My David Bowie

The first time I heard David Bowie was my freshman year in college: San Francisco State, Fall 1975. My new best friend, W., occupied a handsome suite in the 14-storey Verdugo Hall, much nicer than my cramped shabby room in Font Hall. We’d hang out, skipping classes and getting high all day, occasionally making films with the 8mm camera he had on loan from the film department. We shot on the roof of Verdugo (illegal) and in the fields of Marin County, where Christo’s miraculous Running Fence snaked across grassy ridgelines. Once, we shot a sword fight in the Japanese Gardens in Golden Gate Park. No one thought twice about it. One of W’s film major buddies was sleeping with his female professor. That’s just how it was in those days. I could walk down Market St. openly smoking a joint.

We listened incessantly to “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Ziggy Stardust.” At one point, I feel quite sure I thought the latter was the greatest album I’d ever heard. The Sgt. Pepper of the 70s, as one pal put it, probably quoting a line from Rolling Stone. We got stoned and watched “Star Trek” re-runs and argued about Sartre. We were all idiots. But god, what a great time we had in our sprawling decadent ignorance.

I began wearing beautiful suits I’d found at thrift shops, complete with cufflinks. In imitation of Bogart in “Casablanca,” I sported a tan trench coat and a fedora. I grew obsessed with Garbo and Dietrich because in San Francisco at that time it was just part of the larger gay cultural atmosphere. The newly re-opened Castro Theater, a fabulous art deco movie palace whose program featured Warner Bros. gangster films and MGM musicals, became a second home to me. I smoked cigarettes and affected a pretentious cosmopolitan air, complete with faux British accent. As fate would have it, my first real girlfriend, N., also a massive movie and Bowie fan (we saw “Children of Paradise” several times together at the Surf Theater) had been raised a 7th Day Adventist and refused to go all the way. There followed what seemed like endless nights of dry humping in an apartment I shared with a pot dealer, J., on Guerrero and 24th, on the edge of the Mission District, which in those days was still a bit sketchy.

When I moved back to Huntington Beach in 1977, these guises and interests faded away. Our little group of culture fanatics was immersed in Bowie, but also Roxy Music (a natural extension), Eno, and the burgeoning punk scene. Bowie’s romanticism still exerted a powerful aura, though. The heady, naked yearning of “Word on a Wing” or “Wild is the Wind” was like a drug. “Wild is the Wind” especially carried an extraordinary power. An aria of sheer longing, it stripped you bare, reduced to pure trembling emotion. It offered kenosis and embodiment at the same time. Erotic longing as decreation? Bowie wasn’t just a sensuous rocker; he was our Sinatra and Elvis, combined. Of course, Sinatra was our Sinatra, too. Bowie led quite readily to “In The Wee Small Hours of the Night” and the rest of the Chairman’s catalog.

With Bowie’s departure a significant chunk – not of my youth, which is long gone – but of what it meant to be young is in no way lessened but magnified. Till his death, I had no idea how much he meant to me. He was just there – a kind of structure of feeling for feeling. When Lennon was murdered, I was devastated. I remember finding out about it by picking up the LA Times on the way to work that morning. The bus ride, the whole day in the office, passed in a daze. But I didn’t grow up with Lennon or The Beatles in the same way I grew up with Bowie. He made it safe to be, not dramatic, exactly, but passionate and lyrical and free to revel in artifice. Life was theater, his songs said, but that theater was real – more real than anything, because it made reality bearable – and without that theater, without the power of artifice, the whole thing was a brutal joke and a lie. Bowie’s theater made it possible to re-imagine your own life. He was the great champion of the weird and the different.

Oh you pretty things
Don’t you know you’re driving
your fathers and mothers insane?
Let me make it plain.
Gotta make way for the homo superior.

The allusion to the X-Men and mutants says it all. He told us we could invest our lives with glamour, even if it was a borrowed glamour. That it was OK, even cool, to be different.

But Bowie’s appeal went beyond even that. There was something gnostic about his many personae and his dangerous songs poised on the edge of nothing, as Simon Critchley so smartly characterizes them. Gnosticism in rock is not nihilism nor hedonism. It’s the recognition of alienation in a world made by an alien god. Bowie was the poet laureate of gnostic rock – of otherness, difference, weirdness. His music’s power came not from about singing about loss, which the blues and rock have always sung about, but a more fundamental metaphysical predicament having to do with being adrift in being, with the flux of identity, the fluidity of the self and the power of music to conjure multiple avatars out of a desire for belonging, even while realizing that heimlich will always be unheimlich.

Perhaps Bowie’s most gnostic turn came in the Nicholas Roeg film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on the novel by Walter Tevis. The story is one of an alien’s attempt to rescue the remnants of his race from their dying planet by bringing them to Earth. But his introduction to earthly culture leads him to become an alcoholic (in fact, the novel is a brilliant account of alcoholism as a kind of gnostic amnesia, along the lines of “The Hymn of the Pearl”) and he forgets his mission, succumbing to apathy, amnesia, and despair – trapped in the world of gross matter. The gnostic turn becomes an elegy for a fallen race.

So many of Bowie’s songs are suffused with a sense of elegy. From “Memory of a Free Festival” to “Blackstar,” he gave us a sense of the pleasures and sadness of the fleeting, the mortal. Bowie recognized, as no rock star before him had, that we are always double, always split, always sliced in two by the mirror. Rather than try to heal that split, he owned it, exploited it, claimed it as the heritage it was. His songs proclaimed that we are multiple rather than singular, and that that was a good way to be.