David Bowie Is...

[SeriousSideFX lııllı|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|̲̅̅=̲̅̅|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|llıl]

An avid reader



The man who read the world: David Bowie’s son launches an online book club in his honour. Something not well known about Bowie: he was an avid reader, sometimes finishing a book in a single day. Rock star David Bowie was “a beast of a reader,” according to his son, Duncan Jones; so Jones decided to start an online book club to honour his literature-loving dad. The official Instagram account of the late rock star dubbed it the ‘Bowie Book Club’. David Bowie’s literary tastes were wide-ranging; including classics such as Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘The Iliad’ by Homer; novels s such as A ‘Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess and ‘Infants of the Spring’ by Wallace Thurman; together with a wide variety of nonfiction works: history, biography, art, architecture and more….. even the Beano!
Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life – a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. It’s telling that among Bowie’s final public statements was that this list of his Top 100 books was offered as part of the David Bowie Is museum exhibit. As Bowie has apparently left no memoir behind, the closest that he ventured to autobiography is this list of books. Some he chose because he wanted his fans to read them, but many selections have a deeper resonance in his work, in that they fuelled his creativity and shaped who he was. — with Wow Scenery.

[Mobius]

David Bowie's Top 100 Reads:

Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top by John Braine
On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
City Of Night by John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Iliad by Homer
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
David Bomberg by Richard Cork
Blast by Wyndham Lewis
Passing by Nella Larson
Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
McTeague by Frank Norris
Money by Martin Amis
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
Strange People by Frank Edwards
English Journey by J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
1984 by George Orwell
The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
Beano (comic, ’50s)
Raw (comic, ’80s)
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete
Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
The Street by Ann Petry
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
The Bridge by Hart Crane
All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Teenage by Jon Savage
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Viz (comic, early ’80s)
Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult by Rupert Thomson
In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

[SeriousSideFX lııllı|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|̲̅̅=̲̅̅|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|llıl]

^some good stuff and may add to my list of unread, but want to read books


although, did Hutch put this in there??
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

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First day in the us...Silver Spring!


Admiralty Drive in Silver Spring was never the same again.  That is me (waving), my brother Ron, and David Bowie on David's first day in the U.S. in 1971.  Why did he spend his first day in America in Silver Spring...and more Maryland stories in my book "Fast Forward, Play, and Rewind"
https://whoshaq.wordpress.com/2021/02/04/david-bowie-comes-to-america/


When we got to my house, the members of Sky Cobb were in my living room passing a bong around. The band didn’t even try to communicate with David, something that some of them regret to this day. David had never seen a bong before—and, no, he did not partake of the substance in the bong.


Late that night, David went to his hotel in D.C. and left the next day. An interesting fact for all Bowie fans: David went to Mercury Records headquarters on East Wacker Drive in Chicago. After a meeting in my brother’s office, Ron handed David several 45’s that were on the Mercury and Smash labels. One of those records was “Paralyzed” by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. David took a fancy to “Paralyzed,” and on that 1971 promotional tour of the United States, David decided to use “Stardust” as part of his new persona, Ziggy Stardust. To this day, among my brother’s many achievements in the music business, his giving David Bowie “Paralyzed” ranks high on the list.

[sweetcell]

First day in the us...Silver Spring!

with that kind of an introduction, no wonder he was afraid of americans

[SeriousSideFX lııllı|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|̲̅̅=̲̅̅|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|llıl]

also cosmic glue




he's not wrong

[SeriousSideFX lııllı|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|̲̅̅=̲̅̅|̲̅̅●̲̅̅|llıl]

a center.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/david-bowie-centre


What is the David Bowie Centre?
The David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse is the new permanent home for David Bowie’s archive. The space will host everything from guest-curated small displays to unrealised projects.

The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, including 414 costumes and accessories, nearly 150 musical instruments and other sound equipment, designs, props and scenery for concerts, film and theatre. Bowie’s own desk is part of the archive, alongside notebooks, diaries, lyrics, correspondence, fan mail and over 70,000 photographic prints, negatives and transparencies.

The Centre is brought to life with a series of small, curated displays. Highlights include 1970s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto, a film showcasing performances from Bowie’s career, and an installation tracing his impact on popular culture.

The inaugural display will feature an exclusive guest-curated display by multiple award-winning musician, producer, songwriter and Bowie-collaborator, Nile Rodgers, and Brit-Award-winning indie rock band, The Last Dinner Party. Their selections include Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour suit, personal correspondence between Bowie and Rodgers about the 1993 Black Tie White Noise album, plus handwritten lyrics for ‘Win’ from the 1974 album Young Americans and set lists for Bowie’s 1976 Station to Station (Isolar) tour.

Bowie’s extraordinary creative capacity included ideas for a number of projects that were never realised. The displays will show some of these, from an idea to adapt George Orwell’s 1984, to plans forYoung Americans and Diamond Dogs films.