1.14.15 Editor’s Desk

1.14.15 Editor’s Desk
Billy Manes
Billy Manes

It was about 3 a.m. when, curled in my perpetually awkward slumber that involves noise and talking for no real reason, I “heard the news today, oh boy.” My lifelong hero, my sun, my moon, the man who fell to earth and influenced every song or band or fashion to which I would cling in dreams and sleep and love and hate was dead. Tony, my husband, was doing a radio show when the update clouded the transom: David Bowie, 69, had passed from cancer just a couple of days after his birthday.

I only mention this because, well, it meant that my skull collapsed and shattered and the ground became a hole. Yes, it’s overdramatic to eulogize a celebrity or an artist in such a sadly choreographed fetal-position cramp, but that’s what I did. I cried in a ball, I pressed words together in my head the same way that Bowie did on small pieces of paper, I made nonsense make sense and I ran to my computer to relive a life I had already absorbed once before. I was an Absolute Beginner once. A Starman. A Hero. A Dead Man Walking.

It was very early on a Monday morning, somewhere close to the end of a production cycle for Watermark; I was already behind on deadlines, but now I was beneath. So I sobbed some more and watched, in chronological order, the years of my life, my misbegotten life, dance on the screen. Only three days prior, Tony and I had a Bowie day; it was the release date of the Thin White Duke’s newest and last album Blackstar, a maudlin reflection on life and love and disaster tainted with horns and hope.
“I can’t give everything away,” Bowie blustered at the album’s end, and I think, deep inside, I knew something was amiss.

You’ll pardon me for this rant, I hope, because if there has ever been anyone who made me feel OK about being gay in the beginning, who espoused glamor to such extremes, who would throw on a frock and fake his own suicide as if to only reinvent himself, it was Bowie. I learned from that; I tried to do the same on all levels. We were all spiders from Mars, and as such, we were all immortal.

So when a dream dies, when that crouch of pain and tears becomes meaningless in its aftermath, it’s a big deal. I lost it; I don’t remember much of Monday.

But I do remember David Bowie.

For those who rolled their eyes at my mourning morning gear on Jan. 11 – I did in fact wear a black star over my black garb – here is why I cried. Life isn’t quite as artful as it should be anymore, in my opinion. We race from blip to blip, dish to drink, work to bed and stop realizing things. There are no more story arcs, just dot-matrix doubts and shit thrown at walls to see if it sticks: a vocoder, a sequencer, a meme, a Facebook post, some beats thrown in for good measure.

I’m not trying to play the “back in the day” game here, but at least for me, David Bowie was the father of reinvention and inspiration, a shooting star. Even his commercial failures stood shoulders above the chaff we float on today. And, as someone in an internet meme said Monday (natch), we’re lucky to have lived in this small capsule of time that included him. I am lucky. I know this.

Blackstar was Bowie’s goodbye, and it was perfectly timed, just as everything he did was. The think-piece writers are now putting the twos with the twos and realizing that his last video “Lazarus” was in fact a note to his fans and the ultimate expression of pain via seizures and letter-writing.

But, to most of “All the Young Dudes,” it was also just another brush with genius, one we were fortunate enough to absorb, enjoy, think about and share. He never let us down. And losing him felt like the loss of a family member, the last of the gang to die.

There’s a more substantive bit about Bowie deeper in this issue of Watermark, one with fewer tears on its page, but I couldn’t walk in these platforms at this job, at this paper, where we encourage individualism and change, and not pay homage to the man who, I would argue, made it possible for a generation to believe in itself.

Tellingly, Watermark is going through a bit of its own reinvention this week with a new logo and a new company name, Watermark Publishing Group Inc., under the promising new ownership of longtime friend and publisher Rick Claggett. Hell, it went under quite a few changes this year, including my ascension to editor-in-chief.

But if Bowie taught me anything, change is living. Turn and face the strange.

“I don’t know where I’m going from here,” Bowie once said. “But I promise it won’t be boring.”

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