Inaugural Post: I'm glad I've never been interviewed

This week's New Yorker includes a short piece in the "Talk of the Town" section, chatty and mildly catty as usual, about Frank Gehry's response to the limited run of t-shirts bearing the slogan "Fuck Frank Gehry". Apparently the architect was amused and intrigued enough to order a batch for himself. The bit that struck me, the second bit (having gotten past, just barely, the clumsy colloquial phrase "Get this", used to introduce the coincidence that led to Gehry's discovery of the shirts), was Gehry's explanation of why his wife took the developments in stride - "She's Panamanian, so she doesn't get rattled by much." He seems like a charming man, certainly sophisticated, and the comment is pretty commonplace, but the whiff of exoticism lingers uncomfortably. It reminds me, unfairly, of Gene Hackman's character in The Royal Tenenbaums introducing his adopted daughter as his "adopted daughter". I've used similar sort of shorthand to talk about people I love, but it's always struck me, after the fact, as inadequate and small.

Third thing that struck me in the piece: comparing Gehry's decision to start sending the t-shirts out as gifts to the gay community's co-opting the term "queer". Much as MLK adapted Gandhi's passive resistance ethos to the civil rights movement, Gehry shows that the strategies used to combat hate speech can also, God-willing, defeat the scourge of ironic t-shirts.

Or maybe he just thought it was funny.