http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57_1AFXUTro&feature=related

As synecdoche and review my two favorite points from the Frank Gehry movie:

1) the shrink says he is tired of frustrated architects flocking to him and claiming that they could be as good as Gehry if he could cure them of their neuroses;

2) his name is actually (if we believe all we read) Milton Wexler and the other take-away I got was “Couples come here to make things better and artists come here because they want to change the world.”

3) something else I got from the library recently, “Midnight Cowboy” featuring Jon Voight as “Joe Buck” and a song by Nilsson “Everybody’s Talkin” written by Waldo Salt, based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, d and p by John Schlesinger — I like the film within the film.

4) “Hairspray” with Sonny Bono, Ruth Brown, Debbie Harry, Ricki Lake and Jerry Stiller and the music is much better than the Marc Shaiman things; Dartmouth did a production recently which makes me want to nominate John Waters for a Montgomery Fellowship.

5) “Blow-up” by Michaelangelo Antonioni featuring Vanessa Redgrave — I only watched thirty minutes of it but I liked the bit about worrying about people with poodles. I think I already referenced it somewhere below, superficially.

6) Barry Eisler,”Inside Out” (2010) more because he is a friend of a friend, apparently; I thought I saw him in the produce section of Whole Foods and started stalking some dude near the celery and whispering “Barry?…Barry?” but somehow did not have the seeds near the grapes to tap him and find out. This dude was wearing a pro-marijuana shirt, if that is a clue. I got only five chapters in before it started creeping me out; it also made me think that Wikileaks may have actually blackmailed We The People for $100 million before they gave up Brad Manning. I like the bit from the previous bit about taking out a biker on Old Page Mill.

As I was on phone talking about Gehry and drinking strong coffee, I noticed my stack of books and papers looked like one of his maguettes.

7) back to Gehry, and I list this here rather than above as the text itself is less substantial than the previous five or six referenced, as I was talking about the “Sketches of Frank Gehry” on my cell, at Printers Cafe, I noticed that my books and papers had formed what looks to me like a Gehry maquette. I saw the show of maquettes in LA, and walked the roof of the concert hall. I first heard about Gehry when I was an intern at Chiat Day SF; Jay Chiat was an early backer of Gehry, as I understand it, although not in the Pollack film*.

8) I grabbed Richard S. Tedlow’s “Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American” and grazed and what I find remarkable (by “Plastic Alto” standards) is that the author, a Harvard professor, mentions that a 1976 breakthrough marketing campaign is called CRUSH but does not, as William H. Davidow does, go into the detail about Denver and the Broncos — football, people — and call it or reference Orange Crush, the defense. Reminds me that Yiaway Yeh’s wife, CeMo, aka Cecillia Mo is studying links between politics and sports culture, at Stanford. I was also preparing another riff about Davidow, who I met once very briefly at a Dartmouth event AND READ HIS BOOK, and gardening; there is something in or on the Buck’s menu about high tech food growing, using high tech lights and less or no land or water.

Gotta go. Let’s go bowling! Perhaps back in St. Paul. Today my safe word is “Hamlin College”. Or is it “Hamline U”?

9) “I forgot my mantra” — Woody Allen reference.

*edit to add, about six hours later: as I was revising this, and checking “jay chiat” and “frank gehry” I only then realized that Jay is dead. He died almost ten years ago, at age 70 of cancer. Briefly, my first gig out of Dartmouth was an unpaid intern at Chiat Day SF, on 77 Maiden Lane. I got the gig through my former high school newspaper advisor, Tom Harbeck. It was 10 weeks or so in 1986, the year the Mets beat the Red Sox and Bill Buckner became a goat, unfairly, and also Sugar Ray Leonard beat Tommy Hearns, we all watched from Rich Durante’s kitchen and back room, on Hayes. I worked on Worlds of Wonder, studying toy commercials. I only met Jay once or twice, he had no idea who I was, and I did not make the list of “anybody who anybody remembers who worked for Chiat Day.” I was walking down the stairwell from 6 to 5 floors and Jay was coming up and he asked me about the toy gun I had, which was a Star Wars license and not anything from WOW, and I was embarrassed to be holding the toy and basically froze like I was hit from phasers on stun when he asked me. I recall showing my book in LA a couple years later and Jay’s assistant as far as I could tell, was the lady named Carol Madonna, who was quite attractive. The LA agency had the fish shaped conference room, by Gehry. Jay Chiat left us a grandparent, and even people like me were somehow touched by his excellence. I also recall that Fred Goldberg would stop to pick up paper clips, singular, an eye for detail that I try to emulate.