David Bowie is dead…good God! A major-league, avant-garde artist in music for several decades and, for a while, film. Particularly The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. An artist-rocker-maestro-writer-performer extraordinaire has slipped beneath the waves. This is like losing Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger. Cancer took the 69 year-old Bowie earlier today. I’m trying to think of my quintessential default David Bowie song, the one that I listen to more than the others, and it’s a six-way tie between “Fashion,” “Starman,” “Five Years,” “Suffragette City,” “China Girl” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Let’s make it an even seven by adding “Let’s Dance.” I can’t recap Bowie’s decades-long career at 12:10 am — too vast, too extensive, too many chapters. I saw him perform his Serious Moonlight tour at Anaheim Stadium in ’83 or thereabouts. I used to play “Under Pressure’ over and over again in the early ’80s when I lived in the West Village. Oh, to have attended an early ’70s performance of the Ziggy Stardust tour when Bowie had his glam space suits and red-rooster hair. Too much to remember, too much to take, and too damn melancholy. I need to sleep on it. The world is a slightly lesser place tonight.