It's rare that with just looking at two examples the sheer awfulness of our current "culture" can be illustrated in two different fields at once. But NPR rose to the challenge this morning.
NPR "special correspondent" Susan Stamberg interviewed architect Frank Gehry and provided him with what can most objectively and analytically be called an audio blowjob. NPR told us the buildings of the "world's most famous architect" resemble "towering waves at sea." His work, Stamberg said is "Wait for it -- lovable, thrilling, audacious, glowing." His personality is that of "a mensch wrapped around an iron will." Stamberg -- perhaps thinking her skills were not sufficient to the task at hand -- was helped on-air by Gehry's biographer, so she could better ask questions like "what did you learn about yourself from this book?" The bibliographer actually ends up sucking up to Gehry by reading his own words back to him about how he's never really satisfied with his work -- because he hasn't yet achieved perfection. The great man agreed. It was an awful, awful seven minute blowjob. Cultural conservatives would truly be within their rights to take to the Senate floor about this.
WALLACE: You obviously hold some fairly unconventional, even unpopular, ideas Mr. Wright. ...
WRIGHT: I'm not aware of it, if so.
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WALLACE: I understand that you attend no church.
WRIGHT: I attend the greatest of all churches.
WALLACE: Which is?
WRIGHT: And I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my church.--WALLACE: You once said, "If I had another fifteen years to work, I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation" Now, would you tell me why should you, one man, want to change the way of life of more than one hundred and seventy million people?WRIGHT: ...I think they should have a right to look to their architects for what they should build. ... I'd like to have a free architecture, I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and as a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace. ...--WALLACE: Is Salvador Dali a great public relations specialist?WRIGHT: Probably.WALLACE: Are you?WRIGHT: I don't think so. Because I've never cared very much which way the public was going, and what was the matter with it.--WALLACE: What is your reaction when I tell you that the nation's teenagers bought eleven million Elvis Presley records last year. Which group of youth do you think will inherit this country fifteen years from now, the Elvis Presley fans or the Frank Lloyd Wright fans?
WRIGHT: The Frank Lloyd Wright fans. Undoubtedly. Why? Because they're on the side of Nature, and the other fans are on the side of an artificiality that is doomed. Do you believe it? I do.
--WALLACE: How do you square such a mile-high skyscraper with your theories on decentralization?WRIGHT: ... Everybody would have room, peace, comfort, and every establishment would be appropriate to every man. It's an ideal that I think that goes with democracy, isn't it?
--WALLACE: What do you think of the American Legion, Mr. Wright?
WRIGHT: I never think of it, if I can help it. ... One war always has in it, in its intestines, another, and another has another.... And if you are not for war, why are you for warriors?
--WALLACE: Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, section October 18th 1953, said as follows: "Some quarters have denounced Wright as an impractical visionary and a pompous windbag."WRIGHT: Yes.WALLACE: How do you feel about such criticism, Mr. Wright?WRIGHT: Doesn't affect me particularly.WALLACE: Doesn't bother you?WRIGHT: Not a bit. You always have to consider the source from which these things come. Now if somebody I deeply respected had said such a thing I would be worried. I would hurt -- feel hurt. But as a piece in a newspaper, blowing into the gutters of the street the next day, I don't think it counts much.--WALLACE: Let's turn to your political views. After a visit to Soviet Russia, back in 1936, '37, you wrote the following in a publication called Soviet Russia Today. You wrote, "I saw something in the glimpse I had of the Russian people themselves which makes me smile in anticipation"WRIGHT: ... Do you ever disassociate government and people? ... I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be here if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.
--WALLACE: In one of your books; Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, you wrote, "We can escape literature nowhere, and its entire fabric is drenched with sex, newspapers recklessly steer sex everywhere. Every magazine has its nauseating ritual of the girl cover, the he-and-she novel is omnipresent."WRIGHT: Yes.WALLACE: What's wrong with sex, Mr. Wright?WRIGHT: Nothing.WALLACE: Then, why do you write what you say?WRIGHT: It would be wrong with you, rather than sex.
Indeed, there's nothing at all wrong with sex -- including blowjobs -- they just shouldn't be administered by National Public Radio.