Month: December 2001

Your hat and hat and hat are gone…

David Bowie has donated three of his very own Fedoras to tomorrow’s benefit auction at Christies Auction House in New York City. David wore all three of the hats during the Seventies and Eighties throughout the world. Though not the actual hat he wore in the ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, (he gave that away during his time in Berlin) they are of a similar appearance and the one pictured above may actually be one of them.

The online information makes no mention of many of the lots up for auction, but I can tell you that these incredible items are autographed by David and really are the very last of these hats from that period. These highly stylish Fedoras come in three colours, and here are the lot numbers with the corresponding colours:

601 Black
602 Gray
603 Brown

This is the entry from the auction catalogue that just about sums up the generosity of this donation:

David Bowie Memorabilia – Lots 601-603 – (Auctioned Individually)

Straight from the wardrobe of legendary music icon and actor David Bowie, three autographed Fedoras that he wore in the 1970s and 1980s.

Donated by David Bowie – Value: Priceless

The auction commences at 6:00pm local time tomorrow and tickets to attend are $100. To purchase tickets, call Lynn Schauwecker or Angie Kwak at Tibet House (212-807-0563). Another interesting lot up for grabs is an exclusive invitation for four to attend the dress rehearsal for next year’s Tibet House benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

Boy am I jealous of you New Yorkers. Oh, how I wish I had one of those Star Trek-type Teleporters.

I asked for an autograph…

The item above is the latest addition to the BowieNet Store. Originally manufactured to celebrate the launch of BowieNet, a limited quantity of these BowieNet v 1.0 Mouse Pads are now available to you at the bargain price of $24:99.

And just to make ’em even extra value for money, DB has signed the lot! A Bowie signature on a scrap of loo roll is worth a lot more than that. Just the job as a Christmas present for the Bowie fan in your life who doesn’t yet have an autograph in the man’s fair hand.

The good news
BowieNet has MOW Radio for each new MOW. This means that the MOW can DJ their own mix of 20 tracks from the full Bowienet Radio playlist. The MOW also has the ability to skin the MOW Radio player to match their playlist using Photoshop or Flash.

So far 3 MOW’s have created custom playlists. It is this fact that leads us inevitably to…

The bad news
As cool as the MOW Radio is, the response has been minimal. We want to get you all more involved with this great feature, and are asking you for your input on how we can get this working more smoothly. Currently we have been emailing potential MOW’s in advance, telling them the week for which they were chosen, and then hopefully having them return the email with their playlist and skin attached.

This has worked miserably.

We, therefore, are opening this dilemma up to you all with a poll.

What should we do with the MOW Radio?

Sometimes I feel, The need to move on…

After seven years of being an integrated part of Evan Torrie’s brilliant Teenage Wildlife site, Ruud Altenburg has decided to cut the umbilical cord and take his Illustrated db Discography into the big bad cyber-world all by himself.

This very thorough and well researched site is now up to v12.0, and includes six months of updates to celebrate its new domain, at: http://www.illustrated-db-discography.nl…But do beware, it’s very addictive to spotters like me. I went in yesterday to check out the updates and came out again three hours later! Well done Ruud, somebody has to keep a record of these things, and you’re so very well suited to the task.

The Spookyghost of Manhattan…

David Bowie uses new guitarists like a person who uses loads of new things, or something. Go here for the low-down on one of the new boys, and the latest instalment of the Thom and Gerry show.

When I live my dream…

Out today in those outlets with their finger on the pulse is the January 2002 edition of Alternative Press. The magazine will be of interest to many of you for a couple of reasons…the first being that there is a beautiful new full page shot of DB and the second being that our very own Mask was responsible for the session from which it came. (Click on the image above to view a bigger version…but please respect the copyright on this picture and do not post outside of BowieNet.)

In a feature entitled THE MOST ANTICIPATED RECORDS OF 2002, AP celebrates the new year a month early with words and pictures from Nine Inch Nails, AFI, Bouncing Souls, Disturbed, Filter, Chemical Brothers, Green Day, ICP, Marilyn Manson, Weezer and of course, David Bowie.

Mask was responsible for the shots of all three of the artists outlined above in bold, but DB is the trophy she has had her lens on for a long time now. When I asked David how he thought the session had gone, he replied:

“I was gobsmacked when I met Mask as she wasn’t wearing one and there wasn’t even a sniff of one in the studio. To hide my disappointment I just started posing and Lo and Behold she whipped out a camera and started clicking away, giving a very credible performance as a first class photographer. I told her to keep it up and then we both went home. Brilliant!”

And this is how Mask responded when I asked her the same thing:

“Why didn’t anyone tell me Sailor was really David Bowie? I showed up with my throwaway instantmatic camera hoping to shoot Sailor and David Bowie walks into the studio. To hide my disappointment, I just started shooting and Lo and Behold, he started posing…Yeah right!”

In the feature itself David compares the follow-up to ‘hours…’ to such disparate albums as Diamond Dogs and Low, and he had this to say: ”Townsend said it was like Franz Kafka meets Ed Wood. And that’s because he liked it. But I really got what he meant. There’s a handmade quality to the album. But other than that, I couldn’t compare it to any work that Tony and I have done before.”

Intrigued? I know I am…And I didn’t once mention cows! Oooops…

And while we spoke of many things…

A recent spat of compilation CDs have included tracks by David Bowie. We have listed them below in a handy cut-out-and-keep erm…list, with the tracks that appear on each. All of the CDs are now available, and both the ‘Millennium Gold’ and ‘Air Guitar’ CDs are still enjoying TV advertising here in the UK.

Here ya go:

‘The Concert for New York City’
‘America’ and “Heroes” – both tracks live
3 December, 2001 – Sony TV

‘MOULIN ROUGE – Music Inspired by the Film’
‘Diamond Dogs’, “Heroes” and Nat King Cole’s version of ‘Nature Boy’
3 December, 2001 – Virgin TV

‘Millennium Gold’
‘Ashes To Ashes’
19 November, 2001 – Universal Music TV

‘The Best Air Guitar Album in the World…Ever!’
‘Rebel Rebel’
5 November, 2001 – Virgin TV