Your Superbowl Ad Sucked—A Public Service Announcement

 Ads have been called the artform of the 21st Century. They can be artful if not art and The Superbowl used to be the SB of ads too. They used to be funny, daring or visually stunning. "Did you see the one with..." or "How did they talk the client into ..." were standard postgame water cooler fare. They used to be a celebration of unbounded creativity, of the big dog let off the leash for one glorious run around the stadium.

Every year the bar would get higher and those of us in advertising and marketing awaited the Big Game Spots with the eagerness of kids at Christmas. There was always one ad with an incredible concept backed by stunning production values that blew everybody away. It was a point of pride that we could share with our civilian friends and family. We could point to the screen and say, see, this is what I'm talking about. This year we all got coal.

Clients, it seem have become more conservative and so have their agencies. In their effort not to offend, they've failed to entertain or innovate. Microsoft runs the same chirpy ads, the same-ish interchangeable jiggly blonde works it for Carl's Junior, the boldest moves were reserved for Budweiser who poked millennial beer snobs (so risky) and Nationwide who cheerily reminded us that death is an important part of life (insurance).

A PSA from creatives, for creatives, a reminder that in Superbowl 2015, the most exciting part of the game, was the game. So be it. Like they're saying in Seattle, there's always next year. And for those of us who've forgotten what shocking, funny and creative look like all bundled together, there's this little gem for a product most Americans will never see or use. But I'm tempted to sign on, just because their ad is so good. Isn't that the point?

Watch it, but maybe not with your boss looking over your shoulder.

The Dark Night of The Dark Knight

In answering critics who say that dark movies cause dark acts, movie industry apologists sound eerily similar to NRA apologists ....
by Rick Weiss (c) 2012 Trident Productions

As horrific as it is, the “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere massacre in Colorado is already fading from our “news-stream” mentality. Before it completely washes downstream, let’s throw a little keylight on two troubling, if related connections and see what we can learn from them, if anything.

We know from “Inception” that Chris Nolan can bend space and time and keep 4 or 5 different realities going simultaneously, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is even more ponderous, a kinda a big goofy allegorical soufflé. It rises, but falls flat soon after leaving the oven. Good girls and bad girls trade places with reality-defying aplomb. Batman is masked. Unmasked. Masked again. He needs to conquer his fear. He needs to learn to fear again. He's rich. He's poor. He's rich again. He's dead. Alive. Dead again, then alive again. The Scarecrow sits in judgment on the rich. The film’s best line is left to Catwoman:

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne," she purrs. "You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could ever live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

Reflections of a Walker--Three Up, Three Down

Three up, three down. My after-dinner routine, 5-6 nights a week. We're talking the Rocky Steps, so roundtrip, that's 426 steps in all, not counting the long landings. I used to bring my music along, but lately, I go unplugged, to better hear what's in my head.

Steps are a metaphor for life. Steps are work done, effort expended, reward gained, new highs, interminable plateaus, repetition, repetition, religion, progress, process, meditation and more. From antiquity, we've climbed steps to seek absolution, gain power and worship gods.

These particular steps lead to Philadelphia's Art Museum, "the Parthenon of the Parkway," a temple to art. A quick, keylike turn around the fountain reveals the glittering city in expanse, at its feet. My neighborhood, Fairmount, predates the Museum's construction by a good two centuries. William Penn had originally planned to put his manor house here on the neighborhood's most prominent point. I am so spoiled, having six, now seven museums in a ten minute walk. Two of them are literally at my feet, across the street from my house.

This particular night, I did not veer across Pennsylvania Avenue, rather I stayed on it, skirting Mark di Suvero's "Iroquois," another of my favorite nightly visual markers, seen here photographed by Inquirer alumni and friend Eric Mencher. My evening peregrinations had another destination, the newest and most controversial of our "art temples," the home of the new Barnes Collection. My nocturnal crawl had become an "arts reconnaissance."

Much has been said about this building--not all of it complimentary, some of this naysaying dished by yours truly.  I called it second-class, dowdy and unworthy of its prominent place on the Parkway, Philadelphia's museum mile, which, did I mention, I am privileged to live at the crown of?

I compared The Barnes unfavorably with the Phoenix Museum of Art (same architects--Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and wondered if it was something of an architectural slight on my people and place.  When I wrote my piece, an architect friend admonished me to keep a close eye and an open mind. So I did. I have watched The Barnes grow from a hole in the ground. Though I'm not entirely won over, lately a new notion has taken hold of me which I'm finding increasingly hard to shake.

I am not an architect or an architectural critic. But being a visual artist, living smack in the midst of a city where dramatic structures rise up with some regularity makes it hard to be neutral or ambivalent to your surroundings. You take sides. You form attachments. You walk the beat and research with your eyes, ears and feet. So, what I've been grappling with is the idea that perhaps The Barnes is not an architectural mediocrity after all. Quite possibly, it is a work of subtle and compelling genius.

Chatter astride the Social Network Divide, Halloween Edition

c.010101 is in your "face" for Halloween

Today, folks my (middle) age are split right down the middle. Half are FB junkies, half are still poleaxed by the social networks, their triviality, their meteoric rise in popularity (in direct proportion to that triviality). To both halves, the haves, the have nots, the "likes" and the "like nots" this is my final apologia.

I like having a tab on my 16 year old son and knowing who his friends are through FB. I like catching up with my nephews in college and my own friends from 20-30 years ago. I like knowing that my brave friend MN is a master woodworker and though she has breast cancer I can "like" her post in which she tells all, that I can offer her support and encouragement along with dozens of others of her friends. I'm sure she'll carry a little positive buzz into her next chemo session. I love the rolicking political debates I have with farflung friends in FL, PA, CA and all over on issues as diverse as "the meaning of tolerance" "abortion" the "Tea Party." I like bating my old TU classmate who is both a Republican media consultant and though he might howl at the label, a closet liberal. One guy from FL has a real knack for throwing out a debate topic and watching people pounce all over it like wolves. This makes for lots of freewheeling intellectual interplay and just plain fun on a purely social level. If you post about what you had for lunch and that you're at work and bored, chances are I'm not going to care or answer you. It takes less than a second to engage or dismiss a trivial post, but for the rest of us, there is discourse, real intelligence out there. You don't have to look very hard for it. I have a wife, two tech-savvy boys, a business and a pretty active "non-virtual" social life.

I am done justifying the value of being an online social networker. I'm not turning into a socially maladjusted hermit for using it but you may be turning into a socially maladjusted hermit if you don't use it. Many people are saying that the social platform is rapidly becoming not just the next communications platform, but the next communications, computational do everything platform. So whatever you say about the intrusion of the media into our private lives, social media are/is here to stay and some of us have stopped puzzling over what it says about us (as a society) and started wondering what it says next.

Facebook needs some work as a "cloud ap." Doing some things on it still takes too much guesswork and clicking about. That's all about to make a radical leap.   


Form Factor Follies

From geek ...

Computers. We have always been slaves to their form factors. When I was a teen wolf, they were as big as libraries, and now you can slip one in your pocket and carry it everywhere. One of my standard jokes is that as a tween geek I always dreamed about owning a pocket computer and now that I have one (a 5 year old Palm Treo) I'm old enough to need glasses to read it it. The joke loses something without my scintillating delivery, but the Treo, mature tech, fits handily in my pocket. So the problem with mobile computing is no longer size, but two other issues. Better imaging and input. We've all seen people walking down the street staring and clicking away at tiny screens until they walk into walls or other people. They're mobile, but the tiny screen and finger input sucks. It requires that you absent yourself from your surroundings. In the case of texting and driving to disastrous results. Wearable, discrete, heads up displays built into glasses or contact lenses and corneal sensors and the next phase dataglove-finger/hand-whatever thingy sensors will solve this issue. That's just current/breaking tech. Who knows what kind of cool, weird body-integrated computing interface is being dreamed up by the bright boys and girls in Silicon Valley and MIT.  



To chic!



The form factor change of computers drives the very definition of "computer" and "computer user." It's changed and will continue to. Computers used to be computational devices. They solved mathematical problems. Like the payload to get men to the moon and back. Then they shrunk down onto people's desks and became personal problem solvers. Business machines. Users changed from scientist to teenagers. Now our personal communications machines are social machines. And they are rapidly becoming ubiquitously portable.

Here's what the next big leap will look like.

It's more of the same.

It's everwhere.

It's in your face, introducing ...

facespace-3D



FaceSpace 3D Live--What, you think it won't happen?

 Imagine, Facebook 3D and other non-virtual platforms where social networks run amock and becoming completely equally untethered and mobile. Whether I want to or not, I'll be wading through endless streams of social data. Ron in Florida is stirring up his conservative friends. My sister in Virginia is posting the Steelers jerseys she knitted for the lab puppies. Here in Philly, I take a moment and friend the Art Museum as I run up its steps and do my Rocky victory dance.

The Rocky Statue, already my friend, says, go ahead, friend both the museums too. When I get to the top, I'll let you all know. Heck. You'll all be watching. We'll share likes and posts from the restaurants, galleries, service stations and CVS's I pass on foot or you drive by in your car. You think we live in a media-cluttered world now. Man, just wait.

I don't know how I feel about that. Ten years from now, I'll no doubt be nostalgic for the relative simplicity of these our current times. That's just the way it works. We will all walk around endlessly distracted by our personal technology and our personal enviroment and its global extensions. Soon our environment and our technology will merge. And we will merge. I just hope I can keep up with all of it.

Off to get some Halloween candy with "Tween Wolf." Live from the trenches.

Lists, Advice and the joys of reading aloud.

A writer on one of the writers' groups I follow posted this link to the 100 Greatest Opening Lines for a novel. In some respect such lists are meaningless, but I am reading Huckleberry Finn to my 10 year old for his bedtime reading and this line appears as #12 of the "Greatest Opening Lines":

"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

This is the second child I've read aloud to from this, perhaps the most important American work of fiction by arguably the greatest American author. I tell him its for his erudition, but it's really for me. I maintain a "selfish selflessness" when it comes to reading to the boys. I only read works I love, so as best to communicate my enthusiasm for the work and for reading in general. Huckleberry Finn is perhaps my favorite novel of all time. Such a ripping adventure yarn, so simply written, in such a compelling voice on so many complex subjects. Racism, slavery, morality, identity, personal loyalty, the relationships of fathers and sons ... layers and layers, on and on.

That said, imho, the line is only memorable because the book is so damned good. But does that make it great? I always thought the line was a bit of a "throw-away," an understated device Twain used to quickly move readers from A to B. He gives permission to read Huck (his masterpiece) without having first read TS (his great work). Huck Finn is chockfull of amazing lines, all far more memorable than its first line.

How about this passage from Chapter 16, where we stopped last night:
Setup--Huck is bedeviled by his conscience, having had an opportunity to do the "right thing" and give Jim up. But for reasons he doesn't fully understand yet, he doesn't.

"I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad -- I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. "

What makes a great opening line? Is it the great poetic resonance that presages the story like a bolt of lightning? Is it how in a single brushstroke, it intros a memorable protagonist or sets the stage for the work's central conflict?

What virtue is inherent in a novel's first line that we as writers should study, know and emulate?

I always thought that the first lines of short stories were more "important" because of the economy of short stories v novels. Novels are about slow-cooking, delicate, complex nuanced flavors, while short stories offer sharper, faster brighter flavors but by necessity, less complexity. The short story format only allows you to hint at complexity, i.e., negative space, rather than develop it. In cooking, a good reduction, water is all that boils off. In a good short work or a good long work, there is no excess water. So, I'd argue that it's not possible to retain ALL the flavors of a long work in a short work, no matter how skilled or brutal an editor you are.

To wit, this link from Writer's Digest for those of us considering, editing or pulling our hairs out over a novel in progress. Some solid advice within, which I'm taking to heart:

Writer’s Digest - Take Your Novel to the Finish Line

 

Here's again is the link to an essay I did on Twain while reading Tom Sawyer with Son 1. 

My how I roam and ramble. Twain would have me set on a raft without a paddle. 

The Curse of Dr. Barnes

Before

After

The Barnes Foundation, according to its own website "is home to one of the world's largest collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings, with extensive holdings by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Modigliani, as well as important examples of African sculpture."

The design for the new home of the worldclass impressionist collection amassed by the uber-contentious Dr. Al Barnes bears an eerie and unwelcome resemblance to the Juvenile Detention Center which it replaces.

A Bit of Barnesian Background

The Barnes Collection has one of the most embattled legacies in the history of American art collection, even inspiring a movie with the overwrought title “The Art of the Steal."  The good doctor who died in 1951, made a fortune in nostrums and patent medicines. He also had a true talent for shopping in Europe and managed to scoop up a lot of "bargain basement" art at firesale prices.  I haven't seen "The Art of the Steal." I wonder if it even touches on how this shiny collector and creator of Argyrol, nickled the starving artists whose works he bought for a song. But that's art in the age of commerce for you--a sad tale, but scarcely worth a historical footnote.

What makes the infamous Barnes backstory fascinating is that Doc B had no great love of the city and its business and cultural leaders. Seems they turned up their narrow blue noses at his self-made, new money social ascendancy, so he got his payback. Using his collection as a sort of cultural hostage, he forged a will he clearly intended to be unbreakable. Then he used it as a hammer to hit the art establishment over the head with, long after he was gone. Basically, the will said that The Collection could never:

• Be broken up
• Exhibited/toured
• Or worse, moved!

Call it karma, but Barnes died of a tragic auto accident, his legacy still very much in flux. One wonders if he was a victim of self-inflicted road rage. While other private art foundations manage quite well, the Barnes made the news with its odd choice of stewardship and its court battles. Today, Dr. B may be heartened that his unquiet spirit transmigrated to cohabit with certain quixotic forces who still battle to prevent the collection's move.

Maybe a hundred years hence, the Barnesiacs and the township of Merion will band together and take a page from the Egyptians who after decades of righteous contention, were able to repatriate their priceless antiquities from the Louvre.  The fact is that languishing out in leafy Merion, PA, mired in restrictive visitation policies, the prickly half-love of its neighbors and the bizarre internecine politics of its dysfunctional board, the Foundation and its Collection was drowning in red ink. The Pew and the Lenfest Foundations stepped in and threw Barnes a lifeline, but the bailout inked a devil's deal. It required the collection to move to the city where it can finally be appreciated by Philadelphia residents and visitors without special papal dispensation.

This battle waged famously for years in Philadelphia Orphan's Court. Recently Barnes' grudge-drenched will was broken in a gust of sulfur and smoke and what I'm sure are several legal precedents. Philadelphia Lawyers may moan, but art lovers of all stripes are the beneficiaries. Albert Barnes' vitriol was ultimately his foundation's aqua regia.  The experience of the Barnes an object lesson in how even great philanthropy can run aground when a benefactor's nits and gripes overshadow a more expansive, enduring vision of contribution to society. Anger, art and philanthropy make for a gritty salad.

I'm just a little guy with a big mouth and I doubt I'll ever be able to put the following principle to the test. But I believe that if you have the resources to acquire great art, it comes with an implicit noblesse oblige to share your spoils with society. What Barnes did was like commissioning a Mozart symphony, then restricting its performance to his basement. Great art demands the greatest possible audience--access by ordinary people who would be its patrons. Not an elite few. However much money and power you have, you can't narrowcast a cultural legacy in perpetuity. That's the nutshell. Now back to the future.

The House that Barnes Didn't Build

Call it "the takeover of the imperial art establishment" or just call it inevitable triumph of good sense; it seems in any case to be a done deal, a baked cookie. What feels half-baked, is the design by Todd Williams and Billie Tsien. Look at their spectacular design for the Phoenix Art Museum then come back and compare. Though in an Inquirer online reader feedback poll people seem to prefer the new design by a large margin, I ask:

'Where is the visual drama worthy of the collection?'

Why must so much Philadelphia architecture be confined to pedestrian brick and stone? Why don't the commissions who rubber stamp blandchitecture like this have the cojones to point the fancy out-of-town architects back to their drawing boards with the stern admonition to really "bring it" next time. Don't the architects who design for this city have more contemporary and uplifting materials in their palettes?  In the case of Williams and Tsien, they do, they just ain't sharin' it with Philly. Everywhere I go in Philly, I see new buildings going up that look like more of the same. They think they're reflecting the spirit of the city, when in my humble, each new uninspired brick and stonefaced edifice reinforces an anti-progressive, provincial frumpiness this city is trying so hard to shake off.

It's not that I'm looking for wild radicalism like Frank Gehry's scary metal monster in Bilbao, though love it, hate it, or think it resembles a Transformer, at least it makes a impression. Inga Saffron, whose every opinion I normally dote on like a starry-eyed fanboy, praised the punched windows resembling those in the facade of the Barnes' neoclassical home in Merion.


Yawn. So what? A handful of punched windows aren't going to mollify the Barnesiacs who'd rather see their precious collection shuttered than exhibited the way worldclass art should be.

What is the virtue of such nostalgic tribute when weighed in the balance with an opportunity to create a bold, visual exclamation point to Philadelphia's aspirations to evolve as a center of art and culture?  We deserve better.

Don't get me wrong, I am gladdened that this historic collection is finally about to be wrested out of its snuggery in the Land of Lockjaw, but it should come downtown and present its face to the Parkway. It should announce itself with drama and pride, not landscaping.

I walk The Parkway nearly every day. This corridor, one of my favorites in a gloriously walkable city, has so much potential. Yet I fear it will never be as grand as it could be, especially if one of its anchor tenants turns its face away.

"It is an absolutely masterful design. Those who don't understand the design are looking at it from a selfish point of view," according to Moe Brooker of the Philadelphia Art Commission.

I'm just a selfish guy. Well harumph!

Am I missing something?

I think not.

I think the old curmudgeon has spun twice and is now cackling in his grave.

Maybe there's another movie in it

Call it, "The Revenge of Dr. Barnes."

Too bad Vincent Price isn't around to play the lead.

E-books not near ready for prime time:

-@v@- wrote:

Story: Will-e-books-ever-be-a-best-seller?

Amazon and Sony better hope Apple doesn't show up in this space, because the one tipping point feature that trumps price, killer "app-titude" or usability, i.e., “design cool" just ain't there. No eye appeal in either e-book package. These things are both butt ugly; they scream prototype even though they aren't.

Nobody reads 170 books at one time, so who cares, capacity is a non-starter at this point. Add to which they're way out of the price range of the one market they make the most sense for, the poor beleaguered students who have to cart dozens of monster textbooks around in their groaning backpacks. If my kids could replace all their textbooks with the one device they plug into their school's server or the net, I'd jump just to save them the backstrain and myself the doctors’ bills. But for now, fuggedaboudit!

Back to the drawing board kids, but don't take too long. Mark this. Apple will sit out a couple of cycles, then jump in with a sexy, far prettier face, toss in some of the cool interface doodads they do so well and we will all go oooh and aaah and cue up overnight at our nearest Apple Stores to buy the first ones.. Then they'll further solidify their market by giving them away to public schools along with Itunes textbook downloads and Steve Jobs will finally and irrevocably become William Randolph Hearst.

The Art Palace In My Front Yard

Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. While I find that on a whole that the quality of reportage, particularly international reportage has plummetted after the Inky was taken over by Philadelphia Media Holdings and its dark lord, Brian Tierney, Ms. Saffron's star remains undimmed. Ms. Saffron through her Changing Skylines column does what a big city daily should do, shed light and occasional heat on issues that affect urban life. Now as far as architecture goes, the closest thing to an education that I ever got was to hang out and get wasted with architect friends. That is until I made Ms. Saffron's article a weekly "must read" and began to take a proprietary interest in the skyline of my adopted City of Brotherly Love.

This particular piece of skyline is right out my front door and if proximity confers some sense of entitlement or ownership, then her most recent review, Art Palace is Right Fit with Philadelphia is a perfect fit for me.

My architect friends agree that in Ms. Saffron, that Philly has a worldclass observer of public spaces. As people who have lived with the Fidelity/Reliance cum Perelman for 23 years, Mrs. W and I have some history with the building and on the whole are thrilled with what it has become. Given that this structure is the second home of one of the nation’s premiere museums, it is right to hold it to a higher standard.

I must admit that when I first saw the concrete block of the new addition, I was dismayed. I imagined that somewhere, a building materials order got flummoxed and a suburban Walmart got our Perelman order and we got theirs. (Note the liberal use possessives.) But humble concrete can be a tabula rasa and when I saw the metal grid on the 25th street side with the climbing flowering vines, I had a little aha moment and walked away with a smile on my face.

I had another even more intense aesthetic experience after the construction barriers, trailers and fencing were cleared away to reveal a broadened gleaming pedestrian expanse along the Fairmount-PA Ave intersection. Because of its scale and lighting it is serving as a lively, impromptu community hot spot, where on one particular mid-summer evening, while chatting up the museum’s director of housekeeping, a neighbor, I observed Art Museum Director Anne d'Harnoncourt and a neighborhood mom confer on dog training strategies. This is a nexus where we neighbors regularly connect in little Jane Jacobian moments on our way to and from our errands and walks.

There is one sore spot on this lovely walkway and perhaps it takes a neighbor with a couple decades of walkby experience to point it out. Our new neighbors should know that in my 20+ years of observing, nothing has ever flourished in the little strip of earth that parallels the “moat” wall. The previous owners planted boxwoods which, try as they might, through multiple replantings, always withered after a couple of seasons. The same pretty vines that seem so happy on the 25th Street side are dying wretched deaths in that parched little strip of cursed earth along PA Avenue.

Most folks I talk to agree that the work of the landscapers has fallen far short of expectations. Even the streetside lot on 26th, which is a quantum improvement in terms of eye appeal, was poorly executed when it came to laying down an appropriate soil base and proper planting. One day it was a bare construction trash strewn network of pits and trenches. The next day it was planted. The plants there now struggle and show the ill-effects of rushed, slipshod planting techniques. Several cute little rhododendrons have already succumbed. We’re also a bit perplexed that the lovely honey locust and black locusts that were planted along 25th, Fairmount and PA Ave were not extended back along the Meredith St. expanse of the Perelman. What, just because it doesn’t face the more trafficked avenues, it isn’t worthy of modest finishing touches? The museum needs to call its landscapers on the carpet to remedy these oversights. What they’ve done, or more to the point, what they haven’t done, is unworthy of this public space.

The most glaring oversight is the “temporary” PECO pole that furnished power to the construction machines, but now stands, an ugly sore digit, disconnected from the grid and ready to be extracted. But it hasn’t been and nobody can tell me when it will be. I buttonholed the project manager and he asked me if I had any pull with PECO and we both laughed at the irony in his question. Perhaps Ms. d'Harnoncourt herself should get on the phone and work her way up the electric utility’s chain until this sore tooth is yanked. If you google my address, you’ll see why this particular piece of unfinished business is most galling to us. Before the construction, we had a beautiful, unobstructed view of the northwest face of the museum proper and its sycamores. The lot used to be a blacktop sea of cars, parked two or three to the space. We now have a lovely view of the locust trees and shrubbery of the lot. On the whole, a vast improvement. Then standing smack in the middle of our transom window is this bare ugly projection which resembles nothing so much as a rudely upthrust Brobdingnagian middle finger. It is a visual insult that we endured while it was needed and as it no longer serves any purpose, it has to go.

Finally, I chatted up Inky staff shutterbug Michael Bryant when he was taking his photos in preparation for Inga's article. His 7th picture (on the philly.com site) shows the interior view of the ventilation stack and I agree with Ms. Saffron's assertion that it is butt ugly and inexcusable. Imagine in its absence, the light and the view of that pretty brick, tree and sun-dappled piece of 25th St. looking out or the lovely view of the museum’s atrium looking in. It could have been a lively and enduring visual comment on how a cultural landmark and its resident neighbors interact and instead it looks like an architectural mooning (and I’m not talking astronomy) to the genial neighborhood that has for the most part, endured the three years of construction with patience and good grace. The architect had the Perelman's huge interior space to work with that would have been invisible from the street. What WAS he thinking?

Even more inexplicable and you can see it from Mr. Bryant’s photo, are the uneven flashing, the ladder and rag, (if that’s what these are) sticking up from the top. Walking up 25th St. one eerie moonlight night, the glint of the ladder and the rag flapping in the wind caught my eye and sent a chill down my spine. I had to stop and stare down this grim trompe-l'œil for several minutes because it looked for all the world like the malevolent scarecrow in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. (It was a lot darker and creepier then, trust me.)

I can’t claim to always understand art, but I sometimes wonder if I understand architecture even less.