Bowie, A Biography by Marc Spitz

www.wvxu.org

just did an interview with this radio station out of cincinnati.  no venus flytrap or dr. johnny fever, but it was pretty good.  i just talk and talk and talk and while i’m talking i sometimes flash in my own head, “god, you’re doing a lot of fucking talking, why not wind it up,” but i guess i’m still kind of keyed up about the subject of DB.  eventually the raw data will recede and i will forget these facts.  i have almost no facts on hand about LA punk rock, for example, and i just had to re-read an old piece on the Stokes that i wrote because it’s going into a Spin anthology and i was like, “oh, yeah, those guys.  they were good.”  i think the shelf life for occupational research is about three years.  i just forgot all my green day, for example.   i don’t know what to post about the Haitian quake.   it seems ridiculous not to acknowledge it, even on a stupid rock n’ roll blog (although it is jarring to see links to relief sites and you tube clips of devastation on my facebook page next to people misquoting smiths lyrics and lamenting the passing of jay reatard, almost like there should be a completely separate media outlet because it reduces everything else to fucking meaningless at best and vulgar at worst).   i have not been able to stop watching the footage on msnbc and cnn.  i am proud that Obama has mobilized the military and our aid workers so quickly to provide hands on relief despite the fact that  our country’s own economy is in the bog.  that’s the best of us there.   i think pat robertson is a dumbass and clearly the worst of us.  needs a kick in the bollocks.  keith olberman wished him damned to hell last night, which i think is a little too much of the same kinda too much.   just a good Gallagher brothers style kickin’ would likely sort him for some fucking sensitivity.  it’s amazing to me that people still talk about and fear “the devil” in 2010.  i mean Rodney Dangerfield has portrayed him.   maybe eighty year old men need to be thoroughly vetted before they are allowed to talk on television.   i’m still bummed out about dick clark on new years eve.   i don’t mean to be flip about jay reatard even in light of the tragedy in haiti.  i don’t own any of his records but i’m told he was talented.   i still own records that i bought in 1980 (squeeze’s argy bargy for example) the year he was born.  too young.  i will check out his music now.   teddy pendergrass died  too. no need to check out his music.  i was raised on it.  harold melvin’s “wake up everybody” was one of my fucking lullabies.   there’s a whole long bit about philly soul in the bowie book that i wrote from the heart.  it’s an interlude that precedes his young americans period, bowie’s.   i thought about posting it here, and maybe i will look for it in my files.  a simple task, a tribute, something to do while stunned and sad, watching all these horrible images of pain and confusion on the telly, feeling guilty and helpless and grateful.  to close on a separate and unrelated note for today, is it possible that Lou Reed is quoting T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the Transformer track “Goodnight Ladies.”  am i missing that?

http://www.powerofpop.com/?p=2688

what we need is adult education… it’s scary how good it felt to be on a college campus today.  maybe that’s where i belong.  ideally as a teacher and not a student.  i mean, i’ve learned some about writing, and certainly plenty about the business of writing that i would probably be valuable, shooting my mouth off in a sport coat with suede elbow patches.  i did an interview with w-fuv, the fordham university radio station.  it was a schlep and a half getting there from the west village (it’s north of yankee stadium) but once i cleared east fordham road and saw that campus i got a little fluttery.  institutional learning facilities.  yeah.  i’ve been out of them, on my own, for eighteen years.   i never applied to grad school.  i didn’t see the point at the time.  i already had an agent.  i was already living and trying to write in new york.  i felt like it would have been a step backwards.  there’ve been flashes since then.  sometimes i still wake up in the morning and see that my browser is stuck on the application information page to the yale school of drama.  or julliard.  clearly i was drunk the night before and thought, “i’m going to learn how to write a real play.”  but i learned more (and there are some new york theater critics who would dispute this) doing ten downtown plays than i would have ever learned there.  i think so anyway.  i guess the microcosmic lifestyle is part of the appeal, the illusion that you’re cut off from the rest of the world.  we didn’t even have the internet when i was in college… in the mountains of vermont.  so we could really use that illusion as heavily as we wanted.  volume one and volume two.  maybe it’s different now, and if i went back to school i’d find that it wasn’t the kind of enclave i expected it to be.  as a student.  but as a teacher.   who goes there for work, and to give something back?  maybe it could work.  and the excitement, the smell, the stones and the trees of an enclosed campus would just be gravy.  i know the difference between good and bad writing in myself and in others.  i know how to edit.  i have both instinct and technical, field experience.   i own the jackets.  why not?  por que no?  clearly i am just looking for ANYTHING right now.  it’s like hemingway said, “after you finish a book, you’re dead you know.   But nobody knows you’re dead.  all they see is the terrible irresponsibility that comes after the terrible responsibility of writing.”  or something like that.  i’m deep in the terrible irresponsibility and those stone buildings look pretty solid.   anyway one of those links is to a nice review Bowie the book got (i’ll put it in my resume).  the other is to the Fordham radio station site.  there’ll be info on the interview up there i am sure.