Free Babylon by Victor Pelevin Page A

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’.
       Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black and white