David Bowie died yesterday, 2 days past his 69th birthday and the release of his latest album – Blackstar. You’ve got to admire the sheer willpower!

David Bowie, or David Robert Jones, was an artist who created his own genre – a visionary, wildly imaginative and unique music/performance/social commentary that escaped from all attempts at categorization. He was a singer, composer, actor, social critic…

His most remembered incarnation was Ziggy Stardust, an androgynous alien rockstar who gives a message of hope to the dying Earth and is torn apart by black hole-jumpers… Well, you’ve got it there, in this one sentence. This was in ’70 when many weird things happened, granted, but still – Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane was one of the most unusual and most influential of them.

Heck, the reference to his social commentary was quite recently used by Banksy in the form of the famous makeup Banksy put on the British Queen’s face:

I’m not a great fan of his music, although I like some of the songs, but I remember him most vividly from Jim Henson’s 1986 movie Labyrinth, where he played the king of goblins. He was an unsettling presence, especially for an 8 – or less – year-old. A very ambivalent character, menacing and alluring at the same time, childishly egotistic and depressingly alone.

He played in many more movies, his roles include Tesla in Nolan’s awful The Prestige, a not-so-immortal vampire in Tony Scott’s erotic horror The Hunger… And Pontius Pilate in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

He inspired many and will be missed by more.