This Town

It amazes me when I hear about the endless hours involved with graphic design. When I was in school it was common for everyone to pull all-nighters and then drag in with something that made no sense. I didn’t have time for that. I had nightclubs to attend. My life in the early 80s was like this: go to school, do the assignments, buy shirts at Cowboys and Poodles on Melrose, eat dinner at Pages in Encino or Café Casino in Beverly Hills, buy liquor, and go to a club. I was very groovy. This was confirmed by the collection of Wet magazines I had.

Wet was a magazine dedicated to bathing. This may seem thin for a monthly magazine, but it was a center for “new wave” culture. Hip designers created the ads and covers. The articles covered hot tubs, but they also covered Eraserhead and KROQ. The zeitgeist of this time in Los Angeles was rather, and yes this is embarrassing, Less than Zero. This was a city with an amazing amount of faux ennui. Cities have their time: New York in the 1930s, Miami in the 1950s, and Seattle in the 1990s. Los Angeles was in the midst of its time in the 1980s, and everyone here knew it, and knew it wouldn’t last.