Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Everything Barbet had said was beginning to feel like the truth. The trip seemed a ruse, more of a rendezvous to talk about the pregnancy than anything else. She was determined not to play that game, or capitulate to her own insecurities; she’d made a solemn promise to give it her best. Anyway, there was plenty to distract her. Aside from the thermodynamics of manipulating Lew Freiberg into saying yes to the commission, she needed to oversee the final details of Full Fathom ’s chapel unveiling (Barbet’s impotent little PT Barnum extravaganza). She didn’t really have the energy. Her mother’s ordeal had sapped her; putting the nightmare on hold didn’t make it go away. One of the major comforts — that Mom wasn’t dependent on her for financial help — had been yanked from under her.

So she got out her voluminous Prada duffel and threw in a favorite Miss Sixty smock, the Bless skirtrousers, the Loro Piano cashmere hoodie and Van Steenbergen shift, the Judith Lieber minaudière, the Narciso Rodriguez devil-red housecoat, the Project Alabama T-shirts, a D&G tulle/lace babydoll pearl and crystal-encrusted dress (Lew got her that), the Marc Jacobs silk organza ruffle skirt (Pradeep) and Marni taffeta slip, along with Louboutin espadrilles, Comme des Garçons ballet flats, Manolo zebra-print pony slingbacks, MJ mary janes, a pair of black-and-white Converse; antioxidants, exfoliants, extracts, amino acids, and wrinkle reducers; L’Eau d’Issey, Dior J’Adore, and Le Couvent des Minimes creams, balms, and gels. She was a sucker for any kind of overpriced unguent purported to be made for hundreds of years by ascetic nuns or monks. The world was such a load of bull. Even the Pope wore Prada. They called it papal product placement. (Papal Bull.)

Onboard, she flipped through the pimp-ride Robb Reports they always have in private planes and limos. There was an article about a travel agency that specialized in arranging vacations for people and their pets — hiking tours through Provence, “tandem massages” at Las Ventanas Al Paraiso, charters that round-tripped from Jersey to Paris for a paltry $70,000. A sidebar detailed a new fad where people danced with dogs “freestyle”—specialty cruises where everyone got dressed up and big bands played “Footloose” while you boogied in white tie with Rover. They called it “K-9 dance sport” and “interpretive dance to music.” “Humans and dogs have essentially the same genes,” said an event organizer. “Every gene has a gene with the same function in the other genome. Did you know there are dogs who’ve been trained to sniff bladder cancer in humans?” She laughed and tore it out to show Lew because he was so big on helping the tsunami strays. Joan had perversely tried to swing some of his efforts over to helping 4-legged Katrina orphans, but ever since Lew heard about T Boone Pickens and his wife arranging Marines-assisted canine convoys to the New Orleans airport, 45,000 dollar trips on 737s to LAX replete with decon sponge baths, solicitous “caregivers,” quarantines, archival photographs (for the Internet), and microchip implants, he just didn’t want to hear about it. Operation Orphans of the Storm, Pet Rescue Katrina. That’s what they were calling it. The whole menagerie was heading for San Francisco, and Lew finally laughed when she told him that. He was moved to trumpet his favorite slogan: “We all have AIDS! We all have AIDS!”

— more articles on El Zorro! Right there, wedged between the usual glossy, photo-accompanied essays on 3,000,000 dollar timepieces and 7,000,000 dollar collection-of-Ralph-Lauren speedsters: ZH was truly the fortissimo fatass female genius-darling of the starchitectural cosmos. Team Hadid was putting up the “1st building on its home turf of London.” Well, hoop-dee-fuckingdoo. Team Hadid was building an entire floor of the Hotel Puerta América in Madrid — with “no furniture per se: the entire igloo-esque space molded from blinding white LG Hi-Macs, with ameboid walls, sprout shelves, and an iceberglike slab that doubles as a seat.” Her fat ass needs a double seat. The hostelry, built by Jean Nouvel, was going to have an Arata Isozaki floor, a Norman Foster floor, a Ron Arad floor, a John Pawson floor, an Eve Castro and Holger Kehne floor, a Whatever World-Class Whore They Wanted floor. But they didn’t want me. L’il ol Napa winemaker, me. Boo hoo hoo. And, ohmygod, it said Hadid’s rooms had her own branded linens! She was already doing linens! Next thing you know El Zorro would be redecorating Wormwood Scrubs…she was erecting a tower in Marseille for the French shipping firm CMA CGM. “Zaha Hadid’s office is on a roll.” Thus went the hyperventilated Robber Baron Report text, accompanied by ZH’s usual swoopy silverized stochastic cartoonlike computer renderings. El Zorro and her new BMW plant in Leipzig… Extra! Extra! Hadid Turns Auto Assembly Line into Catwalk! Had the world gone mad? Was it really such a slow news day? Was everyone all that interested? The critics were obsessed. Z was breaking down hegemonies and evoking the silent spacecraft of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Z was transforming assembly plants into choreographed, mechanized ballets. “Visually, her early work has all the dynamic energy of a Futurist painting by Boccioni or Balla, but its forms also reflect a desire to reverse Modernism’s dehumanizing effects.” Excuse me while I suck Pritzker dick. Cunt cunt cunt. Iraqi cunt cunt cunt. FatIraqifatIraqifatIraqi cunt. Fat Iraqi cu —

Joan dipped into her briefcase. If she was going to be persuasive, she needed to do a little cramming. She’d brought along a monograph with the detailed history and charcoal renderings of a famous mem that was never built. The structure, called the Danteum, was supposed to have been a monument to fascism. The project, fervently embraced by Mussolini (one of the Florentine poet’s die-hard fans), was meant to reflect the ineffable canticles of the Commedia. The slim volume had an epigraph that gave Joan comfort, attributed to Le Corbusier: “In a complete and successful work there are hidden masses of implications, a veritable world which reveals itself to those whom it may concern — which means: to those who deserve it.” It made her feel better that Il Duce’s labyrinth had remained imaginary. The grimly intimate illustrations were nothing like the grandiose batshit digital Etch-A-Sketches of contemporary megalostarchifuckers, being sad and quixotic and almost macabre, with a precursory whiff of the art of the Outsider. She wanted to show Lew the quote (not the book). There were clippings on Goldsworthy in her briefcase as well; a catalog of pen-and-ink studies by the Romantic “sepulcher artist” Joseph Gandy, including the visionary “Design for a Cast-Iron Necropolis”; a totemic lucky-rabbit copy of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture (with its heavily dog-eared Altars section); a Penguin Classics The Rig Veda; plus a few of Rem K’s wham-bang pseudotrenchant overgraphicized overhyped colleague-condescending essays — all in all, not much in her quiver. Baby On Board. That’s what I really have, let’s face it, and in the end (or the beginning anyway) it was way more than nothing: Baby On Board. (Say it again.) ( You can say that again. ) Baby On Board — by far the heaviest blueprint in her portfolio these days. Nothin says lovin like something from the oven. Praise the Lord and pass the amniocentesis…

What had she to prove, beyond that?

She called her partner from the plane. He had whimsically decided to detour from Rancho Mirage to Wim Wenders’s favorite spa-tel, the Miracle Manor, in Desert Hot Springs. (In Barbet’s world, it wasn’t true Americana unless it was already staked, claimed, and fetishized by some defanged international auteur.) He told her he’d just spoken to “the boys” and Full Fathom had nearly arrived at the Freiberg Love Chapel. Thanks for the update. PT Barbet reiterated that Lew wasn’t supposed to see anything till “magic hour,” when it would be poised for maximum effect; she actually thought that was one of his better ideas. The dusky Napa light would look seriously beautiful leaking onto the X-Acto’d design through the church’s clerestory windows.