On Monday morning I was doing yoga and listening to Radio Canada
when I heard something in French about David Bowie. Something about a new
album, then I thought I heard the announcer say that a concert in Quebec was
cancelled. Finally I realized though why they were talking about Bowie so much
when I heard, “Triste nouvelle, David Bowie est mort.” Wow! One can’t even say
that it’s the end of an era with Bowie’s death because he was an era all by
himself that spanned several eras of pop. I guess I didn’t hear Bowie until the
re-release of “Space Oddity” in 1973. I was eighteen then and living in the
Beaches in Toronto. Around that time a young woman of fifteen who called
herself “Cusha” moved in with me. She was nuts about Glam Rock, Iggy Pop and
Lou Reed, but she was obsessed with David Bowie. The only Bowie record I bought
for years was his “Man Who Sold the World” album, but that got played a lot.
In terms of degrees
of separation, the closest I ever got to David Bowie was when his pal Iggy jumped
off the stage during his concert at the Victory Burlesque Theatre and crawled
onto my lap. I also ate lunch and chatted with Bowie collaborator Robert Fripp
one time in West Virginia back in 1985.
When I was living
on the streets of Vancouver in the late 70s, I used to hang out with a street
musician named Andy Johnson who included in his repertoire, Bowie’s “Dive In
Saturday” and a medley combining Bowie’s “Five Years” and “Star Man”. I would often sing back-up vocals when he
performed those pieces on Granville Street.
As a songwriter, a
lyricist, a performer, an actor and a visionary, Davis Bowie was unparalleled.
He was perhaps the only true Renaissance man that rock and roll ever produced.
Bowie’s death
though made me think about Bob Dylan and how he has pretty much outlived
everyone, including highly influential people like Bowie who were influenced by
Dylan. It makes one wonder if Dylan is going to live forever.
I read about half
of “Good and Evil; Good and Bad”, the first essay from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “A
Genealogy of Morals”. At one point he claims that Israel used Jesus to take
over the world.
I checked online to
make sure I knew where to go for my classes on Tuesday and found that
Continental Philosophy would be at Koffler House on Spadina north of College
and The Short Story would be at University College. After reading the weather
report for Tuesday though, and seeing that there was going to be a snowstorm, I
was really dreading the trip. The plan would have been to go to the first class
and then go home for a while, but if there turned out to be lots of snow it
would make more sense to find a place downtown to wait for the four hours
between classes.
One good thing
about these courses this year is that almost all the reading material is online
and so the only book I have to find is Gabrielle Roy’s “The Road Past
Altamont”, which seems more like a novel, even though it’s included in the
Short Story course.
I listened to two
episodes of Amos and Andy from 1945. In the first, Andy was telling Amos about
a woman he’d once dated that had so many chins he couldn’t tell where her lips
were to kiss her. His solution was to hold a piece of candy in front of her
face and then kiss the part that opened up to eat it. The second episode had the
line, “As long as we’re goin nowhere, let’s keep it local.”
In the evening I
took a short bike ride until the cold started nipping at my ears and so I only
made it to Bloor and Ossington before heading home.
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