David Bowie - R.I.P.

A true inspiration and innovator. Made lots of great music. Changed the world. You will be missed.

I’d rather be dead or out of my head
Than training These guns on Those men in the sand

I stumble to the graveyard and
I lay down by my parents, whisper
‘Just remember duckies, Everybody gets got’

                                                [I’d Rather Be High]

This fall I rediscovered Bowie.  He had been the Fairy Godfather of Goth, so like any punk I turned on my ancestors and quickly rejected him. Sure 'Ziggy Stardust' and "I'm Afraid of Americans' would make it into rotation, but I never really dug into his work. Than this August, getting ready for a semester on stage, I happened to hear Bowie's The Bewlay Brothers - and I feel under his spell...

It was Bowie songs got me through the autumn of 2015: Bewlay Brothers, Moon-Age Daydream, Life on Mars, Breaking Glass, Always Crashing the Same Car, Heroes, I'm Afraid of Americans, I'd Rather be High, and the 'Major Tom' series: Space Oddity, Star Man, Ashes to Ashes, SpaceBoy (Pet Shop Boys Remix).

Bowie led a full life and danced his way through it all - so I rather laugh today and watch this clip again:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnleeu_extras-david-bowie_shortfilms
Pug, Pug! Again! Pug, Pug!

But if you need a dose of classic Bowie here is the performance on England's Top of the Pops music show that launched his career.

“Starman” is David Bowie’s Christmas carol. It offers a promise of deliverance, that the human race has been redeemed by greater powers, with a chorus built for a crowd to sing it. It’s the song that finally broke Bowie, whose performance of it on a July 1972 Top of the Pops made him a nationwide, and soon worldwide, pop star.

The performance isn’t just about Bowie, though he’s striking with his copper-colored mullet, his leotard and his effortless charisma (twirling his finger at the camera while singing “picked on you-ooh-ooo”, and connecting with every susceptible kid in the UK). The essential moment comes when Bowie starts to sing the first chorus and Ronson tentatively approaches the mike. Bowie notices him and sweeps his arm over Ronson’s shoulder, pulls him to the mike. It’s a sweet moment of inclusion, the alien embracing the rocker, and, by proxy, all of the nation’s misfits. “Starman” left community in its wake; its promise came true.

https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/starman/

If anyone is interested in geeking out on Bowie, or just watching me geek out on him, let me know.

I'm geeking out anyways.... run away, normies - or gather around. Your choice, it's confusing these days....

So, due to living in the woods, I hadn't even realized that Bowie had just released a new album (called:  “★” BlackStar). The album was written and released to coincide with his death. I have to wrestle with it for a least one posting!



Blackstar_album_cover [The little star fragments might spell out BOWIE]

I think he actually pulled it off: he lived his life as art - up to and including his death. Greatest marketing you could hope for (the announcement of his death on a Monday to capture the week's newscycle is all marketing), all the media praising you and the final BlackStar video is packed with enough Gnostic/Luciferian imagery shot in the typical Lynchian fashion to qualify as a good old occult 'mind-fuck'.

The Black-Star has many meanings - but the occult one that I kept encountering at the turn of the century was the Black Sun, the anti-Sun, the Black Hole Sun, the Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy (confirmed by Science!), a Solar Eclipse, the Evil Swastika (sun-wheel corrupted) - you know, your basic Nazi anti-life symbol...

As a Goth who has chosen to bask in the black-light phosphorescent anti-glow of the Black Star's infra-rays for too long, I'm not recommending it for mass consumption - but I realized the masses were already getting high dosages of it ever since I watched jocks dancing to NIN's Closer in Ralph's Sports Bar and that was long before the 'Wars or Terror' when the Black Sun really got popular and radiated a whole generation. Christianity was a cultural sun-screen to the Black Sun, it is gone...



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(occult_symbol)

David Bowie wrote:"Rock has always been the devil's music, you can't convince me that it isn't. I honestly believe everything I’ve said—I believe rock and roll is dangerous...I feel that we’re only heralding something even darker than ourselves” (Rolling Stone, February 12, 1976)

David Bowie wrote:“Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership…Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.” [1977]

Bowie disowned the above statements saying he was “out of my mind, totally, completely crazed” on cocaine and Berlin nightclubbing and there is actually plenty of subtlety in what he said - like the actual relationship between nationalism & socialism - so I view it as an artist legitimately expressing that the dark vein of 1970s political-occultism that blossomed into everything from Star Wars to Skinny Puppy. Yet here we are in 2016 and the soul cancer-causing Black Sun is still anti-shining above us...

So Bowie is a Herald of the BlackStar and that's Evil, right?

The Black Sun is real. Modern culture is emotionally fragmented and run on mass mind-control, wars rage as I type this, people suffer in poverty, families are shattered. Depression eats up lives, habits become cherished prisons, fear rules the land. Add in the rise of the assault rifle-toting Bible/Quran/Torah-thumpers. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.

The Black Sun is not a new phenomena, life was still much scarier before modern medicine when any penetration of the skin could spiral into a lethal infection. We are born in bodies that suffer and rot, we are living chunks of matter, no one gets out alive.

So Bowie is a Herald of the BlackStar and that's Evil, right?

Let me try to put it this way: an occultist might willing expose themselves to the Black Sun to build up resistance to it, get an sun-tan so you don't get burnt all the way. The BlackStar is real but humans are tricky little monkeys and when we really care about something, we will try to fool both God and the Devil to keep those precious things safe. Things like friendship, idealism, freedom, humanity, compassion...

Brian Eno of Bowie wrote:"I received an email from him seven days ago. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: 'Thank you for our good times, Brian. they will never rot'. And it was signed 'Dawn'. I realise now he was saying goodbye."

I'm not going to try explain the BlackStar video but the basics are Frida Kahlo takes Major Tom's skull to do Black Magic rituals summoning a dreadlocked beastie to attack crucified scarcecrows. The beginning and end are solemn dirges song about the Villa of Ormen (City of The Serpent) but the middle, ah, that middle, is Bowie being as playful and as honest as he can:

BlackStar wrote:I see right, so wide, so open-hearted pain.
I want eagles in my daydreams, diamonds in my eyes

Yep - he's still a hippie telling us to open our hearts and to keep dreaming of freedom and beauty. And his politics?

BlackStar wrote:I'm a take you home, take your passport and shoes and your sedatives -  Boo!

Sounds like Bowie is not down with the strange dominance rituals that Homeland Security begins every airplane ride with. He's still afraid of Americans and I doubt being married to an Islamic Sudanese super-model helps.  And he is smiling as he sings all this, because to be too grim is too let the BlackSun win.



Robert Anton Wilson, my favorite acid-head philosopher, would always remind those heading down dark occult paths that a sense of humour was a valuable shield against madness and self-importance. When he would talk about this subject he also hinted, but never stated, that the star symbol ★ also has a dirty meaning. My guess is that the ★ could also represent a puckered sphincter, you know 'the chocolate starfish', and maybe the 'dark star'.

Fans are going all Kubrick interpreting the Blackstar video, the mass media is laying down wreathes on Bowie's altar, everyone is rushing to pay cash for Bowie's ★ and to love and praise it.

I suspect a Bowie the trickster is smiling as his 200m dollars net worth keeps growing as the Establishment makes him a Saint and we all give him the obscene kiss as a new generation is being exposed to the Black Sun - but they will find it now has a knowing, smiling face - Unkle Bowie. Is this progress? Who knows anymore.




Bowie was the type of art nerd that devoted albums about playing the role of washed-up rock star before his fame even peaked. It always seemed like Bowie played a rock star playing Bowie. Mirrors of mirrors looped in endless feedback, soaked in occultism and post-modern art - yikes! - I have spent enough time in this labyrinth to have at least left a thread to find my way out. So time to go.

"The one thing I think is important is to not go into any second guessing or analyzing what these images mean, because they’re between you and me. People are going to go head over heels to try to break it down and figure it down across the spectrum, and there’s no point in even engaging that." [Bowie speaking to the Blackstar video director]

"The older you get, the deeper your own references get. And the stuff you picked up along the way that interests you, whether it’s Crowley or Phillip K. Dick or whatever,  Jodorowsky, whatever you might think is interesting. That gets filed somewhere inside of you. There’s a curator inside of you that you don’t even know, who will sort of start filing ‘like’ and ‘not like.’ Then all of a sudden you have this fucking show with stuff that you like because it appeals to you in some way or another. I think the older you get, the more honest that is. Because it’s not ‘I could be younger, I will try to think this is cool because it’s cool!’" [Blackstar video director]

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/david-bowie-blackstar-video-johan-renck-director-interview