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* Come to SuperVegan’s 3rd birthday party! It’s tomorrow (Thursday) at ’sNice Brooklyn, with an afterparty at Lucky 13 bar. We will have free cake and beer. Details here.

* Apparently there’s going to be a Lymond-focused Dorothy Dunnett fan gathering in France in autumn 2010. Um, that sounds awesome. I need more details, obviously, but there’s plenty of time to save money and make plans. Maybe I can get my mom to go with me and split the costs now that I’ve hooked her on Dunnett. *hopes* (Also, 10zlaine, you seriously need to read the Lymond Chronicles so that we can do some Dunnett-related traveling someday! Look, audio books!)

* Marilyn Manson has an absinthe called “Mansinthe.” I tried to say “Mansinthe” aloud and couldn’t get it out without choking on laughter.

* A David Bowie/Mick Ronson picspam. I’ll be in my bunk.

* I'm reading Alias David Bowie by Peter and Leni Gillman. It's exactly the kind of creepy, sensationalist, overly intrusive celebrity bio I was meaning to avoid. Their premise is basically "David Bowie wrote songs that a lot of people like, therefore he owes us every intimate detail of his personal life." Which... I think Neil Gaiman's post about grrm today pretty well covers it: when you buy an artist's work, you're buying a copy of that particular work, not the artist himself. The actual human being behind the art doesn't owe you anything.

I feel kind of guilty for reading it, but it's like a car crash--I'm kind fascinated to see how low it will go. Not Bowie--the book actually sheds very little light on him--but how far the authors will sink in terms of digging into the personal lives of his family members and wildly misinterpreting his lyrics to suit their creepy Freudian thesis (it apparently never occurs to these people that a song can be written in the first person without actually being autobiographical!).

Their claim in the introduction is "David Bowie was really pissed at us for writing this, therefore we must be hitting really close to the truth!" when it should've been "David Bowie was really pissed at us for writing this; maybe we're assholes." I mean, seriously, if anyone tried to write a bio of me by digging up dirt about my grandparents I would 1) laugh my ass off at how stupid that is and 2) be seriously annoyed at them for picking on my grandparents! If "producing art that people like" doesn't equal "owing the world every detail of your life," then "sharing DNA with someone who produced art that people like" certainly doesn't.

I'll go back to Buckley's Strange Fascination once I finish with this. Strange Fascination is a far more thoughtful, analytical, and ethical analysis of Bowie's work, but it was starting to drive me crazy with its constant references to controversies that the author thinks it's inappropriate to delve into. I mean, he's right, but he keeps mentioning them and then refusing to explain as if these are things Bowie fans are already supposed to be aware of, which makes for a very frustrating reading experience.

* Album-wise, I've gotten up to Lodger. It's okay; I like "Look Back in Anger." Nothing after Station to Station has grabbed my interest the way the Ziggy-era stuff immediately did, though. I like Low intellectually and I think "Heroes" is a great song. But Station to Station is the last album that enthralled me on an emotional level. (The first is Hunky Dory, although bits of The Man Who Sold the World are amazing, and I like "Cygnet Committee" and "Space Oddity" from his 1969 album).

* I like how my interest in Bowie has led to a deeper understanding of the culture of rock music--the way concepts I always took for granted like "authenticity" and "selling out" grow from a particular ideology. Rock music was always an avenue for me to question the world around me, but I think it's also important for me to question it--many of its underpinnings are far more conservative than I'd considered.

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