Never seen this video before, but holy shit, Bowie was a god!
Back when he passed, I wrote an obituary of sorts on the old job’s content-starved Yammer site (thought that was bad enough, then after being taken over by a nearly 1K-large organization, theirs was still manned by a single executive whose role seemed to be to do nothing but), accompanied by this picture:
I remember some banter about David Bowie before the last staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was rummaging through some of the boxes in the garage only to unearth these relics from a bygone era. 7th-generation [iPod] nano for scale… to think I ran with that thing, which really is as heavy as it looks! (And isn’t Apple getting a lot of flak over rumors that their next iPhone is going to do away with the headphone jack, it being what, 2016 now?) All the memorials may have since passed, but the “Heroes” cassette was surprisingly cued up for the title track—like a kind of time capsule, almost—and while the playback reminded me just how old this stuff is, it was a fine personal tribute to the artist.
Bonus: The song is just as brilliant in languages I’ve studied in my lifetime. Sadly, the only music I brought in to play on Mrs. Hogshead’s box turntable was Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” 12-inch. (Pardon if the lyrics don’t display upon hover, the Soundcloud iFrame seems to interfere with the <title> tag. These links are all bound to fail one day, anyway, so best to preserve the content elsewhere.)
Define it as the perception of sound without a corresponding external source, and I’ve had it all my life, that noise I’d just assumed was from the pressure exerted upon my skull I could hear in the silence, caused either by the tides within or the radiation that’s only become more pervasive since the Zenith in the other room. But last week I woke and it was louder, I couldn’t yawn it away, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid the cracks were finally starting to show… What am I saying, they’ve been here all along, it’s the damn burst I should be expecting. The soundtrack I had always imagined to be from Curb Your Enthusiasm (or Joker) was instead replaced by the low hum of machinery in the background at a deserted facility, designed by David Lynch. It’s let up somewhat, I’ve noticed it dissipates almost entirely after exercise or orgasm, or I’ve grown to accept its symphony with the computer fan, cracked skylight, WiFi and what I presume are the reverberations of my crumbling reality.
I just realized that all the links to audio and video files in these shitty WordPress blocks will probably break when I inevitably change things around again and I’ll have to clean them up like I did for years of images (and am still trying whenever I come across more of them, mostly on the old sites), God, I’m an idiot sometimes.
Here’s a B-side from a 45 I sheepishly thought I was the only one who had; dig how the 80’s synth cuts into a beat that’s got to be inspired by 1972 Krautrock masterpiece, I wish a short-run underappreciated BBC series had accompanied this theme music. I got it: three astronauts return from a mission and realize they’re not the ones who were originally sent to space but in fact are alien beings from a distant planet—now they must choose between subjugating humanity with their strange abilities or joining them against the larger invasion force to come!
I dl’d this bass-heavy version, but should be able to find the original Now disc in one of my boxes
A mainstay in my 5-disc changer, the one into which I painstakingly keyed so many titles for it to display throughout the early 90’s. Talk about life’s labor lost, I wonder if its onboard memory preserved them, or like my 100% Super Metroid save, they’re all but digital ghosts in broken-down machines, the precarious memories of yet another who is himself fast approaching the same state.
…Until then, however, I’ll accelerate things by eating whatever the fuck I want, including supermarket deli lasagna and Oreo Cakesters, which take me back, too, perhaps not as far, but still to a time when there seemed more ahead than behind. Got me thinking how the Metaverse/San Junipero will recreate ancient treats like these in our minds, because I can’t recall re-experiencing them in dreams, maybe by hijacking the right areas of the brain and simulating the sensations? Could this be done in real-time, say, to disregard information your nerves are sending and fool you into thinking that your dinner smells and tastes like dessert? Might the discrepancy in the fake crunch of the delicious burnt pieces cause bite irregularities or would that be compensated for as well?