Memorial

XXV.Joan

SHE sat at Starbucks, grouping people like an anthropologist. 2 subsets interested her this morning: the Nomadic Nesters and the Sidewalk Kings.

The Double Ns were spinsters who used the café like a personal drawing room. They spent little actual time à table, careful to bitchspray their territory with a clutter of computer, ceramic coffee cup, spiral diary notebooks, dog-eared New Age bestsellers, and peeled-off layers of outerwear. Nomadic Nesters were invariably female and may just as well have used the brackish blood of barren, precancerous wombs to delineate their turf. They hogged 2nd chairs for whatever overflow of detritus, even if the place were mobbed — a contradictory stratagem of the desperately gregarious — and in the rare moments they actually inhabited their space, waited like spiders for the victims who inevitably came along to ask if they might use said 2nd chair. The coquettish Double N would react to the request as if suddenly awakened from deep sleep, thinking her Marcel Marceau gape to be somehow attractive — the contrived and waifish acknowledgment of her own charming eccentricities, which she delusionally imagined others to revel in. Apologizing profusely for her absentmindedness, she would attempt to engage the poor soul who’d approached, with a flurry of cheery bullshit inanities before the seat got dragged to another table as she watched with an insanely intense grin and more marcelled tics, blinks, and twitters. Often the Double Ns begged a hapless neighbor to watch their things, batting Baby Jane lashes when the captive dupes reluctantly assented, rewarding them with a big-voltage desexed smile like a nun gone to rut. The Nomadic Nesters were so highly strung they could actually be seen examining thermoses and cups with Starbucks logos on shelves marked CLEARANCE. Joan feared that becoming N² was her fate.

The Sidewalk Kings were men, usually in their 40s, who strutted in front of the coffeeshop, talking into Bluetoothed air. Sometimes they rather delicately placed an arm behind them — little Napoleons pacing a ship’s prow. They spoke just loud enough for practically everyone to hear; SK monologues were always about money. Joan had the idea of taking pictures with her Razr and leaving personalized Kinko’s-pixeled records of their peacocky boulevardier preening on Porsche windshields with notes that said, “You think you’re Warren Buffett but you’re just a dickless wonderboy.”

(Thom Mayne would never be on Bluetooth or BlackBerry or any colored toothfairy like that. At least that was Joan’s idea. The churlish beanstalk was a Luddite who only used the phone when he had to. Who cared if he blabbed about His Favorite Weekend? Who cared if Richard Meier went on and on about his “cherished” Viking Ultra-Premium grill in the New York Times? Or if Danny Libeskind let everyone know he kept the complete works of Shakespeare, “in miniature,” under his bed. Barbet cared.)

I shouldn’t have fucked him, she thought, on her way to the office, venti latte plashing from the tiny hole of its cheap plastic lid onto her Olivier Theyskens skirt. Never fuck a client. Never fuck where you hope to build. She had the spiky fantasy of Barbet waiting for her with a messengered note from Guerdon LLC, Lew’s holding company, stating that ARK was no longer in competition and thanking them for their “interest, energy, and enthusiasm.” Oh God. She literally shook the thought from her head and groaned. When she got to work, she would scrutinize her memorial file to wash it all away. She’d been thinking about what Lew said about the Mem; anyway, it was time to do what Barbet called an “intuitive run,” a mental jog through the labyrinthine realm of design possibility. She’d probably blown it sky-high by making wetspot Pratesi whoopee, but didn’t care, or at least was telling herself that. So what if they lost the gig? Let Brad Pitt have it. Wasn’t he part of Uncle Frank’s “dream team”? Give it to Hayden Christensen or Lenny Kravitz—who thinks Bauhaus is the bomb—the true Rock Starchitects of Tomorrow.

I’ll just give up my place and go live with Mom. Cave in to perimenopausal loserdom. She was becoming indifferent and dismissive about everything, and knew that was a sign of depression — the knowing of which made her care even less. She felt soul and spirit ebb like a sewage tide of N-squared nutrient-sucked wombdead blood, Joan was over, and over it, she was all over herself. It was cold comfort when Pradeep pulled glibly Googled factoids from his ass to cheer her up: Brunelleschi was 41 when he entered the Florence cathedral competition, and “the great Donato Bramante was precisely your age when he was called to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome.”

There was no message from the holding company when she arrived and after an hour at her desk, Joan felt less paranoid. She flipped through the gigantic orange Hermès leather notebook Pradeep gave her on her last birthday and reexamined Andy Goldsworthy’s seraphic earthwork. How could she compete? For the 10,000th time, she looked at Donald Judd’s aluminum Marfan boxes and concrete bunkers in a neat desolate row but rejected any similar concept because of Freiberg’s grouping phobia. There was a xeroxed article about Michael Heizer’s awesome Earth Art “ruin” in the Nevada high desert — it all made her queasy. Déjà vu vu vu vu vu: newspapers, slick city magazines, and Sunday supplements carrying the same tired layouts on an eroto-Escherian loop: Marfa/getaways, Marfa/land boom, Marfa/Chinati (chinati meant “raven” in Aztec — she wanted to gag), Marfa/Prada storefront installation, Marfa/Giant, Marfa/eccentric 50something heiresses, Marfa/renovated rundown Deco buildings and adobe fixer-uppers, Marfa/ocotillos and prairie dogs, Marfa/Dan Flavin/Barracks, Marfa/“Mystery Lights”…the monthly piece somewhere, anywhere, everywhere about culinary auctions of black truffles from the foothills of the Pyrenees, or Masa Takayama’s latest psycho-expensive sushi parlor, always “tucked behind an unmarked door”…the controversy over the use of “Kobe” vs “Kobe-style”…the Coppola family compound turned lodge-resort in Belize…the Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) and Andrea Zittel/A-Z Administrative Services/A-Z Raugh/A-Z Escape Vehicles and Michael Fucking Heizer. If she read one more thing about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) or the Lightning Field or Andi Joshua Tree (Mojave as Marfa) Zittel’s schoolgirl uniforms and desert hiking trips or Heizer’s cranks and idiosycrasies or High Desert Test Sites or Center for Land Use Interpretation or Dia: Beacon or Lannon Foundation Earth Sculpture Installations or for that matter anything about William T Vollman (who even looked like Robert Smithson; oddly, both Smithson and Vollman looked like Donald Judd without beards) and the Inland Empire or Imperial Valley — she was certain she would disembowel herself at the Basel Art Fair and take a few with her. There were other, different loops: the UCLA Live spring brochure with its dumbass hypey look-at-me names: Chava Alberstein, Pappa Tarahumara, Tania Libertad, Astrid (Zaha!) Hadad; the New Literary Hoaxes; the people compelled to amputate their own limbs; the affluent Manhattanites who got monstrous diseases and wrote tender trenchant diaries of their own demise…the Brian Wilson Smile and Elvis Costello classical-crossover/Metropole Orkest loop; the Walter Benjamin/Eva Hesse/Guy Debord loop; the Proust translation wars; the what-does-Steve-

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.