Babylon by Victor Pelevin Page A

poured their life’s blood into this Tampako of theirs. For them it means… To keep it short, these people have totally identified themselves with their product, and you start telling them things like this. You might as well tell a mother: your son’s a real freak, of course, but we’ll give his face a couple of licks of paint and everything’ll be just fine.’
       ‘But the name really is appalling.’
       ‘Just who are you trying to please, them or yourself?’
       Khanin was right; and Tatarsky felt doubly stupid when he remembered how he had explained the very same idea to the guys in Draft Podium at the very beginning of his career.
       ‘What about the concept in general?’ he asked. ‘There’s a lot of other stuff in it.’
       Khanin turned over another page. ‘How can I put it? Here’s another bit they’ve underlined, at the end, where you go on about shares again… I’ll read it:
        Thus the answer to the question ‘where to invest is ‘in America’, and the answer to the question ‘who to invest with’ is ‘with everyone who didn ’t invest in the various pyramid schemes, but waited until it was possible to invest in America’. This is the psychological crystallisation following the first stage of the campaign - note that the advertising should not promise to place the investors’ funds in America, but it should arouse the feeling that it will happen…
       ‘So why the hell did you underline that? Really smart that, is it? OK, what comes next…
        The effect is achieved by the extensive use in the image sequence of stars and stripes, dollars and eagles. It is proposed that the main symbol of the campaign should be a sequoia tree, with hundred-dollar bills instead of leaves, which would evoke a subconscious association with the money tree in the story of Pinocchio…’
       ‘So what’s wrong with that?’ asked Tatarsky.
       ‘The sequoia is a conifer.’
       Tatarsky said nothing for a few seconds while he explored a hole he had suddenly discovered in his tooth with the tip of his tongue… Then he said: ‘Never mind that. We can roll up the hundred-dollar bills into tubes. You know, it could be even better because it could result in a positive psychological crystallisation in the minds of a signi-’
       ‘Do you know what "schlemazl" means?’ Khanin interrupted.
       ‘No.’
       ‘Me neither. They’ve written here in the margin that they don’t want this "schlemazl - that’s you - to be let anywhere near their orders again. They don’t want you.’
       ‘Fair enough,’ said Tatarsky. ‘So they don’t want me. And what if a month from now they change their name? And in two months they start doing what I suggested? Then what?’
       ‘Then nothing,’ said Khanin. ‘You know that.’
       ‘Yes, I know,’ said Tatarsky with a sigh. ‘And what about the other orders? There was one for West cigarettes in there.’
       ‘Another wash-out,’ said Khanin. ‘You always used to do well with cigarettes, but now…’
       He turned over a few more pages. ‘What can I say… Image sequence… where is it now?…there it is:
        Two naked men shot from behind, one tall and one short, arms round each other’s hips, hitch-hiking on the highway. The short one has a pack of West in his hand, the tall one has his arm raised to stop a car - a light-blue Cadillac that’s coming down the road. The hand of the short man holding the pack of cigarettes is set in the same line as the uplifted arm of the tall man, thereby creating another layer of meaning -’choreographic’: the camera seems to have frown a single moment in a passionately emotional dance, filled with the anticipation of approaching freedom. Slogan: Go West.
       ‘That’s from a song by those Sex-Shop Dogs, the one they made from our anthem, right? That part is OK. But then you have this long paragraph about the heterosexual part of the target