Bubbleheaded Pollyannas
It’s been grim. It’s been heavy and relentless, and shocking, and wearying and worrying, and sad. Jobs have been lost, businesses have failed, relationships have suffered. Many people have died, including people we love. The past months have been cold, and hard, and dark. And it’s not over yet. Esquire doesn’t want to diminish the seriousness of the worst public health crisis in living memory, or its devastating effects, so many still to be felt. We don’t want to seem flippant or heedless or complacent. We would like mostly to avoid appearing to be bubbleheaded Pollyannas — while accepting, naturally, that if you pursue a career in glossy style magazines, you are occasionally going to appear to be a bubbleheaded Pollyanna. And fair enough.
I’m not one for magical thinking. If we’ve learned anything from history it is that things can always get worse. But also, after winter must come spring. We will see off this plague, as we have seen off others. (Nu metal. Skinny jeans. Blogging.) And with that in mind, at the beginning of this year, as we confronted the prospect of producing yet another magazine under lockdown restrictions, a few of us decided that it might be an idea to focus on happier things, to devote the bulk of this issue to stuff that might put a spring in your step as we begin, cautiously, to consign the worst of the pandemic to history.
That ambition has translated into 38 pages of fun things to see and do and drink and eat and play and wear and buy. The Cheerful Issue, we’re calling it. Since I, for one, am fed up of reading and hearing about amazing stuff I can’t even consider doing, for obvious reasons — because coronavirus, as they say on the internet — the criteria for entry was that everything should be accessible under the circumstances. To hell with delayed gratification. I want to enjoy myself now, not in three months, or in 2022. So, no films that aren’t out until Christmas, if you’re lucky, or restaurants that may never open, or destinations that will remain inaccessible until further notice, unless you are prepared to quarantine at each end and then sunbathe, alone, in PPE. We’ve relaxed our own rules only in a few cases (a new hotel, a forthcoming TV show), and only when we are certain that the promised opening or release is actually going to take place on time.
Will I, this spring, be sipping a negroni while watching Frank of Ireland in my newly maximalised sitting room, my boxerdoodle puppy snoring at my freshly cotton-socked feet, while planning a game of pickleball with friends, in between bites of a Lemon Pie XXL from Napoli Gang? Too bloody right, I will. I hope that, like me, you will find much to relish in our recommendations.
Elsewhere, we have David Thomson on that antiquated orgy of meretriciousness, the Oscars; Will Self’s ode to ironing; Jeremy Langmead on his obsession with, as he puts it, not euphemistically, “teeth or nose stuff”; Will Hersey on John Hersey (no relation); Charlie Teasdale on the wonder of the marquee; Philip Hoare’s paean to a remarkable modernist poet of the Twenties (the 1920s); Simon Mills on the late — very late — British adoption of that grand continental tradition, the passeggiata; and Simon Garfield on the most effervescent pick-me-up in the canon of
English lit: the collected works of PG Wodehouse. Also: Nick Cave’s moreish merch; trendy blankets; colourful menswear; a sparkling short story of escape and discovery, by Caleb Azumah Nelson; and, because the future is bright, seven pairs of shades to choose from. If none of this perks you up, not even a little bit… well then quite frankly I don’t know what to do with you.
now, a word or 300 about this issue’s cover. The image of a smiling face might be as old as art itself. It’s one of the first pictures kids learn to draw. As a symbol of pop culture and marketing, the Smiley has been in regular use since the 1960s. Most people looking at it today will recognise it as an emoji signifying happiness. Nothing complicated about that, you’d think.
To my generation, in this country, the Smiley will always be associated with acid house. I was a year or two too young to go to Shoom, the influential London nightclub to which the Smiley’s use in rave culture is most often traced. But I went, religiously, to the parties that followed over the ensuing years, and to me the Smiley will always represent a joyful, mischievous, ecstatic moment in British youth culture.
When it came to designing this cover, I sent Esquire’s creative director, Nick Millington, an email containing the words “Smile” and “The Cheerful Issue”, and a jpeg of a memorable cover of i-D from 1988, designed by the great Terry Jones: a winking Smiley and the lines “Get Up! Get Happy!” I think the cover Nick came up with perfectly represents our intention to spread a bit of joy at this sombre time. Nothing complicated about that, either, I thought.
Some days later I read a story in The Guardian about how the Smiley has recently been co-opted by a dodgy, even dangerous social media movement that uses this icon of hi-jinks to promote an anti-lockdown, anti-mask-wearing agenda. It struck me then that our cover could be seen as a dog whistle to those people and, somewhat horrified, I nixed it. We started work on other ideas. But secretly I began to resent the fact that a tiresome cohort of online nutters could dictate what we could put on Esquire’s cover. It’s not their Smiley, it belongs to us all. (Actually, it belongs to a company called SmileyWorld, who have graciously allowed us to use it. But you see my point...) And so, after much prevarication, I changed my mind again — as ever, the editor’s indecision is final — and asked Nick to bung the Smiley back on the cover.
It is the case that the maverick spirit of acid house that the Smiley evokes — hedonistic, permissive, irreverent — was also libertarian, with civil disobedience, to use today’s jargon, baked in. It was also materialistic, ruthlessly so: the Thatcherite wing of the illegal rave aristocracy is well documented, and one doesn’t typically look to drug dealers for lessons in business ethics. As such, the values of acid house were not always aligned with the happy-clappy mantras of peace and love espoused in the marketing materials, and on the dancefloor.
So it’s not hard to understand why today’s plague ravers might see the Smiley as an appropriate symbol of their struggle against what they see as infringements of their freedoms, which shake down to their right to party, pandemic or no. In any case, this Smiley is not for them. It’s for the rest of us, who continue to try to do the right thing, inconvenient as that might be.
Think of this cover, then, as Esquire reclaiming the Smiley for the (semi-)retired raver.
Like the man said:
Get Up! Get Happy!