How to Be Unapologetically Creative

Liz Phair on “Rebel Rebel” After finishing my 33 1/3 volume on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, I’d had enough ruminating about the album on my own. Now I wanted to hear what other people had to say. So I wrote to some of the smartest and most interesting people I know to ask them for their thoughts and feelings about Bowie and Diamond Dogs. The amazing and wonderful Liz Phair—who needs no introduction for readers of this blog—generously took a moment from her current tour to send me this anecdote and appreciation. It was a…

Proximity to Blackness

Daniel Alexander Jones on David Bowie After finishing my 33 1/3 volume on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, I’d had enough ruminating about the album on my own. Now I wanted to hear what other people had to say. So I wrote to some of the smartest and most interesting people I know to ask them for their thoughts and feelings about Bowie and Diamond Dogs. One of those people was Daniel Alexander Jones, a Guggenheim award-winning performance artist, playwright, director, essayist and educator who teaches at Fordham University. At the…

Camp and Excess on Diamond Dogs: A Conversation Between Glenn Hendler and Rick Moody

After finishing my 33 1/3 volume on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, I’d had enough ruminating about the album on my own. Now I wanted to hear what other people had to say. So I wrote to some of the smartest and most interesting people I know to ask them for their thoughts and feelings about Bowie and Diamond Dogs. One result was a long and engaging (at least to me) email exchange with the writer, Rick Moody, author of many moving works, from 1994’s The Ice Storm to last year’s…

Why Diamond Dogs?

Glenn Hendler, author of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, on why he chose to write about Bowie’s dark, dystopian album The first time I saw David Bowie in concert, he pointed directly at me. He was on his 1976 “Isolar” tour in support of the album Station to Station, and I saw him in my hometown: New Haven, Connecticut. Bowie was in his “Thin White Duke” costume and persona, and the third song he played was “Fame,” his first #1 hit in the United States. Near the end of the song, Bowie rhymes…