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Professor vows to ‘spend a year as David Bowie’
08.19.2015
09:27 am
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Will Brooker, a professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University, is going to write a book on David Bowie, and, in order to do it, intends to eat, sleep, and dress like the legendary rock and roll icon. In order to gain a better understanding of the musician over the more than 40 years of his magnificent career, Brooker will immerse himself in the trappings of the pop icon’s life in what has been dubbed “The Method,” a process of transformative immersion.

This unusual and arduous process will lead to a written account of the year-long experiment under the name “Forever Stardust.” Brooker’s areas of expertise include Alice in Wonderland and Batman. His most recent book is Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman.

Bowie was perhaps the first rock and roll celebrity who is renowned for rapid, chameleonic and experimental changes in his persona, which often inspired those in the fashion world—later musicians of this type include Madonna and Lady Gaga. It will be a challenge for Brooker to maintain so many identities in such a short time, although fortunately, as he got older, Bowie’s wardrobe became more conservative as well.
 

 
Indeed—not only his wardrobe! Bowie famously spent a good chunk of the 1970s abusing drugs and experimenting with the occult while living in Los Angeles around when Station to Station was recorded (an album Bowie does not remember recording).

As Brooker said recently on an interview on Australian radio,

I’ve been reading some of the books that Bowie read, though, and he was very much into the occult, Aleister Crowley, ah, Nazism—you know, all kinds of strange literature, and some of that reading does have an effect on your thinking, especially if you’re doing without sleep, long-distance flights, and so on, you know? If you’re reading some strange science-fiction and books about magic, you know, you can get into Bowie’s head, you can see and sometimes quite a strange place, a dangerous place, a place you wouldn’t want to live too long.

Brooker continued, “It’s fortunate that I’m going through Bowie’s career chronologically, because by ’83 he was pretty clean, so I’m kind of looking forward to that, I think I’ll get a tan, get fit.”

Brooker identifies as a David Bowie fan, of course, but—paradoxically, perhaps—not an obsessive one.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Excerpts from the secret ‘autobiography’ David Bowie gave Cameron Crowe in the mid-‘70s: EXCLUSIVE
British professor claims to have photographed fairies!

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.19.2015
09:27 am
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