It's a shame they make such damn fine cameras...

Really, there are not words to describe this. My Bubbie emailed it to me.



Welcome, my friends, to the world of Soy Vay.

As I have always said...

Frank Gehry is a hack architect. The man is an artist, there's no doubt about that, but you know who else was an artist? Hitler.

Gehry's buildings suck and they're out of place in their surroundings; they're falling apart; they're frequently stupid looking. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. actually uses Ronco technology to cook passersby as they walk down the street. Now, it seems that the Stata Center at M.I.T. is falling apart. And the piece of shit Gehry inflicted on Chicago, The Pritzker Pavilion, just needs to be torn down. It's ugly. Really very ugly. Ugly.

Also, I understand the concept of having a style, but there is a distinct problem with your style if all of your buildings seem to be knock-offs of other buildings. I can't tell most of Gehry's buildings apart in principle. Lots of metal at weird angles. Ugly. The Guggenheim looks like the Disney Concert Hall looks like the Pritzker Pavillion. Lots of metal, variations in shape and function, but all ugly. I kind of like Dancing House, but then Gehry went and ripped it off—in aluminum foil—when he made the Stata Center. At least, in part.

And, as Isaac Asimov noted, "We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects." Physical beauty, which in the cases of most of Gehry's buildings is highly questionable, is not a reason for a building. It is a reason for art, maybe, but not a building. Architecture and design should be left to architects and designers, people who are concerned with function and with simplicity. Gehry's perversions—and Frank Lloyd Wright's and Gaudi's—may look neat and, at least in the case of FLW, may fit their environments, but they're awfully stupid nonetheless. These famous architects are victimizing us, and more importantly, me, with their hideous erections. Gaudi's fantasy church will never be finished, (That's a promise.) and Falling Water is falling right the fuck over.

Maybe you have a different opinion. Maybe, unlike me, you don't think that everything should be made out of bricks. I think bricks are A-OK. Bricks and wood are just fine by me. I don't need these million dollar sheets of Reynolds wrap. I just want some bricks and some wood. Maybe some tiles. Maybe some nails and rivets and cement and the like. Generally though, what's wrong with buildings made out of bricks and wood?

Nothing, that's what.

And I don't think we've done all we can with reinforced concrete.
Or paint. I think Gehry's buildings need a few coats of black paint.

The Subversive Perversity of Layout Editors

Martin Amis is an unusual man. For this reason, when I saw that the Financial Times had interviewed him in their Lunch with FT feature, I couldn't wait to read it. Now, I cannot wait to tell you about it.

The FT is quintessentially British. It is deeply British. It is cup o' tea, God Save the Queen, la-dee-dah, British. So delightfully so, in fact, that their Lunch with FT actually includes the menu for their meal. Rest assured that there was mineral water and peppermint tea served.

But I am not writing this blog to discuss the British. I am writing it to condemn their filthy minded layout editors. I will quote from the first column of this article a portion of the third and fourth paragraphs with all line-breaks included:

professor. Eagleton has
accused Amis of Islamopho-
bia, castigating him for
advocating strip-searches of
young British Muslims and
raising the threat of repatri-
ation to Pakistan.

"I never wrote it and I
never said it," snaps Amis.
He does however admit to
favoring ethnic profiling at
airports after an incident at
Carasco airport in Montevi-
deo, Uruguay. Amis claims
a security guard searched his
then six-year-old daughter
and "f***-f****d her fluffy


...and then there's a fold in the page. A fold. Right after a security guard searched Amis's six-year-old daughter and "f***-f****d— which I can only assume is fist-fucked— her fluffy...something or other. There is something deeply wrong with a layout editor who leaves that kind of cliff-hanger on one line—above the fold, so to speak. Now, maybe I'm the pervert here, a possibility that I heartily contest, but isn't this weird? It is.

For the curious, it was a fluffy toy duck that was fist-fucked.

From My Romance by Gordon Lish

"...as you can probably see, or saw at least as I walked up here, my trousers are excessively large, I wear these trousers that are lavishly large, and it is sometimes no easy business, I can tell you, fetching anything back up from these pockets—sometimes to find something, to get your hand on something, you have to really reach around inside these unusually large pockets. Did I tell you I used to slip tenths into these pockets?—and that nobody at Knopf—that is where I work, at the publishing house that is a division of Random House and that is known as Alfred A. Knopf, and then, before that at Esquire, before I worked at Knopf I worked at the magazine known as Esquire—did I yet make the point this evening that I was able to get a tenth of whiskey into these pockets without anybody at Knopf or at Esquire—or so I like to think, at least—ever being any the wiser? Or pints or half-pints or whatever they were--because with trousers like these, you could really hide things..."

Also,

"...there was a little tiny refrigerator, a sort of pint-sized refrigerator, a little Crosley refrigerator, there with us in the little living room. Which is to say that it was right there in the middle of the room with us, right there with us...Well, how could I not notice that this little refrigerator was a Crosley? I mean, first imagine the circumstances—death and so forth. And there it was, sitting right there with us there in the living room and not, as one would expect, in the kitchen. Bear in mind, please, that I was ten years old at the time and that I had therefore seen my fair share of refrigerators. After all, you go home to somebody's house after school for milk and cookies and a look at the house, it never fails but that you make yourself aware of that household's make of refrigerator. Granted, this might have been a peculiar form of attention for a boy, a concern of any kind with the makes of things. But I can positively attest to sitting in the kitchens of other people's houses and making a point of making myself aware of which company made the refrigerator. You know, Westinghouse, Kelvinator, Norge, Coldpoint, Amana, Admiral, Frigidaire, General Electric--these were the makes of refrigerator I think I probably knew about.... And a Crosley, a refrigerator called a Crosley, this was certainly a novelty to me, I can tell you. which made it queerly exhilarating, I think—a new make of refrigerator, a Crosley."

Lish in recent news:
In Slate
In NYT