AIM LOW + M—SS was a Sheffield fashion brand, fanzine, sporadic music–happening and 24/7 attitude (philosophy, if you like) peddled and occasionally soap- boxed by Ian Anderson TDR™ and Tim Collard of CollardManson.

“If at first you don’t succeed, maybe failure’s your style.” — Quentin Crisp.

You probably won’t have heard of Jeffrey Bernard but you’re reading about him now because he coined the phrase ‘aim low and miss’. He was known, by those who gave a toss, for his weekly Low Life column in The Spectator Magazine and notorious for his chaotic career and life of alcohol abuse. His choice. He personified Soho’s lurid, bohemian art-mosphere, attracting circling kindred  spirits like Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas and Nina Hamnett (The Queen of Bohemia). His Aim Low and Missives obsessed on life, the dispossessed, the reckless and the feckless. The lesson in these pinched times, where our role seems to be  to conform, to fret, and to go shopping, was you don’t HAVE to do what other people tell you to do — a world where success is rooted in achieving personal goals, not those imposed directly by or by association with others.

Success in our celeb-saturated first world wannabe culture is measured by the acquisition, and hi-vis spunking of money on stuff we’re supposed to want but don’t need; getting-It (off the shelf) and flaunting-It (like people do in magazines), all garbed up in Trumpish fake quality and flakey taste.

AIM LOW+M—SS isn’t a cop out, drop out or a tune-in turned-off, it’s the pro-active pursuit of defining and achieving success relative to personal goals free from the shackles of social expectation. Aspiring to be better is better than unavoidably failing to be best.  To keep us out of trouble, or more accurately in ‘managed trouble’, we’re encouraged to live a series of EITHER/OR realities, to participate in mass culture organised around pre-packed partisan identities of warring movements and disparate style tribes. Essentially EITHER/ OR is the logic of difficult choices in an age of scarcity, an economy of limited time and energy.

AIM LOW+M—SS replaces EITHER/ OR with the buzz of PLUS/AND — a mindbomb which means you don’t have to choose — you can have both ... you can have it all (lollipop). If you want. But be careful what  you wish for as we hurtle towards the critical mass of information, overloaded ‘Glutted’ societies and ‘Clotted’ economies.  We’ve had it all ... and now we’re stuffed. Utopia in its many guises is historically portrayed as the land of plenty, a consumerist’s gluttony of entitlement and satisfaction, but it’s apparent that any 21st-century future-proof Land of Cockayne will be less about wanting for nothing and more about WANTING NOTHING. AIM LOW+M—SS— Need without Greed.

AIM LOW+M—SS the drudgery of the multiple-choice tickbox– public–vote of no-list celebrity. It’s a personal vote for hyperbole-free- happiness neither totally nailed nor smashed, not standard, not ‘put down’, high-fived nor dragon- approved — not the richest, fastest, strongest, biggest, thinnest or sexiest ... just a wonderful ‘whatever-you-choose’ life, neither more nor less ordinary.