Bowie & Friends II

Dear friends,

This month sees publication of the second of my two pieces to commemorate David Bowie’s passing, this one—via Modern Age journal—a deep dive into Alexander Larman’s excellent new book Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie.

From the piece:

Larman’s coverage of Tin Machine’s chaotic 1991–1992 tour, in which Bowie and his beleaguered bandmates rolled across the U.K. and U.S. in a cramped bus, playing venues a fraction the size of those he had filled just a year earlier on his Sound+Vision greatest hits tour, is the most electrifying part of the book. During this phase, Bowie comes across as a jittery Cincinnatus returning not to the plow but to the pub (or at least the small theater), not to renounce power but to reclaim it through some drawn-out process of self-mortification. Somewhat akin to the recurring nightmares many of us have of finding ourselves back in high school, Bowie found himself back in his dues-paying phase, a somehow necessary step for charting a viable creative path forward. Larman, despite his misgivings about the group’s music, is too good a journalist not to recognize this material’s value both to his story and to Bowie’s development. He concludes that Tin Machine—the album, and, by extension, the band experiment—was “regrettably vital.”

You can read my full piece here.

Lazarus, as you may have surmised from the title and review excerpt, explores the underappreciated yet endlessly rewarding second half of Bowie’s career. In the crowded marketplace of posthumous Bowie exegeses, this book, in my view, is the one that breaks new ground.

And on the subject of books…

I am happy to report that I have submitted the first draft of a manuscript, written with the assistance of Steve Kilbey and many of the past and current members of the great Australian band the Church, to my editor at Verse Chorus Press. It’s still early days in the process and I’ll have more specifics and an excerpt for you in a later post, but this is a milestone. I started writing the MS a year ago and it has been a full-on sprint since then. Here are some teaser photos for you:

And now, with that book in editing, I’m into the research phase for the next one—a biography of filmmaker John Hughes. In many ways it’s a 180-degree shift in sensibility and I’m feeling some whiplash! But in a couple of surprising ways, it’s not. More on this soon.

Friends and Fellow Travelers

• Remember how I sang the praises of Olivia Rutiliano a few months ago? Well, this great writer and cultural commentator has now landed on Substack. I would encourage everyone to read her mind-blowing piece On AI Actresses and the Timeless Preoccupation with “Building an Ideal Woman” and consider subscribing to her Culture Schlock Substack and podcast.

• On a related note, I highly recommend Sam Kriss’s funny and terrifying Child’s Play: Tech’s New Generation and the End of Thinking from Harper’s. Despite the zaniness of the personalities depicted, it’s hard to understate the importance of this topic. Hated political regimes will come and go, but these strange creatures remain stubbornly entrenched at the top of the economic food pyramid. Why?

• I have recently made the acquaintance of financial analyist and philosopher Vitaliy Katsenelson, who may or may not be my cousin. (His mother comes from a line of Russian Luries, which is also in the mix on my father’s side.) His Intellectual Investor Substack contains just as much wisdom as financial advice, and I was moved by this recent posting on the tricky task of balancing fatherhood with ambition. (Spoiler alert: the latter isn’t worth much if you don’t get the former right). I would highly recommend Vitaliy’s Substack; in every sense, he knows how to put money in its place.

• Last but definitely not least, biographer and historian Bradley Birzer has written this great piece on Ray Bradbury’s political evolution and career-spanning free-speech advocacy, also in Modern Age. (Longtime readers of this Substack might recall my piece on Bradbury’s correspondence in the same magazine). Birzer has been diligently on this beat for a while, and his is the best and most comprehensive distillation of Bradbury’s ideological journey yet published. I’m eagerly looking forward to his forthcoming book on Bradbury.

All right— that’s all for now. Please drop me a line and let me know what you’re up to!

Robert