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May 28, 2007
Your Name Here
The New Yorker
Frank Gehry shows he has a sense of humor, though he still doesn't have a clue:
Harris had the “Fuck Frank Gehry” shirts made in brown with orange lettering and in navy blue with silver lettering. He sold a few hundred, many to Europeans. Opponents of Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development, in Brooklyn, kept asking for donations.
Then, in March, a friend of Harris’s named Howell Caldwell was working as an assistant director on a weight-loss commercial starring Valerie Bertinelli. Get this: Caldwell’s limo driver, Geoffrey Cushing-Murray, also drives Gehry; on set, he mentioned to a friend that he had run into her husband wearing a “Fuck Frank Gehry” shirt at a Super Bowl party. Cushing-Murray had told Gehry about the encounter, and Gehry, he said, had been intrigued. Caldwell volunteered that he knew the guy who made the shirts. Within days, a sample batch was on its way to Gehry’s office.
“Somebody sent it to me,” Gehry said the other day, over the telephone, “and I thought it must have been the people in Brooklyn who are sort of angry. But then I thought, well, it must be loving, too. So I decided it was funny, and I put it on. And I wore it to the office, and everybody got a kick out of that, and then I wore it to the gym”—Gehry lifts weights at a Gold’s in Venice Beach—“and everybody got a kick out of that. The tough gals at the gym said, ‘If it’s an offer, you better be able to deliver, Mr. Gehry.’ ” Gehry’s wife, Berta, found this all funny. (“She’s Panamanian, so she doesn’t get rattled by much,” Gehry said.) In a Queer Nationesque move of appropriation, Gehry decided to begin sending the shirts out as gifts.
Posted by lumi at May 28, 2007 8:47 AM