It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 9.5. Anthony Fantano, his chin nuzzled into his overflowing breast in an effort to escape the vile noise of vacuum cleaners, slipped quickly through the doors of the Resident Mansions. The hallway smelt of old vinyl records and semen. At one end of it a poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a trout, with a large hat and ruggedly handsome features. Fantano made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the greatest of Times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the drive in preparation for Beatles Week.

   The flat was seven flights up, and Fantano, who was thirty-nine and had a charming trim above his mouth, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIMES, the caption beneath it ran. Inside the flat an italian voice was reading out boring opinionated sociopolitical commentary. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque with a design that seemed unchanged from the nineties, which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Fantano turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the Fad Gadget, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off.

   He moved over to the computer: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the revealing  which were the uniform of the Critics. His hair was very sexy, his face naturally aryan, his skin roughened by cheap aftershave and blunt razor blades and the biggest avant-garde festival of the year that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn hipster magazines into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be only two colours - sepia and bland tone of green, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blank-staring face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIMES, the caption said, while the widened eyes looked deep into Winston’s own.

   Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word SCARUFFI. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a squid eating dough. It was the police patrol, snooping into music venues. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Brain Police mattered. Behind Fantano’s back the voice from the Fad Gadget was still babbling away about the Syrian involvment and the philosophical troubles brought by smartphones. The Fad Gadget received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a performance of 4'33", would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the Fad Gadget commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,  and, except in darkness, every fashion statement scrutinized.

Fantano kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing, especially with his cute little ass. A kilometre away the Ministry of New Pitchfork, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was Williamsburg, chief hipster squathole of New York, itself the most populous of the provinces of the USA. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether music had always been this pretentious. Were there always these dignified fucks, their music as unlistenable as possible, their heads so far up their asses that they actually got credit for coming up with new innovative ideas for playing in incoherent sequences? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of memories over some weird show he was pretty sure were about lesbians.

The Ministry of New Pitchfork —Newfork, in Newspeak —was startlingly different from any other object in sight. Not so much because of its appearance, but for the admireably huge quantity of liberal dykes who worked there. From where Fantano stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in comic sans, the three slogans of the Critics:

that’s it for now eugh