I don’t know why I’m even blogging about this since it hardly qualifies as news, but apparently I am. BuzzFoto spotted David Bowie in attendance at the new musical Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark. Unsurprisingly, the show suffered a 20-minute delay due to difficulties. Follow the link to view the photo, unless you wish to throw some money our way so we can buy it and post it here.
Posted in News | Comments Off on David Bowie Seen at Spider Man: Turn Off the DarkFriend, former band member and producer for David Bowie, and co-founder of Chic Nile Rodgers announced last week that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Like so many people who live through cancer, Rodgers started a new blog, Walking on Planet C, to share his experiences and thoughts on his treatment and recovery. Visit Nile’s blog to read about his surgery, morning walks, and motivations.
Posted in Circle Of Friends, News | Comments Off on Nile Rodgers Announces Cancer DiagnosisThis is too cute. The blog Letters of Note came across a treasure from 42 years ago – the response to the first fan letter that David Bowie received from an American fan. Bowie got a letter from 14-year-old Sandra Adams (now Dodd) of New Mexico when he was 20 years old and wrote his response from his manager Ken Pitt’s office typewriter. The picture from Sandra’s website is below. Note his typo! It’s strange to think back in the days before computers that if you made a typo you could either rewrite the entire document or just live with it and move on. I like Bowie’s choice – to poke fun at himself.
Usually I don’t agree with all of the choices for these types of opinion based lists (not even the Seriously Random Lists on my favorite Pajiba), but this time I totally do. Check it out – David Bowie made the number 2 slot for the Cinematical Seven: Most Fashionable Men on Film. Of course I would switch him up to number 1, but I can’t complain too much since not only is Bowie given some due but I like the rest of the choices. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go dig out our DVD of The Hunger and put it on this week’s To Be Watched pile.
Posted in News | 1 Comment »Magazine and newspaper writer Marc Spitz published a new biography of David Bowie entitled, very simply, Bowie: A Biography. Bowie’s life has been the subject of many a biography and music magazine column, but Spitz wanted to take a different approach with his own work. In an interview with Mr. Media Radio, Spitz said that he wanted to conduct more interviews of Bowie’s acquantainces and to add his own personal anecdotes and thoughts to liven up what could easily be a laundry list of names, dates, and performances. There was a lot of hubbub around Halloween about the infamous story of the white witch that Bowie during his more cocaine-addled days, but I suspect that there is more to the book than just that story. I haven’t read it yet, but if I manage to avoid getting laid off (again) I’ll buy it and read it over the holidays.
Posted in More To Own, News | 1 Comment »Anyone that has played any of the Lego video games knows that they are awesome. Lego Star Wars – awesome. Lego Indiana Jones – also awesome. Lego Batman – until now, the most awesome of all. In fact, that one is so great that the Webmaster and I accidentally spent an entire Saturday playing it some months ago. But now to top all of them is Lego Rock Band. Before we heard anything else about Lego Rock Band the Webmaster and I thought it sounded like a ton of fun, but now that we know both David Bowie and Iggy Pop are going to be featured it has climbed straight to the tops of our pile of Games To Own and Love.
The complete song list for the game will be:
All American Rejects – “Swing, Swing”
The Automatic – “Monster”
Blink-182 – “Aliens Exist”
Blur – “Song 2”
Bon Jovi – “You Give Love a Bad Name”
Boys like Girls – “Thunder”
Bryan Adams – “Summer of 69”
Carl Douglas – “Kung Fu Fighting”
The Coral – “Dreaming of You”
Counting Crows – “Accidentally in Love”
David Bowie – “Let’s Dance”
Elton John – “Crocodile Rock”
Europe – “The Final Countdown”
Everlife – “Real Wild Child”
Foo Fighters – “Breakout”
Good Charlotte – “Girls & Boys”
The Hives – “Tick Tick Boom!”
Iggy Pop – “The Passenger”
Incubus – “Dig”
Jackson 5 – “I Want You Back”
Jimi Hendrix – “Fire”
Kaiser Chiefs – “Ruby”
Katrina & The Waves – “Walking on Sunshine”
The Kooks – “Naïve”
KoRn – “Word Up!”
KT Tunstall – “Suddenly I See”
Lostprophets – “Rooftops”
P!NK – “So What”
The Police – “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”
The Primitives – “Crash”
Queen – “We Are The Champions”
Queen – “We Will Rock You”
Rascal Flatts – “Life is a Highway”
Ray Parker Jr. – “Ghostbusters”
Razorlight – “Stumble and Fall”
Spin Doctors – “Two Princes”
Spinal Tap – “Short & Sweet”
Steve Harly – “Make Me Smile”
Sum 41 – “In Too Deep”
Supergrass – “Grace”
Tom Petty – “Free Fallin”
T-Rex – “Ride a White Swan”
Vampire Weekend – “A-Punk”
We the Kings – “Check Yes Juliet”
The Zutons – “Valerie”
The game play will be similar to that of the other Rock Band games with specialized controllers being used for each of the instruments. Players will also be able to design their own band members, build a Rock Den, earn prizes and rankings, and, perhaps best of all, use the power of rock (Patton Oswalt will be so tickled), to destroy stuff. Like I said before, awesome.
So, without further ado, let’s meet Lego Bowie and Lego Iggy.
The National Portrait Gallery in London will be displaying the exhibit Beatles to Bowie: the 60s Exposed until January 24 2010. Over 100 photographs of icons from the 60s in London are used to explore how music and performance created the famous “swinging 60s”. Musicians and performers shown include The Beatles (of course), David Bowie (of course), The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks. Superfans of the groups included in the exhibit will no doubt be interested in the number of previously unseen pictures included in the exhibition. Those interested in booking a ticket to see the exhibition can do so here. As the Webmaster and I won’t be able to make it across the pond to see the exhibition, any of our readers that are so lucky should enjoy it doubly for us!
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
Way back in 1972 when David Bowie developed the character of Ziggy Stardust and his band the Spiders From Mars, never in his most coked-out dreams did he think he would ever have an actual arachnid named after that endeavor. German scientist and spider expert Peter Jäger discovered the spider Heteropoda davidbowie on Mars in Malaysia earlier this year. Jäger has said in interviews since the discovery that he finds that naming spiders after celebrities brings more attention to the endangered status of these insects as their habitats are destroyed. With this publicity stunt, the Heteropoda davidbowie joins Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi in the ranks of spiders named after musicians.
Okay, get this. Nick Troop, the Principal Lecturer in Health Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, wrote what he considers to be the ideal David Bowie song. He used an program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to analyze the words and emotional processes in the lyrics of the songs on Bowie’s most commercially successful albums. Then, he fed them through a randomizer program, a thing that Bowie has done himself many times throughout his career, and developed the ‘ideal’ Bowie song. Interesting, no? Okay, maybe not to some but I am fascinated. My background is in psychology and this is the type of stuff that I spend many hours pondering, except I don’t get paid for doing so like like Dr. Troop does. His findings were….interesting. And totally not what I expected. He says, “I found that the songs with positive emotion and social processes were more successful than the songs that talked about mortality.” Given that the character of Ziggy Stardust was obsessed with his own mortality and dramatic demise, I didn’t expect for Dr. Troop to find that positivity is the emotion that makes David Bowie albums sell like there is no tomorrow.
The title of Dr. Troop’s ‘ideal’ Bowie song is “Team, Meet Girls; Girls, Meet Team.” It rolls off the tongue like “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola” does but that is where the similarities end, given the subject matter.
Is it good? Hm, I don’t know if that is the point of the song. But it is intriguing. And, you can’t deny the fact that Dr. Troop knows his Bowie. Respect.
Posted in News | 1 Comment »As is the case with David Bowie’s back catalog up to this point, Station to Station will get the make-over treatment sometime early in 2010. Completists like us will own the following set: Disc 1 – original album, Disc 2 – 5.1 surround sound and original stereo DVD of original album, Discs 3 and 4 – Uniondale, Nassau Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum March 23rd, 1976 official bootleg. As much as I bitch about all the re-releases and compilations it will be nice to have a good-quality recording of that Nassau Coliseum show. In fact, that’s a pretty good thing to include in an album…..other than 15 new songs, that is.
Posted in News | 2 Comments »