12 January 2016 - David Bowie dies aged 69

Postscript: David Bowie, 1947-2016
Hilton Als (The New Yorker, 11/01/2016)

This was not supposed to happen. Ever. Because he had been so many people over the course of his grand and immense career, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t continue to be many people—a myriad of folks in a beautiful body who would reflect times to come, times none of us could imagine but that he could. He always got to the unknown first.
David Robert Jones was born, in Brixton, to working-class parents, on January 8, 1947, and the Brixton of his day was a changing place—home to members of the “Windrush generation,” West Indians who, like immigrants everywhere, had come to England looking for a better way. And the music those islanders bought to their new island no doubt influenced the artist who always wanted to be an artist; indeed, Bowie’s need to perform—to be recognized as different—made itself known when he was a child. In movement class, he claimed center stage, striking attitudes that his instructors found unusual, original. He was always an original, not least because he defied “Englishness”—not making a fuss, not standing out—by making theatre out of his body and that incredible face.
Everyone knows the story. Jones—who did not shrink from a fight—was arguing with a friend over a girl when his friend punched him in one of his blue eyes; somehow, his fingernail got caught in Bowie’s left eye. The result was a permanently dilated pupil. Just as Marlon Brando broke his nose while horsing around backstage during the Broadway run of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and the accident added to, rather than detracted from, his beauty, Bowie’s infirmity only added to his allure, an “oddity” whose romanticism imagined other places in addition to this world—places he invented and filled with longing.

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Worldwide tributes to David Bowie: 'His death was a work of art'
Ben Quinn, Caroline Davies and Edward Helmore (The Guardian, 11/01/2016)
David Bowie’s latest album, released last week to coincide with his 69th birthday, has been described as his “parting gift” as collaborators and friends paid tribute to the iconic star after the unexpected announcement of his death.
Close friends were among those who recalled Bowie’s final interactions with them amid a re-examination of Blackstar, his final work. It includes a new single, Lazarus, whose video opens with the image of a dead spaceman and which begins: “Look up here, I’m in heaven.”
In a Facebook post, Tony Visconti, who produced a series of Bowie’s albums, revealed the significance to Bowie of Blackstar, his 25th and final studio album, released to critical acclaim.
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David Bowie dead: London street party celebrates icon 'as he would have wanted'
Christopher Hooton (The Independent, 11/01/2016)
Thousands of David Bowie fans descended on Brixton, London last night, not to mourn the loss of the artist, but to celebrate his life and revel in the wide-ranging music he gifted to the world.
Hastily thrown together on Facebook after news of Bowie's death, the understandably haphazard event started fairly mutedly as people gathered in the district he grew up in, laying flowers at his shop wall mural and trading memories under the Ritzy cinema's illuminated tribute, which read: 'DAVID BOWIE. OUR BRIXTON BOY. RIP.'
Before long, however, the windows of a flat opposite the cinema were thrown open and 'Heroes' was blasted out of its sound system, to the delight of those congregated below.
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