#DavidBowieIs

Tuesday my aunt took me on a special weekday treat! We went to the Museum of Contemporary Art to explore the David Bowie exhibit. What a morning. We wore headphones that pumped interviews and music through us for the whole two hours we enjoyed the costumes, artifacts, and music videos. No photos were allowed, but I jotted some ideas in my iPhone notes:

"Everything went into my mind as being an influence."-D.B.

Constant theme of Bowie's work is that he was forever devouring art, culture, trash, whatever and grinding it all up into what he made. Truly we all do this--we just don't always know where our influences are. Bowie on the other hand recognized the strings in his brain, and perhaps that made those strings sing.

A major influence of his early in his career was "The Happy Prince," a story I had forgotten about. I used to read it often from an Oscar Wilde treasury from my grandfather.

"The medium is the message."-Marshall McLuhan

"That's the point of contemporary pop music. It spits of the past."-D.B.

Inauthenticity made up the 70s. And here we are in the 20dimes, living in irony.

DB was maestro of his work. He worked with designers, sure, but there were sketches upon sketches for every level of his showmanship. Pages of his boyish handwriting scratching lyrics, little notes for music, clothing concepts, storyboards...He said it was better he do it all himself. I'm honestly glad there's a lot of stuff I don't trust myself to do. I trust others' opinions much more. What a terror that would be--to know you could do everything better. What a terror, and, yet, how important it must have been for DB.

A wall exclaimed, "You are an engineer."

Advice from the man himself: "Define an area as safe and use it as an anchor."

Finally: "No authors give voice, but instead a rich body of work for us to admire, ponder, and make our own."

But the film is a saddening bore

Cause I wrote in ten times or more.

It's about the be writ again.