What kind of biscuits/snacks do you have in meetings at your office?
Before any business is discussed, we all sit down to a dinner of the older delicacies — the sort that you would have enjoyed at a minor Bavarian prince’s banquet in the early 1700s or so. There is always a whole boiled pig stuffed with radishes and birch leaves. The fowl course pairs pheasant (also boiled, but in a broth of allspice and Reisling), goose gizzard, and charred sparrow. We’re very big on the organ meats: heart, lung, lymph, etc. Of course there is a great deal of home-brewed squash-dandelion beer and wines from the lower Rhine. We do not serve pasta or anything Italian, as the Italian culinary tradition is far too effeminate for our clients. For dessert, a nice pudding of pumpernickel loaf, maple syrup, and rough country liver paté, drenched in brandy, is just the thing. We like our clients to have the fear of God in them from the outset.
Which foods do you turn to when you need a lift?
Nothing better that a few good chunks of milk-boiled beef tripe. Wash it down with 3-hour-steeped Persian wildweed coffee.
Tea or coffee? What kind?
We do not drink tea here. We are Americans, after all. Our coffee pot is replenished continually — in fact it began with an initial ’starter’ brew much like how sourdough bread is made. That starter brew, concocted in February of 1986, still flavors the pots we make today — it’s hard to miss the notes of peat moss and charcoal. Over the years, in addition to more peat moss, the brew might include anything from unsweetened chocolate, dried rhubarb, wheat germ husks, Indian corn, used coffee grounds from the local Lebanese felafel stand, and goat cream. It’s ‘coffee’ in a sort of abstract, Platonic sense.
Do you have music in the creative department?
We do not, first off, have a proper creative department. We like to think of the office lay-out more like Beijing — it’s a system of concentric regions. The center is completely silent and cannot be entered without various tests of strength and is usually empty during the day. At night it is subletted to a Canadian laundry service. Working out from the center is the Telecom Division, which handles all customer service calls and is located in Sweden. Then the Large Bathroom (self-explanatory, for large people), the Computer Room, which is kept at 45 degrees F and is bathed in blue light. Then the Small Bathroom, the Library (smaller than the Small Bathroom), and finally the Moat. But in answer to your question, yes of course we have music: a Bulgarian string quartet plays continuously from the balcony.
If so, what’s on your current playlist?
The quartet plays mostly John Williams symphonies (some might know them as ’soundtracks’) because Bulgarian was the first language that Williams’s work was translated into in the early 80s. When they take a break, we like Michael Jackson as much as the next guys. (We didn’t have any luck getting him in person either.)
Are there any musical genres that are banned from the studio/creative department?
We don’t ban musical genres so much as a) musical instruments (lutes, Pan flutes, miniature harps, Greek pipes, and harpsichords) and especially b) musical clichés. Exclaiming “That rocks like a mid-career Neil Young ballad” will get you an hour in the Moat. Comparing anything to Arcade Fire will result in you being shunned for one month. Any reference to a Chuck Klosterman essay can easily get you transferred to the Telecom Division, DURING WINTER.
On a scale of 1 to 11, how loud is the music?
With 1 being the most Baroque? I’d say about a 3.
As you get closer to deadline does the music go up or down?
As deadlines approach the music gets louder because the office gets much more crowded. This is because our policy is to bring our clients in to the office to do the work of putting together the presentations that we make to them. Since they know nothing about graphic design (don’t even get me started on what we have to teach them about the software), we also bring in the design faculty of the University of Constantinople, plus a team of translators. So, with all those people, we up the string quartet to a full octet and for really big projects a baker’s dozen (who, strangely, only sing barbershop).