple of steps ahead of contemporary. Blackstar leads us in a new direction today just as surely as Space Oddity did in 1969. Such is the legacy of the artist, mapping out where we expected him to go, then showing us a very different and unexpected way of getting there.
As I sat here listening, I read through a few hundred different memories that fans and other musicians had of Bowie. Many mention The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972) and nearly everyone of a certain younger generation mentions Labyrinth in some form. There are articles about his impact on fashion and how his showmanship changed what we expected from a live performance.
What I find missing from all those tributes, however, are two pieces where Bowie stepped totally out of the character of a rock star. One came in 1977 when the ultra-hip, gender-bending rock star was asked to sing The Little Drummer Boy with legendary crooner Bing Crosby for a television Christmas special. Bowie didn’t want to do the song. He hated the song. So, as writer Buz Kohan later told PBS, he (Kohan) and partner Larry Grossman came up with the now famous counter melody for Bowie to sing. The result was an instant holiday classic that you almost certainly hear 20,000 times each December.
The second, also recorded in December of 1977, was when RCA convinced the singer to narrate Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Allegedly, Bowie was RCA’s third choice, with actors Peter Ustinov and Alec Guinness having both turned down the opportunity. Bowie said he did the album as a Christmas present for his son, Duncan, who was then seven years old. The timbre and phrasing Bowie gives to the piece is, like everything else he did, quite unique and different than anything Ustinov or Guinness might have done and it is his version I chose to play for my boys when they were of sufficient age.
He was married to the incredible supermodel Iman. He had children, a boy, Duncan, and a girl, Alexandria, who used their father’s more common surname, Jones. His most recent work was a musical, Lazarus, which is currently in an Off-Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop on East 46th street, starring Michael C. Hall. The musical was originally scheduled to run through January 20, but I wonder now if perhaps the engagement might be extended. That would be nice, since the initial run sold out almost the moment it was announced.
The Internet has exploded this morning with stories and articles. Many will be longer and full of greater insight than mine, but I could not let this pass without comment. Bowie was so much more than any one album or performance, or even all of them put together. I find it very fitting that the last track on Blackstar is titled, I Can’t Give Everything Away, a song that starts out sounding familiar, like the Bowie we think we knew, then navigates itself into something very different. Perhaps this was his way of saying goodbye. Or maybe, just maybe, he wanted to show there is still more than we can imagine.
Ziggy Stardust has left the planet. Godspeed, Mr. Jones. You are already well missed.
When you see a dog wearing the same outfit as you and the dog wears it better.
When there’s no Pantone® number to match anything you’re wearing.
When people follow you because they’re sure you must be on your way to a circus. 
When you’re wearing fishnet and the park ranger gives you a ticket for carrying over the limit. 
When the tags in all your clothes say “Made In Bangladesh.” 
Stop getting out of bed so damn early to go shopping.
Cut back on the food you know gives you gas.
For all that is holy, try taking a shower.
Try A Little Tenderness.
Sympathy For The Masses
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.—Ivan Turgenev
Life is not always as comfortable as it appears
I’m wondering this morning how many people consider themselves sympathetic. I’m not talking about how we feel when someone dies, though certainly we could use more sympathy there, but more along the lines of what the Oxford dictionary refers to as, “understanding between people; common feeling.” Sympathy for our fellow humans, for the people right around us, and especially for those we perceive to be different from ourselves, appears to be in a drought.
For example, being a Saturday, one’s expectations might be that people have the day off, their weekend free, two days of leisure available to them. Yet, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, at least 35% of us work on the weekend. Most of those working weekends are in retail, food service, or sales, which is of little surprise. Of those working weekends, though, more than half of those have more than one job, and that particular statistic has grown substantially over the past ten years. I wonder, as we snarl at how slow a waitress seems to be moving or complain about the number of registers open at the market, if we might do well to show a bit of sympathy for those who are overworked, lacking sleep, struggling to make ends meet, but are still expected to smile and meet the petty demands of customers.
I also think about those around us who deal with persistent pain that we never see. When I was a boy, I fear there were too many times when I thought less of my mother because her arthritis forced her to ask for help. While that attitude reversed itself by the time I was an adult, it is only as I find myself frequently in that same predicament that I truly understand how deflating it feels to have to so often ask for assistance. I know many others who deal daily with chronic pain brought on by a plethora of issues; they smile, they rarely complain, they would rather you not know how they’re really feeling. Yet, when they can steal a moment to themselves, they break down and cry in the silence. Do they not deserve sympathy?
As a general population, I fear we have become so incredibly selfish and self-centered that we’ve lost our sympathy for our fellow man. We deride those who struggle. We make fun of those less fortunate. We even delight in placing obstacles in the path of those trying to better themselves. We would rather strip people of their dignity than put an arm around their shoulder and help them out of the ditch into which they’ve fallen. Instead, we chide them for having dared to fall into that ditch in the first place.
Our lack of sympathy became painfully evident in the past week with a local news story that went viral. A woman complained to a local bar that her New Year’s Eve was ruined by what she mistakenly assumed was a dead drug addict being carried from the bar. Her words were scathing and mean as she not only derided the bar, but her over-worked server. When the bar’s manager came back with a scathing reply, explaining that the “dead addict” had in fact been a 72-year-old woman having a heart attack, the entire Internet cheered that the rude woman had received her comeuppance.
There is a shocking lack of sympathy in that story, first from the woman making the complaint, who was so caught up in how “horrible” her night was that she felt compelled to share her anger on social media. Her words were insensitive and uncaring and the manager’s response was sufficient in correcting that wrong. However, we, as a society, are not happy, apparently, until we’ve taken things too far. As the story became one of international interest, people around the world went out of their way to humiliate the woman making the complaint, even inundating the salon where she rented booth space. Notice that I’m using the past tense in that sentence. Because of the severity of the response, the salon canceled her booth rental. The woman now gets to start 2016 without any income.
“She got what she deserved,” is the common response, but did she? She deserved to be corrected in the same manner as she complained, and that happened rather swiftly. But to think that she, or anyone, deserves to be shamed internationally, to have financial harm inflicted not only on her but on others, who worked at the same salon, demonstrates a global lack of sensitivity, compassion, and sympathy even greater than that which she exhibited herself. Some have said, “I hope she’s learned her lesson,” and I would assume she has, but clearly the rest of the world has not. There is no good reason for the shaming to continue nor for her name to be dragged through the mud of international media.
Throughout my life, I’ve made plenty of mistakes, errors in judgment, outright acts of willful ignorance. Chances are pretty damn high that you’ve done the same. None of us are proud of those moments. We learn our lessons, hopefully, and move on. We all work hard. With the economic devastation of the middle class, the number of people struggling just to put food on the table has increased, despite yesterday’s news that the economy added 292,000 new jobs in December. Simply having a job, or two, is not necessarily sufficient for sustaining a reasonable quality of life.
For 98 percent of us, life is a continual race from one challenge to another. We all have our struggle. We all experience pain we don’t talk about. So doesn’t it just make sense that we should have sympathy for the masses that share our common condition?
A little sympathy and caring goes a long way. Try it.
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