Among The Reasons To Love The 90s
The late ’90s were a heyday for ads that took their time creating a mood for products they were ostensibly selling, which made it easy, working in advertising, to feel one was actually producing a kind of video poetry that caught what it was like to be twenty-three or thirty better than anything on the big screen—even if it’s difficult to come up with what the ads were saying, ultimately, except buy this to be cool. Well—beauty is always surplus in commercial art. Seventeenth-century mercantilism gave us guild houses and grote markets in Brussels and Antwerp; the dot-com era, with the illusion of unending profit and the advances of Avid non-linear editing software (this was pre-Final Cut) made corporate clients willing to pay for syncing basketball bounces and Don’t Walk signs to breakbeats.
Props to the Arnold Agency, Boston. The soundtrack is “Master Cylinder” by Jung at Heart. It’s free for download at noishpa dot net through bee mp3. Downloader beware. Poking around to test those sites for for safety brings up:
“I’m feeling safe, Loiosh. As if I’m out of danger… The thought of a real bed, the second since I’d left Noish-pa’s, was enchanting…
which is an excerpt from Steven Brust’s fantasy novel Jhegaala. Irrelevant, and oddly appropriate.
