This is the way that mourning hits you: You think you're done, that you've moved on, and then, one day, you turn a corner and you see a flash of hair or hear a snippet of song, and suddenly you're back again, submerged again in all that loss. This is what it's like to watch the video for David Bowie's posthumous release, "No Plan."













The video, directed by Tom Hingston, depicts an electronics shop on a lonely, rainy city street. In the shop's windows are stacked old-fashioned televisions. Suddenly, they light up, mostly displaying static, and a crowd begins to slowly gather around them. Then, the lyrics to the song begin to appear on the screens, followed finally by spectral images of Bowie himself.

"Here, there's no music here," sings Bowie in a plaintive, ethereal voice, "I'm lost in streams of sound/Here, am I nowhere now?/No plan."



The effect, of course, is that Bowie is speaking from beyond the grave, and that it might not be what anyone expects it to be. That whatever he is, wherever he is, he's not him.

"All of the things that are my life," he sings, "My desires/My beliefs/My moods/Here is my place without a plan."

Knowing now that this is one of the songs Bowie recorded knowing he was approaching the end of his life, it's hard not to take it as a sort of statement. the title, "No Plan," is itself sort of jarring, seeing as the release of his final album, "Blackstar," and the music video for his song "Lazarus" mere days before his death is seen as a masterstroke of timing. There was a sense that, even at the end, he knew exactly what he's doing.

Now, we have this, and it seems to say, "I have no idea what happens next."

"Me alone," he sings, "Nothing to regret/This is no place, but here I am."

And here he is. The song is a photograph of a long-passed friend that you stumble across on someone's Facebook wall, at once a pleasant surprise and deeply unnerving. And yet, in that wash of emotion, you can recognize it for what it is: One more moment you never thought you'd have. A gift.



Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.