Bowie & Friends 1

Dear friends,

It has been 10 years since we lost David Bowie to the Blackstar, or Mars, or wherever he went. The only silver lining of his passing has been his subsequent unequivocal (and appropriate) canonization as one of the greats of popular music, right up there with the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

To mark this anniversary, the Canadian journal Cosmos + Taxis has published a revised excerpt from my long-out-of-print minibook We Can Be Heroes: The Radical Individualism of David Bowie. You can read the “new” piece here. (A brief perusal of the other contents of the journal reveals that I could have deleted the part where I explained who Friedrich Nietzsche was. Oh well.) Huge thanks to editor Leslie Marsh who solicited and worked with me on the piece, and to We Can Be Heroes’ original editors David Swindle, David Bernstein, and Adam Bellow, without whom it would never have existed. Stay tuned for a second, brand new Bowie essay next month.

In the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to the doings of a few of this Substack’s talented friends:

John J. Miller has just begun a biweekly column for the Wall Street Journal’s new “Free Expression” section. His Dec. 30 salute to Bob Seger is terrific.

Shawna Kenney posted a lovely remembrance of Joe Strummer right here on Substack. The answer to your question, Shawna, is yes, this arts and music aficionado would be interested in reading your book of interviews.

The world famous The World Famous Nine author Ben Guterson has dispatched another of his mysterious “capsule biographies,” which you can read here. (There was a second dispatch, in Broken City, which has since disappeared along with—apparently—the magazine. How appropriate). Astute subscribers have clocked that Guterson seems to appear in the pages of this Substack with nearly the same frequency as the song “Gimme Shelter” appears in the films of Martin Scorsese. Is that because Ben is prolific, or does it have something to do with the Lisbon Circle? Please read all of his capsule biographies to find out. Maybe.

And one from the vault: More people need to know about this fantastic piece on Nixon and Elvis, my favorite among Christopher Sandford’s many, many great pieces. It seems to have cycled out of the Spectator’s main archive, but Spectator Australia still has it. Read it while you can.

And that’s all for now. Happy New Year!

Robert