“David Bowie is . . .” at the Brooklyn Museum

At the Brooklyn Museum, “David Bowie is . . .” draws huge crowds, as it should. Dense with history, art, and music, the exhibition, a transplant from Europe where I first saw it in Berlin, is essential viewing. My memory piece from January 2016, written on the occasion of Bowie’s unexpected death, seems especially appropriate:

I was a huge Bowie fan back in the day, which made it strange that I did not recognize him when I met him backstage at The Bottom Line during a Steve Reich and his 18 Musicians concert. This light haired, well-groomed guy stood there in an argyle vest and pegged pants. Maybe I was clueless because he wasn’t wearing lipstick or glitter. The preppie guy and I talked about the lizard on top of the Lone Star Café at 13^th Street and 5^th Avenue very near home for me in the West Village. As we chatted, a room full of people leaned in. I could feel the heat of their bodies and curiosity. What were we talking about, rapt and oblivious to them?

I let them press in until I was out the door; suddenly the face hit. After hearing that he could, in addition to shape shifting onstage, blend into the ebb and flow of characters in the city, unrecognized, I feel less sheepish. I located in my cache of belongings, six of Bowie’s albums from key periods of his astonishing career. My collection of Bowie vinyl could have been sent off to storage obscurity, but instead ended up in my living room with carefully culled “selects” of some Miles Davis and Coltrane. Today they seem extra precious.

In Berlin, in summer 2014, I wandered into the Martin Gropius Bau. Among the exhibitions: David Bowie. There displayed in room after room: his chronology, art, style, influence, and affinities. I saw pictures of two artists who had influenced me when I first arrived in Manhattan in the ‘70’s. One was Klaus Nomi. I used to have afternoon coffee with him at Sutter’s, at the foot of the Women’s House of Detention before it became a branch of the New York Public Library. Klaus and I both hailed from Germany under very different circumstances, and, Germans together, we shared a passion for coffee in the afternoon. He was an assemblage of triangles from his pointy shoulders to pursed lips, applied dark lipstick at the table, and sang in a falsetto like Lou Christie. Unlike Bowie, with whom he’d worked, Klaus did not “blend.” He vanished in the early ‘80’s, one of the first to go in the scourge of AIDS. Not only is his picture featured in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, but clips from his performances in backup with his stage twin Joey Arias, with Bowie.

The other was William S. Burroughs who had perhaps the most profound influence on me. Bowie and Burroughs knew each other from intersecting planets. Burroughs and Brion Gysin influenced Bowie’s use of the cut-up technique, instrumental in lyrics from “Lodger” and “Low.” When I met him, Burroughs, the father of punk, the most alive junky in New York at the time, was poised to take off for outer space. He told me, we won’t need our bodies for this time/space excursion. Why would we? They are only the clutter of biology, rife for the encumbrance of addiction. Our minds would get there before us. He was a space traveler with this exceptional artist, “The man who fell to earth.” As I think of it now, maybe that’s what death is. 

Regina Weinreich

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