- CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org -

NPR Gives Frank Gehry a Blowjob — An Awful, Awful Blowjob

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 — 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. It was, as I say, an awful, awful seven minute blowjob. Cultural conservatives would truly be within their rights to go to the Senate floor about this.

Rather than crit this monstrosity, let me elucidate by contrasting it with a remarkable 1957 interview, in which a baby-faced Mike Wallace interviews an elderly but very vibrant Frank Lloyd Wright (probably the actually most famous architect) two years before his death. In contrast, this interview is both contentious and admiring, challenging Wright, compelling him to really articulate his beliefs and how they differ from the general culture. Thus, it’s both timely and perennial. Years later Wallace would comment Wright “was master, I was student.” Here’s the full transcript and interview with a few excerpts below:

WALLACE: You obviously hold some fairly unconventional, even unpopular, ideas Mr. Wright.

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?

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: How do you square such a mile-high skyscraper with your theories on decentralization?

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…

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”

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 wrong with sex — including blowjobs — they just shouldn’t be administered by National Public Radio.