Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Nigel said October would be a good time, or January, to avoid the monsoons. You definitely want to avoid the monsoons. When the old woman mentioned the Taj Mahal Palace where she stayed as a girl, Nigel lit up.

“Oh my God, the Taj is the best. But you have to stay in the old wing. Demetrius and I were there and Cameron Diaz, Bill Clinton, and the Australian Prime Minister had just swept through. I think Wild Bill Hickock and Cammy Tell Me True maybe shoulda got somethin started! The Taj is amazing. The service is unbelievable. And the boutiques! They have a Louis Vuitton and a Burberry. I almost bought one of those 7,000 dollar cellphones — the Vertu? With the 24 hour concierge button? No matter what country you’re in, you can ring them up and have a pizza delivered. They could probably get a slice to Elaine Young! Or tickets to a movie, DVDs, whatever. Demetrius was about to die. Do you use the Internet? Probably not, huh. My husband loved it, because we didn’t bring our computers, but every room had huge flat plasma screens — just plunk yourself down on the bed and use the remote to get your E. The Indians so have the tekkie thing wired — we outsource everything to them. I heard they were so busy they were outsourcing outsource jobs! Oh! They’re outsourcing babies! Women from the States are renting out their wombs! Marjorie, I am so serious. The Indians are amazing —more amazing than the Chinese. Well, maybe not, but damn close.”

Marj asked when Trudy was coming back. He scrunched his face and said he wasn’t sure; she was having health problems. “I keep telling her to go to India!” She didn’t press. They talked some more about the Taj and Nigel went rummaging for something. He returned with a DVD he said was made by the hotel on its centenary. “But you need to give it back, Marjorie. Promise? They’re really hard to get and it’s the only one we have.”

She took a different route to Beverlywood so she wouldn’t have to pass Riki’s store. She couldn’t bear to see it locked up with all the wilting garlands and tattered memorials.

SHE was late, as usual. On the way to her appointment she must have passed 3 roadside tributes. They were all over LA now, commemorating places where pedestrians had been struck down, or fatal car crashes and robberies had occurred, and thus far the city had benevolently let them be. Some vanished within weeks, while others were maintained for years, carefully tended and refurbished by loved ones. (The mems lasting the longest were usually for kids who’d been run over near schools.) She was always dumbfounded by their simple eloquence — suddenly revolted by her own pimp-ride, high-end vanity project. She’d never be able to speak in the demotic language of the people; there would always be the arcanely contaminative architectural babel injecting itself like syntactic bacterium into what should have been simplicity itself. There was even a new crop of art photographers who tried to make a name for themselves by documenting the funeral venues, as if those sites were quaintly worthy of pretentious scholarship. It was exploitational, not Egglestonian, a bloodless catalogue of macabre, trivializing juvenilia. Meet the Folkers.

Joan was lunching with a group at Architects Without Borders, a nonprofit that built shelters for victims of the “Boxing Day Tsunami,” now redeploying its efforts to New Orleans. Average White Band (which Barbet insisted calling them) had joined together with a slew of organizations — Shelter for Life, Relief International, Architecture for Humanity — to put up cement-block homes in Sri Lanka, a thousand or so for around 15-hundred dollars each. The gang had experience building in places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iran (earthquake-stricken Bam, which Barbet said should now have an exclamation point after it, like a Lichtenstein). Ever since ARK lost a competition to design transitional housing in Kosovo to Gans & Jelacic, Barbet had chilled on altruism, sending Joan out as emissary — it was good for networking. Katrina itself had spawned a cottage (shack) industry of moveable “Southern venacular” crib prototypes from a pair who called themselves HELP (Housing Every Last Person). Barf.

Even Mayne and Libeskind (and MVRDV, Huff + Gooden, Hargreaves, UN Studio, ad nauseam) were getting into the act. “What a surprise,” said Barbet. Shigeru Ban talked about making digs out of cardboard tubes and plastic beer crates, modeled after homes that sprang up after the Kobe quake; “durable prefabs” and “flat pack” Future Shacks were on the boards. Someone even dared to mention Prouvé’s aluminum/steel Tropical House; Joan was ready to kill. She knew it was mostly PR talk and no action — starchitects and borefucks were good at that. The New Urbanists would prevail. Sketching out Sub-Saharan HIV clinic thumbprints or collapsible origami-like bungalows ( anything but blue tarp tents or Fleetwood-trailered FEMA Village agglomerations) was a way for Joan to distract herself from the demands of the Freiberg Mem, and do something beneficial in the process.

SHE met him in his bungalow at the Bel-Air.

Joan was a little nervous and had already played out the scenario of him wanting to fuck. She ran the loop in her head as if preparing for a court trial or presidential debate. She was pretty sure she’d be able to resist.

Lew was genteel, having slipped off the alpha E-ring he wore around groups. After cordial smalltalk, he asked her to watch something on television: an amateurish CNN-style montage of what the tsunami had wrought. The famous hotel pool getting flooded. A pasty-skinned old man clinging tenuously to a railing as the fatal waters rose. Crowded buses rocketing like skateboards into floating taxicabs. Assorted indistinguishable riverroar flotsam. Then, the iconic image of that body outside the Astrodome: incongrously spliced in, rank and spookily clownish.

A soundtrack, courtesy of Bobby Darin, accompanied the watery parade:

First the tide rushes in…plants a kiss on the shore—

“My son put that together. I guess it’s his way of dealing — with whatever. It didn’t make me happy.”

“How old is he?”

“14.”

“It’s just that age. Teen angst.”

“Yeah, well, I’m my age.” He sighed. “It’s creative, anyway. I think he got the clips from MTV. Burned them on his PowerBook. Or whatever they do.”

“Was he close to his uncle?”

“Very.” He ejected the disc. “Mr Darin: nice touch. Or maybe it was Kevin Spacey.”

Joan changed tack, deciding to be heretical.

“I know this is a weird segue but it’s something I wanted to ask. Architects are funny. Sometimes we work in a vacuum, and that’s good. Depends on the client. We like vacuums; we like to fill them up. (Oops. Wrong metaphor.) But sometimes we ignore the obvious, and that’s not good. Is there anything you envision for the Memorial, Lew? We’ve talked a lot, but is there anything that’s persistently in your head? When you wake up in the middle of the night. Or when you’re brushing your teeth.”

He appeared to be musing. Then:

“Not really. Something…simple — elegant. Not too much bullshit.” His mouth tensed at the word, before softening to a smile. “Big help, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said, without irony. “It actually is.”

He led her to the dining area. She sat at the table and he brought over wine. The fuck-loop streamed through her brain — she flashed on that hotel pool flood — before quickly shutting off.

“Joan — I see all these…Holocaust memorials, and…the thousand slabs. The thousand crosses in Berlin. Oklahoma: the 168 Chairs, the 168 Seconds of Silence. I hate that— literal shit. One of the WTC things was only going to be open to the public from the exact minute the 1st plane hit to the exact minute the 2nd tower fell. Another of the… proposals had these lights —I don’t know how many — but it was the number of people in the towers that couldn’t be identified by DNA! The 92 trees native to New York planted in the soil of the 92 nations the victims came from, the wall with 92 Messages of Hope.”