A London Professor’s Bowie Project

David Bowie

Would you dress like your favorite rock star? And not just for Halloween but for months or even a year? This is what a London professor wants to do for a full year in order to gain a better understanding of David Bowie’s state of mind. But will he be successful…??
According to the Guardian, Will Brooker, who is teaching film and cultural studies at Kingston University, wants to have the full Bowie experience and will be dressing as each the different rockstar persona for a year, acting up as ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, fully immersing himself into their inherent Bowieness.’

‘The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s headspace at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time,’ Brooker explained, according to the NME.

But he does not want to stop there as he is even planning to visit each city Bowie has lived in and to adopt Bowie’s strange dietary habits. And I had no idea his eccentricity was also diet-related, I just knew about the cocaine diet but he also lived on milk and red peppers during the Seventies?

Brooker’s project had some limits though as he realized: ‘His mansion in Beckenham has been demolished, for instance, and I’m unlikely to have a fling with Mick Jagger,’ he admitted. ‘However, it is possible to engage with and get a feel for his experiences without immersing oneself to a dangerous extent.’

The big question now is how will Bowie react? Will he even hear of his research project?

‘Everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought,’ said the professor.

It’s a creepy thing to do, even if David Bowie has himself incarnated so many persona over the years, the project has a vampiric vibe… see you in a year prof. Brooker.