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So I've been grooving on Bowie's music all day, giving thanks to the Goddess for his existence, and to him for the great gift of art he gave us all. And I realized that my favorite of his albums is not any of the ones you might think, but rather his best-selling one: Let's Dance.

I think it's genius. Who else could have rescued disco from the ash heap of music history and made dancing bright and fun and hot and COOL again? Nobody I can think of. And yet he pulled it off (with help from his friend Niles Roger, of course). I love these tracks. They swing. An old-fashioned term, but the only one that fits. They take you by the hips and make you want to MOVE.

And I fucking love that.

Modern Love

China Girl

Let's Dance


(Note the album cover image, which you see in that last viedo - another example of Bowie's cutting humor, as "let's dance" is a fighting term as well as an invitation to dance.)


So yeah, along with Starman (my favorite Bowie song) and Rebel Rebel, his "disco-era" stuff - Fame, Young Americans, Golden Years - and the Let's Dance album are really my favorites. I much prefer music that makes me want to move rather music that makes me angry or sad. The Berlin period may have been more innovative, but it's just not stuff I want to listen to. THIS is what I listen to - the Bowie that moved, that danced, that laughed. The Bowie that knew life is worth living.

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Jesus. I really don't know how to feel about this. He was so enormous, unique. It's not sadness I'm feeling - it's emptiness. He's not leaving sorrow, he's leaving a hole. A hole in the center of things, at the edge of things, in the eye of things. In the way we see things. No, in the way things are seen. He created a way to see things that no one else had before, and now that lens is capped, and things will not be seen that way again. Other ways, yes, but not the way he saw them. It was never the makeup, or the swagger, or the knife-edge balancing act of his persona, or the songs even - it was the way he saw things. That's what made it possible for him to rope together all the arts and disciplines he did, and make a life that was in itself a work of art.

It was that life in total that was the thing, not any one component. He wedded life and art and found the way to make them dance together. I am a DJ, I am what I play, he sang, and he was right. For the world, he was what he played, what he played at, what he played with. He played with the world, turned it into a weird, fantastical jungle gym that he climbed on, up, around, endlessly rearranging the bars to move the dance along.

He was sharp, too. His humor was pointed, observant, nasty, and he used his art and his stature and his stance as a slightly alien being to drive that humor home. To drive that knife in. Listen to me, don't listen to me. Talk to me, don't talk to me. Dance with me, don't dance with me. No... Beep beep! He reveled in artifice - in some ways he was the ultimate Artificial Being - but he played with that fantasy, made it reality, then made it a fantasy again, taking it with deadly seriousness while he was laughing hysterically. That constant uncertainty, that duality, made him the human embodiment of Schroedinger's Cat, in a way - he was never one thing or the other, but both and neither simultaneously.

He played with history, too. Even his own stories were fair game. The shrieking of nothing is killing me... Time and again I tell myself, I'll stay clean tonight... I've never done good things, I've never done bad things... The hero Major Tom falls to earth hard, his fame driving deep into darkness, depression, addiction. He falls into a field of stars he cannot escape, up into a space that traps him, slowly killing him. Want an ax to break the ice, wanna come down right now. The beauty of the world can lift us into heaven, but it can also rot and kill us. There is no certainty, only change, fluidity, the cycle. Change or be left in the darkness.

Fake or real? Is there a difference? Does it even matter? All of life is a fake, a construction, something made up between creatures who think they know what the world is. But we don't know, not really. All we have is our stories to keep us afloat, to give the time meaning, to keep time in existence at all. Every pair of eyes is different, every gaze changes the world, nothing is the same ever, anywhere. Strange fascinations fascinate me... Time may change me, but I can't trace time. Fluid, moving, changing. We think we're on solid ground, we think we know the world, but ultimately we know nothing. His art celebrated Socrates in its way, acknowledging that the best wisdom is to acknowledge the absence of certainty, to keep questioning, keep searching, keep moving. To move is to live... until one stops moving. And even then, we keep moving, onward, into something we cannot see or understand.

But it doesn't matter, does it? Because we're here, right now. The water flows around us, we swim, we dance, we change. Life is a dance, a song, a painting, a living sculpture. An alien thing, fallen to earth from the stars, breaking open and covering the planet with a net of seeming infinity, always changing, climbing, dancing, joining, separating, rising, waking, looking up, rising up, falling, falling, dying and rising again. Moving towards the light, falling towards the darkness. Life, grand, bright, ridiculous, spinning, exploding, artful, chaotic, heroic, seemingly endless... until it ends. We can be heroes, just for one day.

Just for one day. That's the message. Just for one day.

RIP, strange and beautiful prince. I'll keep my radio tuned to the stars. Now you'll be the one calling us from beyond...

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are passing back and forth
through the doorway where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

-- Rumi

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