Persona and personae: Which Bowie are you?
11 Monday Mar 2013
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in11 Monday Mar 2013
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in11 Monday Mar 2013
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in11 Monday Mar 2013
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inSo on Saturday night I did some things that I’m ashamed of, not because of the degenerate nature of them but because I fear that I may have hurt people, not unwittingly, but because of my drunken, selfish state. I can’t explain why I did this, nor what the details are because of the incriminating nature of such things but I don’t know why I feel that it is alright to mess with people’s feelings in such a callous manner. I really feel guilty about the hurt that I may have caused with my foolish words and actions – I have no excuse except for the fact that I was drunk and inescapably horny. It’s not a good place to be in but I feel like I’ve caused a whole lot of trouble that shouldn’t have been caused in the name of my own amusement, fleeting as that may be. I also see why people drift away from me eventually – I cross too many lines, break too many barriers. At heart I know that I am a selfish bitch, I can’t commit to anything except for myself and what I want. I don’t blame people for not wanting to stay with me, I just wish I knew how to do things differently.
07 Thursday Mar 2013
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inBut I do it anyway. That’s what the theme of my life is fast becoming – I have no talent for art, having taught myself to draw at the age of 12, sketching furiously from then on until I was 18. I finished school, started working and tried to fit in and be “normal”. This seems to have been a colossal failure, because since all my peers are getting married and establishing families, I seem to have found myself right back where I started from which is drawing by myself on a Friday night. A key point that I have missed out is why I started drawing again, despite my dearth of natural talent and that reason is that I fell so hard for an imaginary person that I had to try and capture his face through graphite medium and in any other manner possible. I have no idea why, I might be going through a mid-life crisis of some sort, even though I’m rather young for that. All I can say is that Bowie changed my life, he made me realise that I could never be like the suburban drones around me – that what I wanted out of life is something more than that. He made me connect with the person that I was before everything changed, before I was taught to reject everything that I loved as unholy, before I lost myself in the holy flame that reduces individuality to cinders. Now I am rudderless, a ship adrift upon a sea of misunderstanding. Who am I, who is the real me, who is this person that has been living my life up to now? I have no idea, I’m trying to find out through mediums of expression that are open to me – perhaps I’m going through an experience akin to Jung’s where he reached transcendental states via the process of being alone for too long.
Let’s outline my life so far, having been a precocious, intellectually aware teenager that was in love with music, art and everything that smacked of sub-culture, I spent the last year of school trying to be a conventional person, as I had finally tricked someone into dating me and I had no idea what I wanted out of life. I escaped into the rave culture of the late 90s, discovered that sex was one of life’s chief pleasures and was well on my way to joining the ranks of “normal” people – having decided that I would do almost anything to have people accept me, I began to have the sense of having my soul eroded. I took my first job then, fresh out of school and having money for the first time in my life was an overwhelming experience, so I began to buy into the myth that materialism was the way to go and began a lifelong addiction to acquiring things. At this point I decided that my life needed meaning and substance, so I began to be interested in religion because this is the logical choice for people who want to find some sort of spirituality in day to day existence. It is not a good idea for someone who is prone to losing themselves on a daily basis – I began to fall in love with the concept of being an Orthodox Jew, despite the objections of my family who never really got basically anything I was on about. The religion offered a place for me, a solace, a sense of belonging but it was all illusory. I was committed for 10 years to this institution of morality and uprightness – I tried my hardest to fit into the mold that they prescribed for me as a female but there was always something that wasn’t quite right about it. Everything became smaller, restrictions piled upon restrictions, and I was so sincere about wanting to be the perfect person that I put so much pressure on myself that I was bound to fail. I’ve never been a moderate person, and religion brought out those OCD tendencies by the dozen – soon I was trying to block almost everything out that wasn’t religiously related, ergo everything I had ever been attracted to since I could remember.
Then the real storm came when I fell in love, I think that people with borderline OCD shouldn’t ever fall in love but nonetheless, it happens. I was madly obsessed with this person from my community, he embodied absolutely every one of my ideals and I was convinced that this was the reason that fate had led me to religion. So I pursued him, and we had sex a few times, and he played with my emotions of the duration of a year and decided that out liaison wasn’t congruent with his life path and decided to move on. I said that I had, but for 4 long years my every waking and sleeping moment was filled with thoughts of him and how we were fated to spend the rest of our lives together in a happy families kind of manner. Except for the fact that he wouldn’t even look me in the eye, or speak to me – I stayed away, hoping that the force of my will would gravitate him towards me, but sadly I pined. I got an addiction which I’m still aiming to shake off at the moment, which reached the level that I had heart palpitations that sent me in panic to the emergency room a couple of times, landed me in hospital for observation and a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder which led to me being prescribed Xanax which led to a horrific benzo withdrawal that lasted a year and which I am still feeling the effects of. He got married and is now a father, I tried to get a view on his life by befriending his spouse but I honestly don’t care anymore. He’s a part of my past, the past that threatens to overwhelm me every time I try to do anything.
So in short, I stopped being religious, which is a real eye-opener in terms of the fact that I have absolutely nothing to anchor me in life, reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs, I wager and I am trying very hard to figure out why I have been placed on this crazy planet.
Sordid details following, energy permitting…
06 Wednesday Mar 2013
Let’s sway in the moonlight, with soul-bereft 80s Bowie…
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01 Friday Mar 2013
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inAnyone wanting to hear the new David Bowie can do just that. The singer has placed all 53 minutes of The Next Day, his first album in a decade, on iTunes‘ streaming service.
Despite a slew of favourable reviews, until now fans have only been able to hear Bowie’s two comeback singles, Where Are We Now? and The Stars (Are Out Tonight). In general, the album follows the template set by the latter song – more often upbeat and rocking rather than somber and contemplative.
In his Guardian review of The Next Day, Alexis Petridis noted that several songs contained nods to the singer’s past, particularly the 1979 album Lodger: “The dense web of screaming feedback that ends…
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01 Friday Mar 2013
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inSo I received the email early last night from David Bowie’s management, regarding his new album the Next Day: “You’ll be receiving the David Bowie album stream sometime this evening.”
Little did I know everyone else would too.
You can stream the full 14-track album now. You’ll have to have iTunes installed on your computer, however. Read the news and see the link to the stream here (that’s a hotlink). The live stream will remain available on iTunes until the album’s official release (in the U.S. that’s March 12 [Support Independent Ethos, purchase on Amazon]; the vinyl sees release March 26).
That surprising stream for all meant I had to hustle to write up a review so my voice as a longtime Bowie fan is not left out of the mix among other critics. I promised the piece to the “Miami New Times.” After four listens…
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