B/Bowie
Is there life on Mars?
Neil Postman once said that every technology is both a blessing and a burden, ‘not either or, but this and that.’ I often assign my students a paper in which they have to discuss that statement, and if I was going to write a paper for my own assignment, I would talk about twitter. It’s hard to ignore the fact that twitter is responsible for some truly reprehensible evils like helping to lower democracy into its grave. But it has also provided me with my favorite recipe for vegan thumbprint cookies with almond flour and raspberry jam, which I got via a tweet from Duncan Jones, aka @manmademoon, and this surprises me no end and somehow sums up how twitter has changed the world. Long ago, when I was a child, glamorous photos of Angie and David Bowie with their infant son were a large part of the mythos of rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that I now exchange recipes with said infant son, the artist-formerly-known-as Zowie Bowie, really is remarkable. I feel like it says it all. On the one hand, twitter is a violation of the privacy, sanity, and the space-time continuum. On the other, as the recipe anecdote indicates, it’s irresistible.
I like Duncan Jones’s film work in its own right but it’s nice too, that, when people ask me who my favorite rock star that I ever met was, the answer is David Bowie. I met him – if you can it ‘meeting’ – backstage at a festival in Ulm, Germany where I had a long chat with him about the Legendary Stardust Cowboy during most of which I did not realize it was him. This was because he was short and plain and wearing a t shirt and jeans and our conversation was very much on the lines of many a conversation I have had with nerdy record collector boys over the years, the kind which the English would call trainspotty. Only when it began to dawn on me to whom I was talking to did I become tongue-tied and red-faced. And then I backed slowly away from him big-eyed, like any normal person would.
David Bowie was headlining the entire festival, and I love him as much for the transformation he underwent later that night – from pale-faced trainspotter to Starman in a silver lame jumpsuit – as I do for the amazing party his crew threw later on in the evening, although probably the thing I love most about him is the extreme care his very kind management took of my passport, which I lost that night and they returned three weeks later. Bowie’s whole set up was just a class act, all the way. And it should be said that this impromptu conversation we had was not the norm in my life as a rock critic, which was really confined solely to twenty-minute phoners with exasperated rock stars in between sound check and stage.
That type of interaction has, I believe, become less frequent as rock journalism itself fades away, thanks to the aforementioned technologies which allow listeners to connect more directly with the music itself, without relying on a middle man. Now if you want to know some facts about it, go to Wikipedia, and if you want to hear it, just go to Spotify. Who needs opinions anymore? You probably have your own favorite David Bowie song, at least I hope you do. Mine is “Life on Mars” by a long shot, though I also really love “Space Oddity,” which I thought about yesterday as that Chinese spacecraft came crashing to earth. “Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows…” I can’t say that my meeting David Bowie briefly at a party in 1991 made either of those songs any better than they already are on their own, but it’s fun to think back on it, if nothing else.