"Twinkle Twinkle, Uncle Floyd"

When David Bowie wrote that line in 2002, it sounded surreal. A global artist invoking a public-access television figure from Paterson, New Jersey. A local icon folded into a song about foggy memory, the illusion of time, and disappearance. Uncle Floyd Vivino died on Jan. 22, 2026. With his passing, the lyric no longer feels poetic. It feels like the closing of a chapter.

Watching Uncle Floyd on our kitchen television with my dad was one of the fixed points of my childhood. We laughed hard, especially at Oogie. There was nothing else like what Floyd was doing on television: no polish, no guardrails, no concern for taste-making or approval. It was chaotic, strange, and completely unafraid to look ridiculous. It was hand-built, not designed by committee or corporation.

We were both from Paterson, and connections like that matter to kids trying to assemble an identity. I saw him in thrift stores on trips with my mom and grandma. We always recognized him, but we were careful to leave him to his own devices.

As I got older, I kept seeing him in the same places: thrift stores, record bins, clothing racks, the ordinary corners of what would become much of my daily life. Like me, he was always looking for records. Eventually, I introduced myself. I always called him “Mr. Vivino.” It felt right to keep it simple. He knew that I knew. We never had long conversations, just brief exchanges. But I was always struck that I was talking to Uncle Floyd.

When Bowie referenced Floyd - and Oogie - in Slip Away, it landed with force. Not as celebrity name-checking, but as recognition: proof that something deeply local had crossed into global memory. There was nostalgia in it, sure, but Bowie turned it into documentation. I always loved the line about “sailing over Coney Island.” Even though Floyd was based in New Jersey, I imagined the signal of his show stretching across all five boroughs, spanning the Hudson as it emptied into the Lower New York Bay and New York Harbor, and then out toward the Atlantic. A local broadcast with an outsized reach: it's very romantic to think about.

Years later, during my WFDU 89.1 FM days, I served as emcee for an evening of music featuring Uncle Floyd. Talking with him in the green room before the show felt like a collision of timelines. I brought a Floyd album for him to sign. He hesitated over disturbing the original shrink wrap, mentioning that collectors take that stuff seriously. It was a human detail. The man who thrived in absurdity also understood the small rituals of preservation. He was a record collector, after all.

There's a lot of things happening on this stage: never mind the duct tape holding up (or failing to hold up) the WFDU sign, but it's our author and Uncle Floyd in the same spot.

When Floyd later joined WFDU with his own radio show, the symmetry felt almost too neat. Sharing the airwaves with him wasn’t fandom, it was continuity. The same voice moving through different channels. The same signal on a new frequency.

The Vivino family are local legends, but their influence escaped geography a long time ago. What began as regional television became part of a wider cultural experiment, one that anticipated today’s DIY media world. But Uncle Floyd’s version of it was different. It wasn’t optimized. It wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t branded. It was community media, public-access culture, unfiltered expression before platforms and algorithms took over.

His passing marks the erosion of a cultural ecosystem. A time when weirdness didn’t need justification. When local television could shape identity. When someone from Paterson, NJ could build something that reached the world without losing its roots.

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