Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting the brand name ‘Nescafe Gold’ in the consciousness of the largest possible number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags. Next morning this is reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the basic slogan:

‘Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!’ Here is the scenario.’or the advertising clip:

A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the square a Mercedes-600 and two jeeps are parked outside a chic town house. The young man glances at his watch. Change of camera angle: several men in severe dark suits and dark glasses emerge from the mansion - the security guards. They surround the Mercedes from all sides and one of them gives a command over his walkie-talkie. A small fat man with a depraved face emerges from the mansion and looks around in a frightened manner, then he runs down the steps to the Mercedes and disappears behind the dark-tinted glass of the car, and the guards get into the jeeps. The Mercedes starts to move off and suddenly there are three powerful explosions in rapid succession. The cars are scattered in flying debris; the street where they have just been standing is hidden by smoke. New camera angle: the young man on the bench takes a thermos flask and a red mug with a gold band out of his sports bag. He pours some coffee into the mug, takes a sip and closes his eyes in ecstasy. Voice-over: ‘He brewed it rough and dark. Nescafe Gold. The real taste explosion.’

The term ‘involvement’ didn’t only come in useful at work. It also forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.

He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted to cult porn films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn’t even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short, Blo’s article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.

But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were good for was to tempt suburban Moscow’s kids out of the Eden of childhood. In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult porn films, and was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo himself very well.

He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneoulsy under three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky had invented the name ‘Blo’ together, borrowing the title of a bottle of bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they’d found under the bath (they were looking for the vodka Ed’s wife had hidden). The word ‘Blo’ summoned up the idea of inexhaustible reserves of vital energy and at the same time something non-humanoid, which was why Ed used it carefully. He only used it for signing articles imbued with such boundless freedom and ambivalence, so to speak, that a common signature such as ‘Ivanov’ or ‘Petrov’ would have been absurd. There was a great demand for this ambivalence in Moscow’s glossy magazines, so great indeed that it posed the question of just who was controlling its penetration. To be honest, even thinking about the topic was a bit frightening, but after reading Sasha Blo’s article, Tatarsky suddenly realised that it wasn’t being implanted by some demonic spy or some fallen spirit who had assumed human form, but by Ed and himself.

Of course, not just by them alone - Moscow probably had two or three hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol, as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with nappies and Moscow’s own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren’t obsessed with arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism: they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, or even any real readiness to drop a tab of acid occasionally - despite their casual use of the term ‘acid’ every day of the week. What they did have were problems with digestion, money and housing, and in appearance they resembled not Gary Oldman, as the first acquaintance with their writing led you to believe, but Danny de Vito.

Tatarsky could not gaze trustingly into the distant expanses sketched for him by Sasha Blo, because he understood the physiological genesis of those expanses in the bald head of downtrodden Ed, who was chained to his computer in just the same way as they used to chain Austrian soldiers to their machine-guns during the First World War. Believing in his product was harder than achieving arousal from telephone sex, when you knew that the voice hoarse with passion speaking to you didn’t belong to the blonde promised by the photograph, but to an old woman with a cold who was knitting a sock as she read off a set of standard phrases from a crib soaked by the drops falling from her running nose.

‘But how do we - that is, Ed and me - know what to involve other people in?’ wrote Tatarsky in his notebook.

From one point of view, of course, it’s obvious: intuition. No need to inquire about what to do and how to do it - when you reach a certain degree of despair, you just start to intuit things for yourself. You sense the dominant tendency, so to speak, with your empty stomach. But where does the tendency come from? Who thinks it up, if - as I’m convinced - everyone in the world is simply trying to catch it and sell it, like Ed and me, or to guess what it is and print it, like the editors, of those glossy magazines?

His thoughts on this theme were morose and they were reflected in his scenario for a clip for the washing powder Ariel, written soon after this event.

The scenario is based on motifs from Shakespeare. Loud music, solemn and menacing. The opening shot shows a cliff on the seashore. Night. Down below, menacing waves rear up in the dim moonlight. In the distance is an ancient castle, also illuminated by the moon. Standing on the top of the cliff is a girl of incredible beauty. She is Miranda. She is wearing a medieval dress of red velvet and a tall pointed cap with a trailing veil. She raises her arms towards the moon and utters a strange incantation three times. When she pronounces it for the third time there is a rumble of distant thunder. The music grows louder and more menacing. A wide beam of light emerges from the moon, which is visible in a break in the clouds, and extends until it reaches the rocks at Miranda’s feet. Her face expresses confusion - she is clearly afraid of what is about to happen, and yet she wants it. A shadow slides down the beam of light, coming closer, and as the melody reaches its climax, we see a proud spirit in all his evil beauty - his robes are flowing in the wind and his long hair is silvered by the moonlight. On his head is a slim wreath set with diamonds. He is Ariel. He flies close to Miranda, halts in mid-air and holds out his hand to her. After a moment’s struggle Miranda reaches out her own hand to his. Next frame: close-up of two hands approaching each other. Lower left - Miranda’s pale weak hand: upper right - the spirit’s hand, transparent and glowing. They touch each other, the spirit instantly transforms into a box of Ariel and everything is flooded in blinding light. Next frame: two boxes of washing powder. On one it says Ariel. On the other, in pale-grey letters, it says Ordinary Caliban. Miranda’s voice-over: ‘Ariel. Temptingly tempestuous’.