(Photo: Gregory Pace/FilmMagic)

David Bowie is taking a break from being David Bowie, at least for a year. “I’m fed up with the industry,” he said at the Vanity Fair party last week. “And I’ve been fed up for quite some time.” He greeted strangers with, “Hi! I’m David. I have seven children. And I’m fucking freezing.” So how does an icon slack? “Just don’t participate. I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums. I go for a walk every morning, and I watch a ton of movies. One day, I watched three Woody Allen movies in a row. I like going out to the Angelika: If the first one’s only okay, I’ll sneak into one after the other. It’s so easy.” He says he has no plans to take up hobbies either. “I’ve been listening to Arcade Fire and Secret Machines and this great opera from the eighties called Nixon in China. It’s just that. He gets off the plane. He has dinner with Mao. Someday, I might do opera. But I don’t have a musical in me, much less a vampire musical.”

Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Jada Yuan
• Table of Contents: May 8, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!