the brautigan ch.1
The Brautigan
If you happen to turn to the blurb on the back cover of any novel by the American author Richard Brautigan, you will probably come across the following sentence. We never really know who wrote it but it seems to turn up time and time again:
“There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans’, just as now write novels.’ The unnameable at the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle continues to tickle our future fancy: ‘This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful and right.’
It was time to have another go at this new shot. Modern architecture was becoming the architecture it had threatened for the whole of the last century. Buildings were lying around, abandoned, legs up in the air. Cathedrals were back in vogue. Rumours, of the sort that had become reality, were exchanged as fast as they could be invented.
I don’t recall arriving in Barcelona. Was there an airport recently built, a museum recently published, a star architect I was doomed to meet? I couldn’t tell. The roller-bladers bruised me, the sun hurt the sidewalk. Architecture could curtain the soul. I stepped into the Hotel Colon. Could it be, was it, why was he here? He looked up as if awaiting a foreign agent, ‘Hello!’ I greeted Frank but didn’t know him well enough - except in poetry - to call him Frank. He was on his way to Bilbao and just happened to be in Barcelona. Funny, I thought, that just as I wanted to have a new shot at unreality I should collide with the world’s most renowned architect. ‘What’s going on?’ Beats me, Frank said. There was architecture even in his smile. I got up out of the huge leather chair as Daniel rushed in. Last thing I remember I was rushing toward the door again.
From 30,000 feet up in the air it seemed appropriate to try and take revenge on all the asphalt down there in Bigtown, in Mesquite just outside Dallas. It was one of the deadmalls in urgent need of resuscitation! New exchanges for retail, community and security were necessary but unexciting. Nothing much to be done, except either let the corpse go on dying or resuscitate it in some unknown way. Outside the window, the serenity of the clouds could not fail to suggest the idea of an Airwalk. Contemporary architecture needed a new shot. It was necessary to play with a new genre, invent a new rumour: Pulp Architecture. This would be an architecture unstable but not uncomfortably so, a partial architecture. Up there in a building that had already died, snipers sat not with AK47s or Kalshnikovs but with consoles and Firewire connections.
The Brautigan was taking shape.
If you happen to turn to the blurb on the back cover of any novel by the American author Richard Brautigan, you will probably come across the following sentence. We never really know who wrote it but it seems to turn up time and time again:
“There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans’, just as now write novels.’ The unnameable at the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle continues to tickle our future fancy: ‘This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful and right.’
It was time to have another go at this new shot. Modern architecture was becoming the architecture it had threatened for the whole of the last century. Buildings were lying around, abandoned, legs up in the air. Cathedrals were back in vogue. Rumours, of the sort that had become reality, were exchanged as fast as they could be invented.
I don’t recall arriving in Barcelona. Was there an airport recently built, a museum recently published, a star architect I was doomed to meet? I couldn’t tell. The roller-bladers bruised me, the sun hurt the sidewalk. Architecture could curtain the soul. I stepped into the Hotel Colon. Could it be, was it, why was he here? He looked up as if awaiting a foreign agent, ‘Hello!’ I greeted Frank but didn’t know him well enough - except in poetry - to call him Frank. He was on his way to Bilbao and just happened to be in Barcelona. Funny, I thought, that just as I wanted to have a new shot at unreality I should collide with the world’s most renowned architect. ‘What’s going on?’ Beats me, Frank said. There was architecture even in his smile. I got up out of the huge leather chair as Daniel rushed in. Last thing I remember I was rushing toward the door again.
From 30,000 feet up in the air it seemed appropriate to try and take revenge on all the asphalt down there in Bigtown, in Mesquite just outside Dallas. It was one of the deadmalls in urgent need of resuscitation! New exchanges for retail, community and security were necessary but unexciting. Nothing much to be done, except either let the corpse go on dying or resuscitate it in some unknown way. Outside the window, the serenity of the clouds could not fail to suggest the idea of an Airwalk. Contemporary architecture needed a new shot. It was necessary to play with a new genre, invent a new rumour: Pulp Architecture. This would be an architecture unstable but not uncomfortably so, a partial architecture. Up there in a building that had already died, snipers sat not with AK47s or Kalshnikovs but with consoles and Firewire connections.
The Brautigan was taking shape.
posted by frank heron at 11:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home