If Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town is indicative of Jaw Bone Press's usual practices, they make very blocky books. And on a peculiarly stiff paper stock. Each page feels weirdly solid, as if it's a couple of more standard pages pressed together.
As a whole, this 272 page book feels unwieldy. Especially if you're holding it while reading and trying to not bend its spine.
Thankfully, this is a book about David Bowie.
Specifically, how his time spent in Berlin changed his career for the better. At least, that's the sense that I'm getting from the opening 40 pages. So far I've read about Bowie's becoming deeply addicted to cocaine, his growing obsession with the occult, and what sounds like a mental break from reality that resulted from the combination of the two.
Thomas Jerome Seabrook keeps foreshadowing what's to come, though. Things like why Iggy Pop didn't return to Hollywood's Oz Studio after one day of recording with Bowie in 1975, and what makes Bowie's Berlin Trilogy of albums such a critical success.
Much has been promised, and it's looking like Seabrook will deliver.
At the very least, Bowie's crazed obsession with the occult does help explain just what he was doing in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Even if that movie appearance was nearly 20 years later.
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