Bruce Wagner - Memorial

How had she gotten herself into this? She realized now that the Freiberg Mem would be her final commission — or attempt. The blood of ambition, once boiling, had pooled out. She was anemic and gone reckless in her arterial, architectonic imaginings; her vagina was the only thing that gushed. Perhaps that was a good thing. Everything sickened her — restless and reckless. She’d always wanted to screw a billionaire and for that she remained unapologetic. Joan liked to fuck and titans usually fucked pretty well. She saw Kirk Kerkorian cross the street once, in front of the Regent Beverly Wilshire and thought, He looks like a lion. Not a single bodyguard, no entourage, nothin. Double K made Lew look like a squirt, though Freiberg probably had more money. She’d love to climb a snowcapped mountain like K2. Lew was OK in the sack but tended to say dumb things like “Love is a sexually transmitted disease.” Or “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.” Or “My ex called our waterbed the Dead Sea.” (After their last rendezvous, he’d actually said, “I love the smell of Napa in the morning!”) She had a feeling he memorized them out of those Yiddish humor books people keep in the shitter. He had a serious side but liked to karaoke to “In A Gadda da Vida” and the McGuire Sisters’ “Picnic Morning” and tell creep-out jokes like the one about the Iraqi woman whose doctor told her he needed blood, urine, and a pap smear. “Here,” she said. “Take my chador.”

Seemingly, the oaf gene and the saccharine one ran deep in the Freiberg clan. Lew revealed how Samuel and his wife loved the poetry of Mattie Stepanek, the dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy pinup who took forever to die. One day Joan was on the treadmill at the gym watching a bunch of Mattie clips on Oprah. (It was on the very day she saw the “Oprah Goes to Auschwitz” billboard on Olympic.) The anniversary of his death, something like that. A rerun of a rerun. There were firemen in the audience and everyone was crying, including John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix. (The theme of the show was Heroes.) Snot was flying. Oprah cried so much she wiped her chin with the heel of an open palm like an old pro who knows that tears on the face sometimes don’t “read” for the camera. They panned off O to Mattie’s mom sitting in a special wheelchair because she had the same thing her son died of. Passed it on to him and her other kids. There she was in the motorized peoplemover with the expensive black leather headrest that looked like something from Virgin Airways Upper Class. O asked Mom what Mattie’s last moments were like and she said, “Well, each breath was agony. And we couldn’t give him painkillers because that would be like giving him death. And he said he was ready to go, that he’d seen heaven, and heaven was nice, and he was ready. And I guess I wasn’t”—sniffle, sniffle—“I guess I was kind of selfish but I said, Mattie, you have to hang on! And he said, OK, Mom, I will, cause I love you. And after 2 weeks of this —I was bribing him, Oprah! I’d say, Mattie, where would you like to go? We can go anyplace in the world. We can go to Disney World. And he was so weak. Finally, I thought, I can’t torment him anymore. I told him: Mattie it’s OK, it’s OK for you to go. And he just gasped. He was too weak to say anything but I think he was saying thank you.”

Then, the suckerpunch. She said:

He had that same look my other 3 kids had when they went.

This would be Joan’s last hurrah — that’s how she thought of it — and she knew the phrase to be vaguely delusional, grandiose, because she’d never really had a 1st. There would be nothing to remember her by but the veined dome of her barren uterus. Brunelleschi’s Dome, bewitched, bothered, and unbuilt… she would never be asked to design MoMA knickknacks or water-front condos; never be asked by Miuccia Prada to conjure the splintered jewel of a flagship; never be asked to lay out city master plans with Wolf D Prix/Coop Himmelb(l)au; never collaborate with Thom Mayne on government-subsidized wastewater treatment plants; never go pub-whoring with Tracey Emin or be invited to the Finnish Lapland to carve ice art alongside Future Systems, Tadao Ando and Rachel Whiteread, El Zorro and Yoko Ono, Kiki Smith and Isosaki; never be thrown on the Holocaust Memorial boxcar bandwagon (the latest, in Farmington Hills, announced itself by emailed précis: It’s a new Holocaust museum that resembles a death camp. Its brick walls are surrounded by wire reminiscent of the electrified barbed wire at Auschwitz. The building’s top half is painted in blue and gray vertical stripes, as if it were clothed in an inmate’s uniform. A tall elevator shaft looks like a crematorium chimney. Steel tubs resemble gallows. The trees surrounding the museum are stunted and wiry, to suggest starving inmates ); never be asked to star in magazine ads, like Matteo Thun balancing a maquette on his head for Canali, or standing inside a box, on Audi’s dime, like a gunsel in a roadshow Mummenschanz with the Nike-esque slogo Never Follow.

…the first architect to be given the Hiroshima Art Prize for work that promotes peace, is relentless in his vision to create spaces that are positive responses to the brutalities that surround us all.

Daniel Libeskind Never Follow

Never follow a relentless pussywhipped kike in python boots and a Yohji trench who gets off on pouring rusted ’s into concrete Shoah tribute troughs. She saw Cowboy’s recent design for an add-on to the Royal Ontario Museum: it looked like a Sony Aibo robot dog taking a bite out of a lovely old cathedral. An aesthetic train wreck — you couldn’t take your eyes off it. Maybe that was the whole trick…

Some of the condos the starfuckitects were being asked to design — aside from containing wine vaults and massive screening rooms — literally had minimuseums of their own work! Meier was putting up a building whose units were called “limited editions,” signed and numbered acrylic models of each apartment presented to the proud new owners as “closing gifts.”

No. That would never happen to Joan Herlihy —

BARBET asked her to attend an opening at the Gagosian in Beverly Hills.

And there he was again: the Renaissance Meier showing collages or constructions or whatever at 10,000 a pop. Pop goes the easel. Faux Cornellian boxes with artful effluvia of the great man’s double helix pasted within: a First Class (naturally) boarding pass (JFK to LAX), a subscription label peeled from a magazine with RM’s name and address (East 57th), a placement card for some fancy dinner— Richard Meier in High Society hand-inked cursive. The starchitect himself greeted all comers — tufthunting toadies — in a corner like a silver-fox cardinal fresh from a papal conclave. To Joan, he looked like a well-heeled dentist, the type with something questionable on his hard drive.

She’d met him before and he had always ignored her but this time, when Joan said how much she loved the “constructions,” he looked her square in the eye and seemed to connect. Maybe he was horny. He probably wasn’t such a bad person. She actually admired that church he did in Rome. He was no Thom Mayne — balling Ricky Meier wouldn’t be a walk in the (memorial) park — but who knew. She thought she could probably do it if she had to.

THEY went to Little Indian Village on a drizzly day. She glowed with the life inside her. She never stopped smiling.