Alone in the mountains, a van sits idly as the sun rises. From the west comes a slight breeze, and were there any grass it would’ve rustled in the wind. As it is, there’s only the subtle sounds of the shifting sands to act as a soundtrack for this lonely scene.
Inside the van, a young man wakes up. He uses a worn French press to make a cup of coffee and then steps outside briefly to survey the landscape. Back indoors, he sits down at the folding kitchen table (it doubles as a bed and sleeps three, in a pinch) and inserts a tape into the video camera perched precariously on a makeshift tripod of books, tupperware and vinyl records. He holds up a sign that reads Day 155, P.B. (Post Bridgette) and begins to speak directly into the camera.
Fuck Hollywood, he says. And while we’re at it, fuck Bruce Springsteen too.
He doesn’t mean that last bit, of course. He loves Bruce Springsteen; he’s America’s most treasured songwriter. Speaks for the people, you know? But he was angry and felt betrayed by The Boss, and if you couldn’t trust Bruce Springsteen you couldn’t trust anyone.. All those stories on Born to Run, the ones about the good times with the fast cars and beautiful girls, they’d been a lie. There was no peace to be found on the open road, or perhaps there was no peace to be found in him. Either way, he could see now that you could never walk in the sun, and there was no gorgeous brunette putting the sunset to shame as you stare at her and press down on the gas pedal, just a little harder. 2,567 miles from New York to Nevada, and he didn’t feel any better than when he had left. He blamed Hollywood for the heartbreak, and Springsteen too; decades of bizarre and damaging genre clichés, of sitcom reruns and pop song replays had codified romance as nothing more than a means to an end, a search for a simulated intimacy that taught people all the wrongs ways to find each other, to be together. People hate on Hallmark, but their cards are just the falsities of romance given physical form; it’s the movie studios who are to blame, and the music makers too, for the idea of romance, for that poisonous ideology which has become inescapable in our day to day lives. And he finally understood romance, or at least he thought he did. Standing alone in the desert, he knew what it meant to have been in love.*
word by Josh Elyea
“I’ve always been particularly susceptible to the allure of the open road, due in no small part to early exposure to Kerouac and a strong affinity for the Springsteen works mentioned in this piece. While I think these narratives are important for the ways in which they offer an escape from the mundane, it’s also important to look at the inconsistencies in these narratives; for example, while guys like Springsteen and Kerouac were the strongest proponents of the restorative powers of the open road, they rarely deal with what happens when you reach the end of your road. What happens after you drive off into the sunset? That’s what I wanted to look at with this piece.”
colour by Hey Studio
“Hey is a graphic design studio based in Barcelona, Spain.
We specialise in brand identity, editorial design and illustration.
We love geometry, color and direct typography.
This is the essence of who we are.
We take care of every single step of the design process and we always work closely with our clients, big or small, in one-to-one relationships.
We also undertake side projects. These activities aim to play with new ideas, push our creative boundaries and develop a passion that is then injected into client’s work.
In 2014, we opened an online shop, a place to share our passion for typography, illustration and bold graphics.
Hey was founded in 2007 with the idea of transforming ideas into communicative graphics.
Here is a selected list of projects crafted for our clients.
We would love to hear from you. Say hi here.”
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