Ruminari

Caspar - age 32 - designer/filmmaker
Brooklyn, NY

Caspar and I met a few years ago through some mutual friends in a rock band called The Protomen. He was doing graphic design and web work for them, while I just knew the guys from when they played dive bars in TN and weren’t packing out venues in all over the country. Caspar co-founded Version Industries, where they’ve done client work for Disney’s Tron Legacy, Louis CK, 65daysofstatic, and a whole bunch of other stuff you’ve probably heard of and/or thought was cool.

He and I chatted in May about why he moved to the city from his home country of England and how long he planned to be here. 

“When I was about 2 years old, my parents moved to America. My dad got a scholarship, and it meant that he could come to the US and teach, paint, lecture, that kind of stuff. For two years I lived in Virginia. It had some kind of profound effect on me, because after that, we went home and all I wanted to do was go back, but we never had the money; my parents were artists. Until the age of about 18, I would plead every summer that we could go to America. For whatever reason, despite every plan we made, it never happened.
 
By this point I had a really good friend called Lorenzo, and as it turned out he was American. He would come over every summer to visit his English father (his parents had divorced). My summers consisted of hanging out with this American kid, and he would just tell me stories about things in America – movies that had come out, things people were into. I was this little village kid, literally, totally unaware – there was no internet back then – and he would come over with stuff that would just blow my mind.

Eventually, I took the year off after I graduated school. Everyone goes to Nepal or Japan to teach English or something, and I just got a backpack and went to America for 3 months. My parents knew a load of people from when we used to live there in all these different cities, and I just took a bus or a car or hitched a ride or whatever. I went to San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles.

It was one of the best 3 months of my entire life. Every single place had an amazing experience to offer, and at the end, I remember thinking New York left this tangible sense with me. I thought, if I could ever go back it would probably be New York. It kind of had this thing where I thought “maybe one day,” and then eventually I did go back.
 
In 2001, I got money for graduating and went back to America as quick as I could. I was going to be there for 3 months, and after about a week I decided just to go to New York, because I wanted to learn, work for filmmakers and live in New York.
 
A week into staying, the World Trade Center got hit. I was living on Grand street, in an old converted police station in this $9k/month apartment belonging to this filmmaker I was friends with. He had shelves of VHS tapes, and I was watching 3 or 4 of them a day, because he had all the coolest films and I had to catch up – which as far as I was concerned was an education. When the World Trade Center got hit, I was watching Werner Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I’d started watching it at about 8 in the morning, and my friend up at Columbia University calls at 9 and said “what are you doing?” I said “I’m in my pajamas, drinking coffee and watching a movie.” She said “do you realize what’s happening right now? Turn on the TV!” She got me to change the channel, and I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was, so I saw these planes hitting, and I was like “what is this, it looks like a movie?” Because it looked like a movie. It really did. She’s like “that’s the World Trade Center and it’s been hit with airplanes. You need to fucking get out of there!” She told me to look into the streets, and I look out and people are running past the window, covered in shit. This fancy apartment had this double-paned, soundproof glass, so I couldn’t hear it, I could just see it, which is why I guess the whole thing hadn’t hit me yet.
 
So I told her I was coming and turned off the TV – the movie was terrible, anyway – and I put on a rucksack and had to walk with all of my stuff from Grand st. all the way up to 116thst, because there were no cabs, no trains, there was nothing. I just saw unbelievable stuff on my way up. One of the things I’ve never forgotten was that all the cars had all of their doors open, and all the radios were on in the cars, all tuned to the same station. You heard the news full volume as you were walking down the street. 
 
New York after that point was very serene and surreal and everyone was kind of super chill. So my 3 months there the second time were amazing and I had a very serene, beautiful experience. I made some very good friends that time, and then I went back and lived in London with no money, and no job. So… I started a company [laughs].

Someone got us a job making a website, so we kind of thought, “let’s make a website company.” Giles was working at a really fancy company, and I convinced him to quit his job, and my other friend quit his job and we started this thing – and we got no work for a year or two. Suddenly out of nowhere, work started happening.

I had a girlfriend in America by this point, and I basically said “you know what, fuck it, let’s go to America.” At that time, the internet in England sucked – websites sucked, the understanding of what you could do with the internet sucked, the speed of everything was still modems – it was really lousy over there. This was 2003. We wanted to make cool websites, and we couldn’t get anyone to pay for a cool website, because the Internet was just like a back-burner situation in England at that point.
 
Eventually, we found a lawyer who wanted to trade a website for a visa. The whole thing was this unrealistic situation where we just didn’t think for a second that it would work. She was just out of law school; it was kind of this “fuck it, it’s free, why not” thing. Exactly a year later, a letter arrived at my parents’ house and it was my visa to America, and I just cried.
 
Giles and I stayed for another few months, packed our shit and moved over. We lived at 125th and Broadway, up on the edge of Harlem, next to the Cotton Club. We landed with absolutely nothing, and spent the next 2 years pulling it all together, and now here we are. So I guess that’s my New York story.”