Stars We Grew Up On

Eight spreads, six of them argument. Turn and face the strange; the masks were the point — the personae are authorship rather than concealment, which inverts the usual reading of unmasking as exposure; everything hidden, brought to the front; from the capsule to the blackstar, tracing the arc from Space Oddity to ★, recorded while dying; authenticity is our purest freedom; and made of star stuff. Difference read as direction rather than as deficit, and the freedom of having more than one self. Filed in Stars We Grew Up On, the collection that deliberately owns the star-as-celebrity sense of the word. Two listening companions: the five Bowie cards that open the L★S Playlist, and the long version, Nobody Got His Eyes Right.

Eight spreads, each built around an embedded AURORA song: a different kind of human; the mothership is coming; warriors and weirdos; there is no cure for me; running with the wolves; and runaway home. The arc is the argument — she came home by gathering a tribe of Weirdos, not by being cured into fitting. Feeling alien, the mothership's invitation, naming your people, refusing the cure, and stimming in the open. Filed here beside Bowie because both are public figures whose difference was read as direction, and because this collection owns the star-as-celebrity sense on purpose. The listening companion is Stimming and Belonging with AURORA, weighted toward live performance because the argument is the body.

The spine is entrainment, and it is unspent anywhere else here: groove is measurable and agreed upon across listeners, so repetition is the mechanism rather than the deficit — and Remain in Light was built by layering one held figure at a time. Byrne gets to the same place himself three hundred pages into How Music Works, linking being accused of missing obvious social cues to sensing a musical build; the zine extends that paragraph and declines the mirror-neuron wiring he hangs it on, because the broken-mirror account of autism did not survive review. Two spreads are about transmission rather than music: he wrote “a very mild (I think) form of Asperger’s syndrome” and the internet published a coming-out, and in the same paragraph he repeats a 1994 study’s 69 percent without the qualification printed in its very next sentence. The same fault, twice, in one paragraph. Then subtraction as access — a performance style he himself called defined by negatives, down to instructing club lighting people to turn the lights on at the start and off at the end — and the budget line: Byrne got to be an auteur, and the same nervous system without a record deal gets a behaviour plan. Listening companion: One Body at a Time.

The spine is a design decision anybody can check: the Imagination Library has never had an eligibility test, and the book is addressed to the child by name rather than to a parent or guardian. Set against the gates the rest of us live under — income thresholds, severity cut-offs, the annual review that funds you for being worse — that becomes an argument rather than a nice fact, because a gate does not only ration, it sorts, and sorting needs somebody to rule on who is worth it. The physics spread earns its place: a star has no mechanism for aiming its light, and the inverse-square law is geometry, not judgement. Two spreads are about what allyship cost her, including the death threats she received over Travelin’ Thru. Then the turn — Tressie McMillan Cottom’s The Dolly Moment gets a spread, not a footnote, and is not answered on Dolly’s behalf; her closing line about knowing what we love turns out to be the LYDTYSS grammar in someone else’s words. It ends on a misquote: Dolly attributed a paraphrase to Emily Dickinson in her own autobiography, dropping the hedge exactly as we once did, and gets loved down to that too. Listening companion: Love Without Cringing.