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DIONYSIAN_SOAP

                                              December 29, 2005
     
  I remember once picking up some    
  rock n' roll book on display at   
  City Lights, I flipped through     
  it at random, and read 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.

     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 resoved 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 (still         
  largely un-read); a few Velvet Underground     BANG
  books, and then let the project drop                                       
  for a while...                                     CAMDEN_TOWN 
                                   
         I didn't even snag Angela 
         Bowie's tell-all book when
         I saw it (I couldn't tell 
         you why not).             
                                   
                                   
  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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