#90: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Black Devouring Star, pt. 2 (Patreon)

(Apologies if the audio isn't opulent; had to work in adverse conditions.)

MJ on the secret links between Blackstar and The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie's shamanic psychosis, and "human life" in the dust of a dead media galaxy.

***[Please note: Hearing this again for the first time in January 2023, I think my diction in characterizing the pre-AIDS gay community in New York was poor – a word like "decadence" sounds like a sanctimonious reprimand, which is not what I meant at all. I should've said something like "comparatively open and optimistic" next to the inferno of the 1980s. 

It's essentially impossible to imagine what that would've been like, but when COVID starting closing down the world, I periodically tried to tell myself something like: 

"OK, imagine that COVID is completely unexplained, completely incomprehensible, and it's only killing people like you, whatever 'like you' means. Now imagine that the rest of the world, from your own town to D.C., is ignoring it, barely trying to understand it, much less cure it – and on the rare occasion that people who aren't 'like you' even talk about it, they're either saying that it's holy retribution and you deserve it, or they're treating it like a fucking joke.

"Imagine 10 or 15 years of that; imagine that the 'explanation' they finally drag out is the most threadbare bullshit you can conceive of; and imagine that as soon as people who aren't 'like you' start getting the disease, there's suddenly a mass economic and political push for a cure. The most famous not-like-you victim of the disease not only survives, but can return to the physical shape of a goddamn NBA player, while you've spent a decade watching 100,000 people like you getting literally eaten alive, visibly poisoned and broken bit by bit for months, for years, turning into animate cadavers, and not only is there no way to stop it, there's not even a way to find out how it started."

I think about that a lot now.]