In this second installment of Mark Dery’s autobiographical essay (a “nonfiction novella”) about a suburban teen’s transcendent encounter with Ziggy Stardust, our hero has his congenitally straight brain blown in a late-night, black and white encounter with the confusingly feminine Ziggy during Bowie’s final appearance as the character.
Mark Dery
Mark Dery (markdery@gmail.com) is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books: Escape Velocity, a critique of the libertarian-bro ideology that dominated the Digital Revolution of the ‘90s (and is now the operating system of Trump’s autocracy); two studies of American mythologies (and pathologies) The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, and, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. He has taught journalism at NYU and been a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale. He popularized the concept of “culture jamming” and, in his 1993 essay, “Black to the Future,” coined the term “Afrofuturism.”
