Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday Born I was

In honor of David Bowie's 59th birthday today I will forgo my usual laziness tactic of raiding my back catalog for blog entries I will compose a short impromptu stream of conciousness essay on the man, his music and how it affects my life.

I think I grew up always knowing that I would be a David Bowie fan but didn't actually get around to it until around my nineteenth birthday. I was reminded of the prophecy by a track on the Lost Highway Soundtrack entitled "I'm Deranged," a song which begins:

"Funny how secrets travel
I'd start to believe if I were to bleed"

It's a spooky song, sung with a voice full of diaphragm and mystery. It always makes me stop and listen. It aches.

David Became something I could claim as my own. I would never say I like him better than U2 or that he has had anywhere near the influence that that band has had on me but loving them was joining a group of the obsessed, people who evangelize and meditate on their music. David Bowie is like my private chapel.

Todd Hayne's movie Velvet Goldmine, which is based on Bowie's life and manages to grasp the spirit of the style without any of the spirit of the man does have one brilliant insight in a scene where a UFO comes down and bestws an emerald ring upon Oscar Wilde and that ring is later passed on to the David Bowie character. There's a lot of truth in that connection. Both Bowie and Wilde are aesthetes but not superficial. Makeup and theatrics for Bowie are what velvet suits and witticisms were for Wilde. Both men play characters as a way living out a truth. Both men seem to be amoral bacchanals but if you look deeper both display a great understanding of God. Wilde wrote "happy they whose hearts can break and peace of pardon win, how else man man make straight his plan and cleanse his soul from Sin, how else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in." David Bowie wrote "Lord, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing And I'm trying hard to fit among your scheme of things It's safer than a strange land, but I still care for myself And I don't stand in my own light." The legend is he wrote that during several months of living entirely on whole milk and cocaine.

God is an American.