The Futile Style of London

Date: 2.23.98

From: Simon Pope (EscapeCommittee@CompuServe.Com) Subject: This is London

The Futile Style of London

NEW

at I/O/D website

URL(http://www.backspace.org/iod/)

This is London.

Josh.

Precocious small boy steps, jet-lagged, from Club Class. Inch-thick soles of Airwalk gleaming white as the black run at St. Anton. Droors-brand army surplus combat trousers and North Face puffa indicating an intention to do business on and off piste. Self-contained under hood and high-TOG breathable future fabric. Self-reliance velcroed tightly into place, an outward manifestation of the prep-school motto--'You are alone. Trust no-one.' It's been a good year for Josh what with his starting-up WEBCOM.NET. Dad would be proud. Those wild years at university seemed distant. Saving trees (Dreads! What was he thinking of?) and sleeping with that girl whose dad was a NUM rep (Fatal mistake! Don't sleep with the enemy!). The one great thing about this business at this moment in time is that you can take what used to have cultural credence and sell it on to the world and his personal assistant. Slow it down, scratch it in that way that reminds other people of Bronx-bound trains and Futura 2000 graff. Put some loops over it, something with a big beat for stomping kids kinda like early Beastie Boys. Add some titles in fake-fucked Courier, sim-printer-misfeeds and mid-frame hair-in-the-gate film-stutter to deny all digital process and complete the whole Radical lo-fi feel. And so Josh extends the business enterprise of his dad's generation into the 90's. Globe-trotting 007 execs dreaming of Suzie Wong extended by transnational gottabe Goldies dreaming of Jackie Chan flicks. Where Josh's dad's business was built on international trade in fossil fuels, Josh makes his wedge from the trade in cultural currency. It's high tide in the UK for pseudo-Japanese, infantilised graphics: flat colour, highly delineated, softly curved outlines, (perfect for Freehand and Illustrator), and moving-in with Takishi was a stroke of genius for getting it real. A tap into the mainline of a totally obverse cultural resource. It's hard work fronting the business and trying to deal with a relationship which demands parity on every level. Maybe it's the single sex school's fault but too late to undo the conditioning. 'Some other culture's have just got it right. Thousands of years of people knowing their place and still having the coolest gadgets.'

Justin

Justin, Josh's co-director, is the bread head. Justin used to be an account manager up West with one of the big-noise, big-budget agencies. Eight years living a one man yuppie revival in the pristine post-Lloyds white tower would have tipped a more scrupulous man over the edge. Walking monochrome corridors, scoping for black-clad door-whores for a moments abrasion can seem futile , but leaving this cathedral dedicated to the power of spectacle would invoke an immediate 'access denied' in the four-star staff canteen. Each day necessitated more urgent solutions to the problem . How to squeeze into the half-lined, pleated and turned-up, 2 button, slim lapelled Agnes B? It was obvious that the countdown had begun. Ground-zero approached fast, like a student out of the School of Hypermedia Research with an assignment to deliver and a liberty to take. Why not steal a few clients for yourself and make a go of it? Everyday could be casual Friday. Imagine: wearing post-rave leisure wear to WORK. Cool. The two of them came together with the intention of first cajoling then melding a band of like-minded individualists into a 'design collective.' In vogue during the summer of '96 and into the first half of '97, this notion that a loose association of college friends could turn into an international ad/pr/design agency for the kids appealed to everyone from TV post-production drones to fully indoctrinated Royal College post-graduates. Treat the office as a club, bedroom, chill-out and war-zone and still make a healthy profit from the communication needs of the world's more obnoxious business ventures. The best of both worlds: the arrogance of the college leaver with financial rewards of the superannuated D&AD conformist. For those that were stylistically disadvantaged by the Eighties, a period of grace was declared in '97 where transition from besuited thirtysomething to crophaired young Turk in only-available-in-New-York Nikes was made possible without anyone openly laughing in your face. The decision to move over to post-rave conformity had an unbearable inevitability about it, and the signs of final transformation, the Roni Size CD on repeat play in the studio, would be accompanied by the first self-reflective draw on some spliff AT WORK. Crossover achieved. Adolescence recovered. Keeping the memories of this journey through to the other side alive is important. Not, as you may expect so that the feeling of achievement might bolster an otherwise over inflated ego, but because clients love it. They troop into your studio, (still unhappily besuited) and, faced with the haze of smoke and the background sounds of ambient darkside hardstep, feel like they've entered the den of iniquity that they always suspected lay behind every art student's bedroom door. This is somewhere they've never been before. Yes, they've had the holidays to Thailand, Phuket, Bali. OK, so they've visited friends in Hong Kong - and since handover, Singapore; and they've watched Trainspotting and even read the book that time, but while they were at Uni they couldn't get close. With eyes on an MBA at Yale and an internship with ANZ there was no way that the risk was going to be worth it. So they're in their mid-thirties and now they can actually BUY into this stuff. 'I've got the brains, you've got the looks. Lets make lots of money.' as one of Justin's favourite songs would have it. For brains they turned to Andy.

Andy

Andy is bright enough and could easily be several rungs up the ladder in the City fixing Tokyo Marine's corporate intranet or holding the hand of floor traders as they try to comprehend the inanity of their everyday lives whilst squinting at the harsh pink and blue representations of Tiger economies crashing, HEY LOOK! right there, on their screens. He knows his TCP from his IP, his NLMs from his AUTOEXEC.NCFs. WEBCOM.NET would have a severely limited skillset had Andy not been delivered with a 2:1 after going full term at Kings. Server-side backend UNIX flavoured mindfuck gives most Web designers instant impotence and an overweening self-doubt. Not good for business let alone personal development. So all the black arts of CGI and increasingly Java are left to Andy. In most cultural and technological shifts, people like Andy aren't the public face of the industry. Now is no exception. They are in no way 'cool'. They like the same music as their older brothers and dress in whatever is on the floor and smells least like chip fat or the sweet, baked bean sweat of teen-boys bedrooms. When this cycle of boom and bust is long forgotten, Andy will still have his head down and know the worth of a good PING program. Enough of Andy.

Adam

Night time. Brewer Street. Soho. London. Rain on the narrow streets. Every surface appears as oil. Neon lights, peepshow pinks and reds fracture the taxi window. Hot ciabatta breath spills steam. Moist hearts onto dank glass. Adam drops his ennui-laden shoulders inside his Le Mans inspired jacket and stares that blank Directors stare through fixed-focus eyes. In his dreams: the plastic grey rear seat, piped with red, takes a hint from last years Helmut Lang and bucks the trend, preferring camel as the new black. Transformed by force of will into soft calfskin. Puckered and buttoned in tasteful restraint against the lard-arse behind the dry clean only Comme des Garcon poly mix stay-press. A Saint, a double-Oh-seven. Black leather double breasted three-quarter length coat could conceal an Uzi. Could conceal the palmtop-remote-control-video-conference-web-phone. A silent warrior-monk tooled-up with yet-to-be-fulfilled potential. Wardour Street. Soho. London. This Director's Cut commands a cross-fade, covetously, into the parallel world of film and video, where warp-driven, powder-fuelled lunches thrive on THAT tale of kilos of columbian biked from pillar to Post. Here's the potential to let your career fly like Tom Cruise in that Apple ad for Mission Impossible - through the loser-debris of misplaced zeal and missed Playstation R&D opportunities. Tumbling through three-sixty to avoid the rotor blade of JeansCorp sanctioned Shockwave fun, whilst behind you, beneath you and all around, the flak ricochets from off of shattered WebSite dreams. Feel the cold burn of inhaled ROM fumes - the exhaust of trashed graphics enthusiasts, blasted like so many particles, calculated and rendered in full 72 mil resolution by Silicon Graphics workstations. The beads of sweat form on Adam's artfully concealed but receding hairline, mirroring the grey rain as it slides asthmatically down the mildewed taxi window. Every journey home has been like this recently. A video tape plays and rewinds, caught in a frenzied loop, wearing his patience thin. Every drop-out amplified. Each iteration reinforcing the feeling that trust has been misplaced. That saving your best work for your highest profile client has not paid off. Art & Business. Like grape and grain. Start out on one. Don't finish on the other. And the aural signs are starting to show. The upspeak. Blurted out, too late for modification into much-respected Albarn mockney. Four long years from version 3 thru 6, slowly losing a grip on the point of it all. A time for change. Maybe reinvention is the only solution. Notting Hill. London. Home. Flipping his last ten pence piece, the severed monarch's head floats, goading, and mocking his situation. Only one thing left to do: just fucking phone Justin...

Simon Pope 19/02/98