Bowie related symbols in the City of Buffalo Flag

My interview tomorrow will feature Yuki Numata Resnick, a world-renowned violinist who I met while working on a project in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. While there I noticed that the City’s flag contains several symbols related to David Bowie. This, of course, is pure coincidence, but the coincidence borders on the uncanny. Pick a random other city and look up its seal— there’s a good chance you will find few if any Bowie-related symbols.

If it isn’t obvious, let me point out what I’m seeing in this one:

Lightning bolts. The lightning bolt has been a symbol associated with Bowie since he wore one across his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane (1973). The Buffalo flag features 13 lightning bolts, symbolizing its early use of hydroelectric power (it was one of the first cities to have widespread electric lighting). And who gets credit for electrifying Buffalo? None other than Nikola Tesla himself, who Bowie portrayed in the Christopher Nolan movie, The Prestige (2006).

Stars. Stars make frequent appearances in Bowie songs—“Star,” “Starman,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “The Prettiest Star,” “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love),” “New Killer Star,” “The Stars Are Out Tonight,” “Blackstar” and more. Buffalo’s flag includes 13 stars, representing its inclusion, as part of New York, as one of the 13 original colonies.

The Color Blue. The dominant color of the Buffalo flag is blue. Bowie conspicuously mentions blue in many songs: “Silly Boy Blue”; “Space Oddity” (“Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”); “Running Gun Blues”; “Sound and Vision” (“Blue, blue, electric blue. That’s the color of my room.”); “Repetition” (“And he could have married Anne with the blue silk blouse…”); “Scary Monsters” (“When I looked in her eyes, they were blue, but nobody home…”); “Let’s Dance” (“Put on your red shoes and dance the blues”); “China Girl” (“I’ll give you eyes of blue…”); “Blue Jean”; “Lazarus” (“Oh, I’ll be free, just like that bluebird…”). The only other color in the Buffalo flag is white, which also pops up in Bowie lyrics (“The return of the Thin White Duke;” “Black tie, white noise;” etc.). But Bowie clearly invests special meaning in the color blue, and while I am not an expert on city flags, it seems atypical to me for those city flags I have seen for it to both one dominated by one color and for that one color to be blue.

Sails. “Sailor” is a word associated with Bowie in part because he used it as his personal username when posting on BowieNet. The name is an anagram of “Isolar,” referencing his 1976 Isolar tour. Sails and sailors would pop up in Bowie songs, like “Red Sails,” “Life on Mars?” (“Sailors fighting in the dance hall…”), or “Move On” (“Well I might take a train or sail at dawn…”).

Water. Water appears in different forms in different Bowie songs. That isn’t especially unusual, but peculiar to Bowie is an association between water and death. In, “Candidate,” Bowie proposes a date that ends in suicide: “We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band. Then jump in the river holding hands.” The river is again a place of death in “Glass Spider”: “If your mother don’t love you then the riverbed might.” The absence of water is the central problem of “Looking for Water,” which might have been inspired by Bowie’s role as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, who came to Earth, ya know, looking for water. The Buffalo flag depicts a canal, probably the Erie Canal, and Lake Erie right about where it intersects with the Niagara River.

Sky. The prominent clouds in the Buffalo flag orient the image beneath the sky. While this might seem obvious, most representational images in other city flags are either out there on their own or are set beneath featureless skies. Some Bowie songs, such as “Memory of a Free Festival,” explicitly mention clouds, but the number of Bowie songs that either explicitly or implicitly mention the sky (for instance, “Starman”) is too numerous to count. The clouds in the flag might be a subtle reminder of Buffalo’s infamous weather, but, like many Bowie songs, also evokes looking to the skies.

Canada. The landmass in the distance on the flag is Canada. The image of a foreign country in the flag of an American city is rare and might be unique. Bowie had some distant connections to Canada— he often performed there, he recorded there, and hey, Canada is part of the British Commonwealth. But more broadly, its inclusion on the flag speaks to Buffalo as an international city. Bowie was nothing if not a citizen of the world. Even if he didn’t explicitly mention Canada in a song, many other countries and more broadly the idea of travel appear very frequently (travel is a major theme of the album Lodger, for instance).

Lighthouse. Lighthouses are not a theme in Bowie songs, but light is. I immediately think of “Heathen (the Rays)” and his repeated performance of the Velvet Underground song, “White Light/ White Heat.” Not unlike water, light takes different forms in Bowie songs (“does my face show some kind of glow,” for instance, in “Station to Station). But once you start looking, you find references to light all over Bowie’s lyrics. The lighthouse in the flag represents an actual landmark in Buffalo, but more broadly it suggests the function of the light, which uses light to show the way. This tracks with Bowie’s usage of the concept on an abstract level. Combined with the lightning bolts, stars and everything else, Buffalo’s flag seems like it would fit in well on stage at a glam rock concert.

Of course, all of these connections are entirely coincidental. But Bowie valued “found art” and encouraged his audience to bring their own meaning to his work. He said of his famous “cut up” technique, “if you put three or four dissociated ideas together and create awkward relationships with them, the unconscious intelligence that comes from those pairings is really quite startling sometimes, quite provocative.”

While the main point of this post is to highlight what, at least to me are some nearly remarkable associations between Bowie-related images and themes that would be hard to find in other city flags, the worth Bowie placed on assigning meaning to images and words that are not inherent to those things, and certainly not provided by the author, puts the work on the audience. Art becomes interactive, not passive. And, oddly enough, the creative engagement between art and civic affairs (specifically in Buffalo), is also the theme of tomorrow’s interview…