2025-04-11
We dressed in suits on the day Joe and I hung a giant banner from the roof of the biology building. By my third semester I was done with the learning part of university, but now fully committed to the shenanegans part of university. We had already mapped the underground tunnels, figured out how to eavesdrop on the elevators through the telephone system and now we were obsessed with getting on the roof of every building. It was student election time and Joe wanted a giant banner of Nikita Krushchev's head with "Vote Nikita" written across in an intimidating large chunky font. A website called rasterbator split our image up into 100 pages ready to print out at the libary and tape together on my parents' floor. We got trapped in the freight elevator the previous week on our scouting mission, so the plan was to take the stairs carrying the large rolled up poster, nobody questions someone wearing a suit.
I was being interviewed by a british guy in New Zealand, thankfully the conversation turned from programming to film photography and went a lot better than the last one. The previous company I interviewed at had a foosball table, but programmed pop-up ads. When the british guy hired me, I set the computer's background to a Devo image that says "Duty Now For The Future" anticipating dilbert style drudgery until I cleared my student loan, and while it was exactly that, it was also many other things. It was the movie Brazil mixed with Flight of the Conchords, but with occasional earthquakes and dreams of earthquakes. I made posters disguised as real corporate posters to adverise for floor-wide movies, paper airplane contests and tournaments on the foosball table we bought. If I call you bro during our conversation, blame these kiwis and be glad I'm not drinking fizzies, eating sammies or ending my sentences with sweet as.
When Stefan showed me the unused space above his Montreal clothing store on Saint-Laurent, I knew it would be perfect. No bar, no TV's, just a completely unadorned space - perfect for weird synthesizer drones. There's something intimidating about Montreal, the whole city knows colours and design. I put on the Nils Frahm movie and started to design the poster for the event. I haven't talked to Joe in 10 years, nobody I know has, but I always think of him when I use that font from the Krushchev poster. My dad wonders if things would have been different if we nicknamed him "Doctor Joe" instead of "Hobo Joe".