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DIONYSIAN_SOAP

                                              December 29, 2005

  I once picked up some rock n' roll book
  on display at City Lights, and flipped
  through it at random: there was a short
  paragraph about Angela Bowie walking in
  on David Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed
  together, and then casually offering to
  get them something to drink.

  I laughed, sneered at this lowbrow rock
  "biography" crap, and put the book back
  on the shelves -- and walked away from
  it with this (possibly apocryphal) story
  wedged in my brain forever.                    SERPENTINE_KISS

     Thinking about this later, I
     decided that my original sneer
     was a misplaced snobbery...

     This stuff clearly *matters* to
     me, why pretend otherwise?

         A character like Bowie transcends
         mere celebrity and becomes something
         like a mythological figure.

         Refusing to read from the Books of Bowie
         just because their veracity is uncertain
         is clearly besides the point.

         And refusing to read rock literature
         because I'm supposed to be above that
         stuff, that's pretty crazy:

             (a) I'm not above listening
                 to the music.

             (b) I'm supposed to be above
                 being above things.
                             
  So I resolved some day to       
  read some schlock rock          
  biography trash, and glean      
  what I could from it.           
                                  
                                 
  I didn't get very far... I read a book about David Bowie,
  "Loving the Alien" and found it to be only of middling
  interest (it degenerates into reviewing his sales
  figures...  "Can he get another hit!? Oh my.")

  I bought a few Patti Smith bios ; a few
  Velvet Underground books, and then let         BANG
  the project drop for a while...
                                                     CAMDEN_TOWN
      Eventually I even bought
      Angela Bowie's book, but I
      passed on it several times                           
      first, and have only glanced      (The writing looks          
      at it.                            terrible.  Maybe Angela     
                                        actually wrote it.)         
                                                                    
                                                                    
  But more recently, I've really                                   
  found the mother-lode:

           PLEASE_KILL_ME

  Are celebrity anecdotes too trashy
  for you to bother with?

  Myself, I think there's something
  inherently amusing about the
  thought of Phil Spector asking
  Arturo Vega if he's a Nazi.



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