I guess that to watch dusk fall on one's life must be even harder for those who were once as young, as brilliant, as extravagant and as fascinating and adulated as Bowie was.

Even today, I still have mixed feelings about these autographed records and articles, some sort of relics shattered by the idol himself. 

But thinking about it with hindsight, and when one considers the Heathen’s album cover released at around the time that Bowie slaughtered with black ink my Young Americans’ copy, one can perhaps better understand Bowie’s mindset about iconography, including his own -and in that respect, one undertands also why iconoclasm had become for him the only possible way out .
Because throughout his life, Bowie's choice was to surprise, to deconstruct, to alter and modify, to challenge and destroy everything (including himself, occasionally, with cocaine and outrage), if only for the sake of rising from the ashes.  Clearly, David Bowie was not keen on an eternal commemoration of the characters he had embodied.

Under this perspective, his “attack” against my Young Americans’ copy seems coherent, authentic, almost friendly -somewhat touching.
The Not-So-Young-Anymore-American of 2003 had projected with his ragged autograph his own Black Light on what was -and still is- the most brillant, glamorous and lushest album of his career, in my own view... All things considered, what else could one expect from a Black Star ?