Samizdat my friend, you are a transformer. My friend, you are a transformer. The Strange Case of Dr. Brooker and Major Tom

© batenka.ru, text,

© AST Publishing House LLC

* * *

Chapter 1
How to become famous

How to become famous, happy, find yourself and your love, predict the future and cure all diseases

According to sociologists, about 30% of people dream of becoming famous, and 40% of the population are happy when they get a little random fame. Actually, great ambitions and the desire for fame are just a consequence of our childhood complexes, but more on that later. The main thing is that this chapter has everything you need to become great and famous in the Post-Apocalypse era. After all, the world after the End of the World is a place where everything is possible. Field of Miracles, a giant Russian roulette where one person, completely by chance, becomes a famous participant criminal group, while another turns into a super star by playing air guitar. You can become a great killer maniac, or you can put everything you have on the line, but never achieve anything. You'll learn how to fight in a cage in front of a crowd, what it takes to be on TV and have women ask you to sign your name on their bare chest, and whether you can turn into the late and great David Bowie and how it will affect your health. All the stories in this chapter are true, we have not made up a single character (except that the existence of the hunchback from Glasgow may raise some doubts). And all of them appeared as a result of long journalistic work, which proves that the real world is more fantastic than even the wildest fiction.

The Strange Case of Dr. Brooker and Major Tom

Dedicated to the memory of David Bowie - “the man who fell to Earth.”

Yulia Dudkina

For a second, he himself suddenly believed that he was David Bowie. Last days everything was leading up to this. First, I had to be stuck at Los Angeles airport for a day without luggage, then a thirteen-hour flight. He finally arrived in Melbourne on July 15: by that time he had hardly slept or eaten for several days. It was cold in Australia, and he arrived in just a T-shirt. “So this is how the Scots feel in London,” he thought as he left the airport. The strong coffee and champagne made his head spin, and when he entered his hotel room, the walls swayed towards him. But there was no time left for rest - after changing clothes, he went downstairs and caught a taxi. They were already waiting for him. The guards at the entrance did not ask for a ticket. “I think this is where you want to go,” they said when they saw him, and led him inside.

When he appeared at the door, people whispered around him: “Look, it’s him! He has arrived! It was impossible to confuse: bright red hair, white face, blue shadows around the eyes. Journalists clicked their flashlights, strangers tried to touch him or even hug him. He hunted throughout London for vintage 70s suits, wigs, jackets and ties, he ate red pepper milk and drank energy drinks in huge quantities.

Everything has gone too far, and now even at night he sometimes sees confused Bowie dreams - he wakes up, writes down fragments of thoughts, and then, having dug deep into book biographies, he realizes that the same ideas came to Bowie himself. Dr. Brooker caught his reflection in the mirror, smiled to himself and thought, “I think I’ve got it.”

One of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics is quantum teleportation. The state of one quantum particle is destroyed and recreated where there is another particle - entangled. Once upon a time, David Bowie was the #1 psycho, the guy from outer space, the rock 'n' roll star. But in last years he was already a sixty-eight-year-old conformist, a shadow of the former Bowie - he no longer dyed his hair or transformed himself, lived quietly in Manhattan with his wife and daughter and prepared himself a gift for his last birthday - the first album in three years called Blackstar. David Bowie is a quantum particle whose state has collapsed; Bowie disbanded to appear elsewhere. It seems that the role of the entangled particle in this teleportation went to the British professor, feminist, film and contemporary culture researcher Will Brooker.

Once in 1967, a very young guy, David Jones, came to the theater troupe of Lindsay Kemp, a dancer, mime, famous actor and teacher, who painfully wanted to become famous. By the age of twenty, David had already released one unsuccessful record, recorded in fifteen minutes, and sung a frivolous song for advertising Luv ice cream. Then nothing worked out for him, and he decided to take up pantomime - he liked the kabuki theater, where men played women's roles. Kemp's students traveled all over the country and performed in this genre. David knew exactly what he wanted: for the whole world to know about him and his work. But he didn’t understand how to do it: very shy and reserved, he felt uncomfortable on stage.

Lindsey Kemp wanted to help the student, especially since he clearly had talent. And then Kemp advised the guy to paint his face and color his hair. After all, if you put on a mask, then you are no longer you. You are your role, and everyone is looking at you. Play it and people will believe it. You no longer have a choice - you put on a suit and went on stage, which means the performance has begun. The longest play of your life, David Jones, and you play David Bowie in it.

In 1969, when the Americans landed (or pretended to land) on the moon, Major Tom from the Bowie song was lost in outer space. The BBC was showing reports about American astronauts, and Space Oddity was playing in the background. Shy David Jones finally knew what to do.

A successful invention, a set of images, an accurate hit on the sick nerve of the era - they believed in the invented Bowie so much that he became almost real. So much so that he invented the role for himself. It was already a double performance, the needle in the egg, and the egg in the duck. Ziggy Stardust appeared on the stage - a space musician made of plastic, an alcoholic and a drug addict, who flew to Earth five years before the Apocalypse. David was carried away by the production and was already having difficulty distinguishing between his own roles. “I can never decide whether I invent the characters or the characters invent me,” he said. And sometimes he suddenly declared: “Now the real me is in front of you,” but even then no one knew how much to trust him. By 1973, Ziggy Stardust began to behave very badly: he forgot why he came to Earth and betrayed his friends. Bowie “killed” him right on stage, and Ziggy was quickly replaced by new characters. It was as if Bowie was wandering through a labyrinth of crooked mirrors and in each of them he saw either Ziggy Stardust, or the Gaunt White Duke, or Thomas Newton, and in the end he ceased to understand whether his own reflection was there at all.

At the same time, in the mid-70s, a little Englishman named Will was staging his own play. At noon, during the lunch break, he would come home from school and diligently dress up: now as a clown, now as a cowboy, now as an astronaut, and sometimes in something completely incomprehensible. Having changed his clothes, he joyfully ran to class again. He was five years old, and he made costumes out of anything, so they weren’t very believable. But he really wanted to believe that his classmates wouldn’t recognize him. They really didn't recognize it. More precisely, deep down they knew that in front of them was their friend Will, but they liked to imagine with him that he had turned into an astronaut or a cowboy. When children grow up, it turns out that imagining themselves to be a cowboy, a soldier, or whatever, and dressing up in costumes is “stupid” and “frivolous.” Then they become respectable men and women, useful citizens of their state. Will Brooker became a scientist.

Brooker studied film and culture, wrote a famous scientific work entitled “Batman Unmasked. Analyzing a Cultural Icon,” became a professor at Kingston University in film and television. Then he studied the behavior of fans " Star Wars"and the influence of Lewis Carroll on modern culture. He published a feminist comic book series about a female superhero, My So-Called Secret Identity, which was praised by The Guardian and Times Higher Education. Will has never been a public person. He was often invited to various programs, and he accepted these invitations, but he still liked to spend time alone - reading, writing articles for magazines, traveling. He also loved David Bowie, a man who grew up but never stopped playing. As a teenager, Will began listening to him. He walked around with a cassette player and played the Let's dance album over and over again - he was amazed how Bowie managed to become incredibly successful during his lifetime and at the same time remain very strange, how he managed to be pragmatic, but not lose his individuality.

Will Brooker always wanted to do something special that had something to do with Bowie. For example, writing a book - after all, that’s what he does best. But so many books have already been written about Bowie that you could remember a whole concert hall, and Will is not the kind of person to just write another one and remain in the shadows, do like everyone else. And then he decided to write a special book, put his whole soul into it, and at the same time understand Bowie in a way that no one understood him. And for this, he decided to become Bowie for a whole year: travel to the same countries where he traveled, and read the same books, adhere to the same diet and dress the same. Maybe then we’ll be able to get into his head and tell him what really happened in it all these years. After all, if you manage to become a cowboy or a clown, then the show has already begun.

This is the weirdest show you've ever seen, Will Brooker, and you're playing David Bowie in it.

“It was all simpler in the beginning,” says Dr. Brooker. – I watched the films that Bowie watched, listened to music, studied biographies, and was creative. But then I realized that if I wanted to truly understand what was in his head, I needed to go further. Maybe if I knew what all this would entail, I would have thought twice before starting.” Now Will, like Bowie in his time, paints and plays music. Coming to cities where Bowie once visited, he tries to repeat his route. True, Will does not give big concerts - he only sometimes performs in small clubs. But when journalists ask him for an interview, he never refuses, because he needs to feel for himself what it’s like to be constantly photographed and asked the same questions. It turns out that it’s not very comfortable - you often want to hide and be alone. Will began his experiment in 1960, when Bowie was just starting to build his career. But he himself doesn’t yet understand which year he should stop at – after all, when the superbook goes on sale, he will need to dress up as Bowie at the presentation, that is, return to the old images again.

Some episodes in the life of a musician can pass quite quickly - for example, those when he had a creative lull. Others take a lot of time - for example, he was the Exhausted White Duke for several weeks. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of money on a project. For example, the Gaunt White Duke's high-collared shirt cost a hundred pounds from a tailor, and Thomas Newton's hairstyle - "The Man Who Fell to Earth" - required two hours of hair dyeing once a month. And then there are the flights. Will arrived in Melbourne right at the opening of a grandiose exhibition dedicated to David Bowie, so he was greeted there like a star. Moreover, the real Bowie did not come to see it.

Will decided to save on only one thing - unlike the real Bowie, he did not take drugs. It's expensive, illegal, and how can he come to his students while high? After all, you can’t lose your favorite job because of a book. Instead of using cocaine, Will began drinking a lot of energy drinks and forcing himself to stay awake for days at a time. The sensations, of course, are not exactly the same, but also quite strange. And it’s not about costumes and drugs. Sometimes a scientist even gets tired of the fact that his project is perceived as a simple masquerade. Will is trying to understand Bowie's work - to find out where the images and ideas came from. And the musician’s drug trips and homosexual relationships, the scientist says, are already his personal life, and Bowie had a right to it.

Will's head is an artistic mess, his face is completely white, and his lips are painted with red lipstick. In a few hours he will be giving interviews to Australian journalists. The professor is already pretty tired. He started his project in June 2015 and managed to reach the 80s. At first he was Ziggy Stardust - nervous and impatient. He hardly ate or slept, constantly communicated with the press - after all, this is how a person who wants to become famous behaves. And Bowie really, really wanted it. Ziggy Stardust is a bright piece of plastic with glitter behind which you can hide a very shy guy.

Then Will had to become the Gaunt White Duke, the fascist bastard from 1976. An elegant, drugged-up Pierrot, almost expressing no emotions. He placed black candles around the room, turned on German music and painted strange paintings to it.

“If you decide to be the White Duke, then you become like a bullet, like a knife,” Will explains. – Bowie didn’t just come up with all these images out of nowhere, they were inside him. It was just that at one time or another he pulled them to the surface. It was very difficult for him in the 70s, and he had to become just like that in order to survive it all. Not everyone can be a White Duke, because not everyone has it in them. Found in me." Will says that Bowie of the 70s reminds him of a sick bird - he somehow constantly shrinks all over, tucks his legs under him when he sits down. “The seventies were a real disaster,” says the doctor. “We’re lucky we didn’t lose Bowie during this time.” This is the same time when Bowie, according to him, lived on red peppers and milk. Will tried to eat the same way and understood where this strange posture of the sick bird came from. That's exactly how he felt. Will walked around London for several weeks in a feverish state: if you are the White Duke, then you are a superman and have the right to do whatever you want. You are strong, cruel, and there will never be punishment for your crime.

- So have you really done something? – I ask Will, but he avoids answering:

– You see, it’s better for me not to tell anyone about this. Sometimes I think that Bowie didn’t comment on my project because he had forgotten what he was like in the seventies and didn’t really want to remember. It's really very difficult. It’s even strange that he survived then. Sometimes I think: what if he actually died much earlier, and instead of him there was his clone - this cheerful, fit man?

By the time Will got to Berlin, where Bowie went to calm down in the late 70s, he had pretty much stopped understanding what was happening. On a tour of favorite places Bowie, he listened to the stories of the guide and sometimes suddenly thought that he was talking about him - Will.

Now the professor has already reached the 80s. Major Tom, who was lost in space many years ago, has finally been found. It turned out that he was just a worthless drug addict who had done nothing good in his life, only breathed cosmic ether. “Mom said, you better not mess with Major Tom.” In 1980, the song Ashes to Ashes was released. In the video, Bowie sits huddled alone in the corner of a padded room. The cruel Pierrot walks along the seashore towards sunset to disappear forever. This is the bottom from which the rebirth of David Bowie gradually begins. And this is a real relief for Will: at least he no longer has to eat red peppers and wash it down with milk.

It is unclear how David Bowie himself felt about Will Brooker’s experiment; he refused to comment on the scientist’s project. Will wants his best-ever-Bowie-book to be like a gift, an expression of love. But it could have turned out the same way as Bowie himself once did with Andy Warhol.

In 1971, spouses David and Angela Bowie approached 33 Union Square in New York. They looked impressive: the husband had shoulder-length hair, women's shoes with a gold strap and a wide-brimmed hat. Angela had her hair cut short and dressed almost like a man. Together they went inside and took the elevator to the sixth floor, where Andy Warhol’s famous “Factory” was located, a New York nest of debauchery, the place where pop art was born. David really wanted to go there - he adored Warhol and dreamed of meeting him.

David and Angela exited on the sixth floor and saw a brick wall in front of them. They knocked, some people came out to them and refused to let them into the “Factory” - they did not believe that in front of them was a famous musician and his wife. The couple went downstairs again and came back up, this time other people responded to the knock, and David and Angela were finally let in. Regular guests The “factories” could not come to their senses after the incident when a crazy feminist burst into the loft several years ago and shot Warhol three times in the stomach, so they looked at the new arrivals with distrust. When David found Warhol, he immediately decided to sing him the song he wrote in his honor. It was called “Andy Warhol”.

“Andy Warhol looks a scream, hang him on the wall...” - it seems that the artist did not really like these words. He chuckled vaguely and stepped aside - he didn’t want to talk to Bowie. David stood alone in the middle of the room and looked terribly confused - he didn’t want to offend anyone. Someone passing by said to him, "Wow, Andy's just crazy about that song."

“Sorry,” David replied. “I thought he would be pleased.”

“Yes, but you hinted at his unusual appearance,” the unfamiliar guest of the “Factory” answered him. “And Andy has skin problems, and he always thinks it’s obvious to everyone.”

David was terribly depressed - he felt out of place here. But then Warhol, passing by, suddenly drew attention to his women's shoes - yellow-gold with a strap. He seemed to immediately forget how much the song had affected him.

– I love these shoes! Where did you buy them? – he turned to David. After that, they began to discuss shoes, and the misunderstanding was forgotten. A few years later, Warhol even became a fan of the musician.

However, if Professor Brooker did have the opportunity to show Bowie his book, and Bowie didn’t like it, then Brooker would definitely have the right pair of shoes to fix everything. He spent a lot of time and effort choosing a wardrobe for his role.

The professor looks tired. He wanted this project to belong only to him, to be a part of himself. But it turns out that all his time and energy are devoted to another person. Will has a lot of ideas for new works that have nothing to do with Bowie, but so far he just can’t take them on. Because if you decide to play the role of David Bowie, you play it to the end, just like the shy guy David Jones once did.

No, Will doesn’t regret taking on all this at all: it will be a long journey, from which he will return a little different. But sometimes he still goes on Twitter and asks readers: “Remind me why I started doing all this in the first place?”

In the 70s, Bowie-Ziggy was sure that the end of the world was about to come. 2015 Will is increasingly surprised that it never happened. After all, the scientist, in order to immerse himself in the past, began to use social networks less; he mostly sits at home, doing music, painting and other old-fashioned things. And when he goes outside, he clearly understands that now something is wrong with the world. From every magazine cover, from every billboard, someone shouts another utter nonsense. Try to turn on the TV - on one channel people are talking about nothing, selling air and buying it. On the other, they are shooting at each other point-blank, cutting off heads, and raping five of them. Go online and everyone wants to tell you what color their underpants are and what they ate for breakfast. There is so much information that it does not stay in the head - we are almost like fish that can retain something in memory from thirty seconds to several days, but not longer. “Or maybe the end of the world has come after all?” - the doctor thinks. It came, we just didn’t notice. And Bowie knew everything from the very beginning. If, of course, he existed at all. All this has yet to be learned by the professor when he completes his journey to the end.

In parting, Dr. Brooker says to me: “You know what Bowie did when he left the stage? This meant that the show was over, they were no longer looking at him and he could take off his mask.” And Will slowly wipes the lipstick off his lips.

Bowie had long since worn off his lipstick, and in his later years you would hardly recognize him in a crowd walking around New York, and you would be unlikely to find even a trace of Major Tom in that middle-aged gentleman. Maybe David Bowie - this brilliant simulacrum - has simply lost its meaning? Crazy No. 1 stops being crazy if everyone around him is going crazy. The plastic guy from outer space is losing his uniqueness in a plastic world. After all, Bowie always tried to be a mirror of his era. But it seems that one day he simply had nothing to reflect.

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The second material of the joint series of samizdat and the telegram channel “Sieramadre” is dedicated to Great Britain’s desire to regain the title of a global power and gain primacy in the nuclear arms race.

Stay tuned! The next material will be published on the website “My friend, you are a transformer” on July 12

Hello reader! How are you, what have you been doing all that time? While I was preparing this letter, I re-read the response letters to the previous one and was happy: how interesting everyone lives. For example, I am terribly happy for my regular correspondent Daria, who, it seems, is finally finding her dream; I was terribly moved by the letter from reader Vyacheslav, who, when he did not receive the Saturday letter, immediately asked where I had gone. It’s time to get used to it, but it’s not worth it at all, let it always be perceived as magic when letters from all over Russia and the world around it fall into the mailbox.

What does it take to prevent a habit from becoming a routine? I catch myself how by the end of the week the sensations become dull if you don’t think: there seems to be nothing more interesting than making samizdat and watching the world on fire, and even this can fade if you don’t try to realize every day what you’re doing, and ask yourself questions.

It seems like it’s always been like this in life: here’s a lamp hanging from the ceiling, here’s a sofa against the wall, and these shoes have been there for an eternity, and your hands already know by heart the texture of a loved one’s scruff. So why is this, how did this happen?

Asking yourself questions, constantly trying to remember what brought you to where you are, and to yourself, is very important. This is how the most interesting discoveries happen. You look into the past, widen your eyes - and realize why you are like this.

Don't let routine win - think and ask. Have a good weekend.

Always your editor-in-chief of samizdat “My friend, you are a transformer” Grigory Tumanov

How to become famous, happy, find yourself and your love, predict the future and cure all diseases

According to sociologists, about 30% of people dream of becoming famous, and 40% of the population are happy when they get a little random fame. Actually, great ambitions and the desire for fame are just a consequence of our childhood complexes, but more on that later. The main thing is that this chapter has everything you need to become great and famous in the Post-Apocalypse era. After all, the world after the End of the World is a place where everything is possible. Field of Dreams, a giant Russian roulette game where one person accidentally becomes a famous member of a criminal gang, and another turns into a super star by playing air guitar. You can become a great killer maniac, or you can put everything you have on the line, but never achieve anything. You'll learn how to fight in a cage in front of a crowd, what it takes to be on TV and have women ask you to sign your name on their bare chest, and whether you can turn into the late and great David Bowie and how it will affect your health. All the stories in this chapter are true, we have not made up a single character (except that the existence of the hunchback from Glasgow may raise some doubts). And all of them appeared as a result of long journalistic work, which proves that the real world is more fantastic than even the wildest fiction.

Dedicated to the memory of David Bowie - “the man who fell to Earth.”

Yulia Dudkina

For a second, he himself suddenly believed that he was David Bowie. Over the last few days everything has been heading towards this. First, I had to be stuck at Los Angeles airport for a day without luggage, then a thirteen-hour flight. He finally arrived in Melbourne on July 15: by that time he had hardly slept or eaten for several days. It was cold in Australia, and he arrived in just a T-shirt. “So this is how the Scots feel in London,” he thought as he left the airport. The strong coffee and champagne made his head spin, and when he entered his hotel room, the walls swayed towards him. But there was no time left for rest - after changing clothes, he went downstairs and caught a taxi. They were already waiting for him. The guards at the entrance did not ask for a ticket. “I think this is where you want to go,” they said when they saw him, and led him inside.

When he appeared at the door, people whispered around him: “Look, it’s him! He has arrived! It was impossible to confuse: bright red hair, white face, blue shadows around the eyes. Journalists clicked their flashlights, strangers tried to touch him or even hug him. He hunted throughout London for vintage 70s suits, wigs, jackets and ties, he ate red pepper milk and drank huge quantities of energy drinks. Everything has gone too far, and now even at night he sometimes sees confused Bowie dreams - he wakes up, writes down fragments of thoughts, and then, having dug deep into book biographies, he realizes that the same ideas came to Bowie himself. Dr. Brooker caught his reflection in the mirror, smiled to himself and thought, “I think I’ve got it.”

One of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics is quantum teleportation. The state of one quantum particle is destroyed and recreated where there is another particle - entangled. Once upon a time, David Bowie was the #1 psycho, the guy from outer space, the rock 'n' roll star. But in recent years, he was already a sixty-eight-year-old conformist, a shadow of the former Bowie - he no longer dyed his hair or transformed himself, lived quietly in Manhattan with his wife and daughter and prepared himself a gift for his last birthday - the first album in three years called Blackstar . David Bowie is a quantum particle whose state has collapsed; Bowie disbanded to appear elsewhere. It seems that the role of the entangled particle in this teleportation went to the British professor, feminist, film and contemporary culture researcher Will Brooker.

Once in 1967, a very young guy, David Jones, came to the theater troupe of Lindsay Kemp, a dancer, mime, famous actor and teacher, who painfully wanted to become famous. By the age of twenty, David had already released one unsuccessful record, recorded in fifteen minutes, and sung a frivolous song for advertising Luv ice cream. Then nothing worked out for him, and he decided to take up pantomime - he liked the kabuki theater, where men played women's roles. Kemp's students traveled all over the country and performed in this genre. David knew exactly what he wanted: for the whole world to know about him and his work. But he didn’t understand how to do it: very shy and reserved, he felt uncomfortable on stage.

Lindsey Kemp wanted to help the student, especially since he clearly had talent. And then Kemp advised the guy to paint his face and color his hair. After all, if you put on a mask, then you are no longer you. You are your role, and everyone is looking at you. Play it and people will believe it. You no longer have a choice - you put on a suit and went on stage, which means the performance has begun. The longest play of your life, David Jones, and you play David Bowie in it.

In 1969, when the Americans landed (or pretended to land) on the moon, Major Tom from the Bowie song was lost in outer space. The BBC was showing reports about American astronauts, and Space Oddity was playing in the background. Shy David Jones finally knew what to do.

A successful invention, a set of images, an accurate hit on the sick nerve of the era - they believed in the invented Bowie so much that he became almost real. So much so that he invented the role for himself. It was already a double performance, the needle in the egg, and the egg in the duck. Ziggy Stardust appeared on the stage - a space musician made of plastic, an alcoholic and a drug addict, who flew to Earth five years before the Apocalypse. David was carried away by the production and was already having difficulty distinguishing between his own roles. “I can never decide whether I invent the characters or the characters invent me,” he said. And sometimes he suddenly declared: “Now the real me is in front of you,” but even then no one knew how much to trust him. By 1973, Ziggy Stardust began to behave very badly: he forgot why he came to Earth and betrayed his friends. Bowie “killed” him right on stage, and Ziggy was quickly replaced by new characters. It was as if Bowie was wandering through a labyrinth of crooked mirrors and in each of them he saw either Ziggy Stardust, or the Gaunt White Duke, or Thomas Newton, and in the end he ceased to understand whether his own reflection was there at all.

At the same time, in the mid-70s, a little Englishman named Will was staging his own play. At noon, during the lunch break, he would come home from school and diligently dress up: now as a clown, now as a cowboy, now as an astronaut, and sometimes in something completely incomprehensible. Having changed his clothes, he joyfully ran to class again. He was five years old, and he made costumes out of anything, so they weren’t very believable. But he really wanted to believe that his classmates wouldn’t recognize him. They really didn't recognize it. More precisely, deep down they knew that in front of them was their friend Will, but they liked to imagine with him that he had turned into an astronaut or a cowboy. When children grow up, it turns out that imagining themselves to be a cowboy, a soldier, or whatever, and dressing up in costumes is “stupid” and “frivolous.” Then they become respectable men and women, useful citizens of their state. Will Brooker became a scientist.

Brooker studied film and culture, wrote a famous scientific work entitled “Batman Unmasked. Analyzing a Cultural Icon,” became a professor at Kingston University in film and television. He then studied the behavior of Star Wars fans and the influence of Lewis Carroll on modern culture. He published a feminist comic book series about a female superhero, My So-Called Secret Identity, which was praised by The Guardian and Times Higher Education. Will has never been a public person. He was often invited to various programs, and he accepted these invitations, but he still liked to spend time alone - reading, writing articles for magazines, traveling. He also loved David Bowie, a man who grew up but never stopped playing. As a teenager, Will began listening to him. He walked around with a cassette player and played the Let's dance album over and over again - he was amazed how Bowie managed to become incredibly successful during his lifetime and at the same time remain very strange, how he managed to be pragmatic, but not lose his individuality.