Today: Ziggy Played Guitar

Last Week: Chris T., Errand Boy

Here’s how the human mind works: I said “Happy Birthday, HAL 9000!” in last week's newsletter end began to reflect on the famous “shutting down” scene where HAL keeps repeating the name “Dave” and it put me in mind of David Bowie and I thought further still to Bowie’s breakthrough Space Oddity and how it’s directly connected to my favorite film of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey and I thought about that time in 2001 (the year, not the movie) I talked a friend into going to see it in it’s 70mm widescreen rerelease at the Ziegfeld and how skeptical the friend was about the film’s merits, thinking it was all hype and the movie is overrated and how the friend didn’t feel that way after seeing it and why, over the years, I’ve spent untold hours learning about the film and trying to understand it while knowing it’s ultimately a very simple story about the next chapter in evolution, beautifully told and that it escapes me not everyone feels the same way about it and I kept thinking through to how Bowie probably saw it many times and I’m sure he loved it and then I thought of his recent birthday, how he shares it with Elvis Presley, who used Also Sprach Zarathustra as his entrance and exit music from 1968 on and I continued to connect, all the way to Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s “2001” co-writer and genius who wrote The Sentinel upon which “2001” was based and who once said “If you understand ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we have answered.” and who, in 1945, first postulated the idea of bouncing signals off man-made satellites in geostationary orbit above the earth and without whom I might not be currently employed and how, if he had come out of the closet early in life he might’ve been shunned and unemployed and how this whole paragraph would then be moot and it brought me back to David Bowie and how he broke down barriers and and then I thought of Ziggy and how HE was like the “2001” Starchild, returning to Earth, to help us evolve. Or destroy us. Your choice.