[FRIAM] The Paper Architect.

[Jon Zingale]

On one of my last visits to Cleveland, I had the pleasure of meeting a
young savant named Jack. Besides hosting a late-night radio show on
WCSB[𝄞] and performing afternoon noise music at a near-westside bar[𝄢],
he talks nearly non-stop, and almost singularly, and with encyclopedic
scope and depth, about the design and history of Cleveland architecture.
There is no building that exists or has existed, that escapes his
survey. To drive with him is to sign up for a guided tour, he points to
every cleared lot and Payless shoe store and describes exactly what is
missing. He explains the appearance of buildings now missing, the style
of their transoms, trellises, and archways; the founding dates, the
location of the quarries whence came granite, marble and mud for bricks.

For those not familiar with individuals like Jack, let me explain that
it is far from rare to meet these individuals in rust-belt coffeehouses,
and much more rare to find them in academic programs anywhere. They are
most easily identified in winter, where they are found without a coat,
wearing a sweatshirt or hoodie, and bumming cigarettes in blown-out
tennis shoes. I mention his appearance because my conversations with him
evoked for me the dedication of Ginsberg's Howl. Alan Ginsberg dedicates
his poem to Carl Solomon, a dadaist friend that committed suicide in a
most remarkable way. Solomon lived in a time when translobal lobotomy[⌁]
was still high-psychiatric science. Solomon, deciding that one's life
*is* the life of the mind, simulated madness until finally, the surgeon's
knife removed his soul. Ginsberg then begins his poem with the line:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

I dare not print more of the poem for fear of raising the specter of
obscenity, pornography[¶].

Jack and I would talk about empire and decadence[⊲] and of those
buildings that are left to rot[⌦] before being torn down and replaced
by McDonald's, their steel boilers (the size of some apartments) scraped
for dollars. Those buildings can never again exist, for there is no longer
the steel, the raw resources, the expertise[⌽], the affluence, or vision.
The image for us is architecture as a mirror reflecting the internals of
our postmodern institutions, the hoax of sustained pedigree and privilege.

One morning, over coffee and as he ranted at me about the horror he
experiences from art moderne[1948] (a movement that I rather like, but
hey), I stop him to ask about some prints he has in an envelope on the
table. It seems that with the help of a disposable camera, the photo
lab of a CVS, a thumb drive, and the copy machine at the local library,
that he has taken to editing back into images of parking lots those
glorious buildings that had once stood there. In some of the images, he
would grotesquely enlarge the forms until they loomed over drugstores
and Chipotles. At that moment, seeing the images, I understood Jack's
protest as I understand Solomon's. Today, to dedicate one's life to the
life of a paper architect, to practice the drafting and design of those
buildings that will never/can never again exist, is the deepest sob and
most hopeless utterance of a postmodern era. A thumb in the eye of 20th
century decadence and waste, a glorious and honorable suicide.

[𝄞] Where he smokes a j before browsing youTube for samples to mix into
a two-hour sound collage.
[𝄢] http://www.nowthatsclass.net/
[⌁] Francis Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle
[¶] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
[1948] https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/467
[⊲] As an aside, two days ago was the anniversary of Marie Antoinette's
date with the guillotine, vive la révolution, perhaps there will be
cake!
[⌦]
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiY0fTfxNTzAhUHm54KHfbLBHwQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQA1CzfljahgFgwocBaABwAHgAgAHdA4gB6AySAQkwLjQuMy4wLjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=2LVtYZiFGIe2-gT2l5PgBw&bih=766&biw=1440
[⌽] Sure, feel however about your Wrights or Mies van der Rohes, but the
empire has become too exhausted to birth another just as it cannot birth
another Rachmaninoff.
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