Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Jobs-who-is-always-standing-in-front-of-a-big-

screen-image-of-himself-have-up-his-sleeve loop (one year it was a rare cancer). CEO porn: hedgehogs with half-a-billion-dollar cash payouts (“the new status symbol”) and other assorted unjailed swine making 200,000,000 a year, retiring with guarantees of thousands of free hours on private jets (you didn’t even have to be on the plane yourself, you could just send it for friends like a taxi) plus eternal use of company-owned skyboxes, bodyguards, chauffeured cars, and “home lawn maintenance.” What irritated Joan most being that architecture was now firmly in the loop-the-loop consciousness of public domain. The same new bullshit modernist house in Santiago that was in 10 X 10_2 only took a month or so to work its way to Vogue, the smart-aleck Details fauxfags, and the Travel Channel’s oafish Amazing Vacation Homes. The Master Builder’s emporia information orgy was like some Philip K Dick PR firm automaton regurgitating to the tick of a nuclear clock: loop-the-loop artists endlessly rediscovered-repackaged with ballsy new psychosex bios, the Year of Bontecou, the Year of Goya, the Year of Arbus, the Year of Caravaggio (it was always the Year of Gehry, Koolhaas, Piano, and Hadid), before beginning again, looped in on itself, sniffing its own fulsome shit and vomit. Joan wasn’t even who she thought she was, merely a skin-sack of Diet Coke sugarwater and ruined ovarian eggs playing the role of Joan Herlihy, increasingly neurasthenic, bitterly nympho’d, aging mannequin manqué. Barbet, the playful playboy business partner and sometime lover of outsized libido and ambition; Pradeep, the debonair Delhian manchild who got off on hooking her up with a richie; Freiberg the satyr Medici, a Jack Palance in her customized version of Contempt. It was all some big dumb telenovela: even the sheer observation was “loopy”—Starckly unoriginal, banally incontestible, radiantly reliable. It was scary. Like the sage once said, we are not living, we are being lived. I don’t want to hear about Marfa anymore. I want Marfa to die like New Orleans. I don’t care about 60-lb Didion and her brave, beautiful Broadway-bound deathmarch. (The producer’s coup would be to fix it so she expired on the day of the premiere, like the Rent guy.) I just want this Mem. Please God let me do —In the file lay more taxonomized, staggering memento mori that could never be hers: the templelike Taiwan earthquake mem with its 2,455 lotus-blossomed inscriptions representing each victim; pedantic WW2 memorial — lowered Rainbow Pool and wallfield of 4,000 stars for every hundred soldiers dead; sunken, doomed, watersheeted voids of Arad’s footprints; canopied Arizona Memorial and ghostship of 11-hundred-and-77 souls (survivors of the attack are allowed to have their ashes interred within); Ando’s floating Fort Worth museum, and grassy skylit subterranean repository on the solemn lonely island of Naoshima; the 2,711 undulating Art Spiegelman cartoon steles of Eisenman’s mem to the Murdered Jews of Europe; Yad Vashem’s domed Hall of Names hovering like a deathstar over a bottomless well; Anouska Hempel Design’s buried Bahian resort within Itacaré’s verdant, vertiginous cove; Calatrava’s avian Sacramento River span, and Vebjørn Sand’s da Vinci footbridge in Norway (& those of Robert Maillart as well); the small, elegantly winged 9/11 altar on Staten Island honoring its 260 residents who died on that day; a Princeton student who won an Archiprix for his virtual Wave Garden just off the Pacific coast — torn veil mirroring electrical grid generated by waves and surfers; the churchified “hooded tower” of the Aires Mateus brothers’ orthogonal limestone Rector’s office at New University of Lisbon (unforgiving unblinking slits like those of Thom Mayne) with breathtaking attachment of banked Epidaurian steps; Testa’s gorgeous carbon-fiber skyscraper, woven like a basket, airily billowing naked except for elevator shafts; that burnt gnome Louis I Kahn’s unbuilt FDR mem on Roosevelt Island, linden trees leading to open stone room at the end of a finger that touched the sea; Michelucci’s meditative Chiesa di Longarone rotunda near Belluno; Johannesburg’s inner-city apartment block with Babel-barreled core, a hollowed-out basement filled with 3 stories of rubbish— Pawson’s anthology: ancient spiral tower at Samarra. Watery silence of Barragán’s magisterial Los Arboledas. Mexican grain silos. Neutra’s chapel at Miramar Naval Station. Noguchi streams and boulders. Dreamtime moonview platform, Katsura Palace. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Spiral Jetty! Stone enfilades…Shaker chairs…Orkney standing stones…Aqueducts…Pyramids…Bowls…Boxes…Balance…Pools…Harmonics…Reduction…Walls…Ramps…Mass…Economy…Ascent…Infinity…

She sat like a dazed animal.

She could still feel Lew’s come inside her.

The office hummed with undepressed interns.

She wanted to leave before Barbet arrived.

She decided to go visit her mother.

HE was thinking about his kids. Ghulpa said, with a kind of wonder, that he’d never spoken so much about them as he had to the visiting cop. He shrugged and stared at her teeth, which seemed to have found tortured new angles in their effort to escape her mouth and view the world.

BG was right. (Thankfully, she never judged him on that, or any account.) He’d done wrong by them and it pained him to talk of the past. Sure, things had soured between husband and wife, but was that any reason to excommunicate his own children, his blood? Cut them off at the root? They were good kids. Tough times back then, economically — a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. It killed Ray not to be able to provide: the Don Ho vacations, the once-a-week to Chasen’s, the new car every year and whatnot. God bless, but Marj was a ballbuster, she was rough on him for not being a bigger breadwinner, bitched him out right in front of the kids. That hurt. The bottom line was, no one could hold a candle to his father-in-law. That sentiment was always front and center. Ray actually liked the guy, which made it even harder.

He used to take the brood miniature golfing on Robertson just to get away from her. That’s what got him on the entrepreneurial kick. He secured a loan against the house her dad bought for them so he could buy in to Kidz Links, a 9 hole course that Chess and Joanie loved. $15,000 was a shitload of money back then. (He thought he could make it work but his partner was a thief.) The Links had bridges and tunnels and little windmills that swatted the ball away if you didn’t time it right — all kinds of fun things. The children played for free, of course, and got popular at school. Finally, it folded. Ray wanted so much more for them than he could give. It never sat well with him the way he treated his boy. When he was 5 years old, Chester used to ask for money every time the ice cream truck came. For a while Ray said the truck played that tune only when it was out of stock — the ice cream man’s way of saying “sorry” to the neighborhood. His thieving partner got a laugh out of that and played along. They told Chess to stay inside until it went away so the driver wouldn’t feel bad. It worked for about a week until he got wise and bawled his eyes out. Now Ray wondered, What was in my head?

He wondered plenty: where they were: if his children were even alive. You never knew. People had accidents and abductions (he crossed himself reflexively). Maybe Chess was in prison for torching an ice cream truck…the girl would be close to 40 now. He called Joanie his “princess.” Back then all the dads called their daughters Princess. Chester, he called— what —Chesterfield. (That’s what Ray used to smoke.) Occasionally, he thought of trying to get in touch with Marj. He couldn’t remember who told him but the old man knew she had remarried, a wealthy guy, one of those country-club types. A real-life duffer with no time for kiddie links. A breadwinner. He wondered if they’d had kids themselves. Maybe so…or he could have had some from another marriage. Eight Is Enough. Yours, Mine and Ours… anything was possible. Ray imagined large family gatherings in La Jolla or Oceanside or Carlsbad, seersucker Sunday brunches on the yacht. Champagne and Eggs Benedict. Probably a corporate man. Someone his ex father-in-law would approve of.