“Philip Johnson used to say, ‘We’re all going to go to the Century Club — the architects, but not their wives. And we’re going to wear evening dress and we’re going to talk about architecture.’ So they invited Bob. The person who called said to me, ‘I’m embarrassed to have reached you, Denise, I wanted Bob. You can’t come to this meeting because you’re a wife.’”
 — Haha, old asshole Philip Johnson strikes again, as recounted by the architect Denise Scott Brown, who was also married to an architect, Bob Venturi.

Are your favorite things Renata Adler, Hal Hartley, Peter Dinklage, gay nude drawings and baseball? OH MY GOD, MINE TOO, LET’S BE FRIENDS!!! But yes, all of these things are happening: *screaming*. Renata hits The Strand at 7 p.m.

by Will Arbery

• He saved the world from destruction with his rocket science. He and Wernher von Braun saved the world and all its vegetables.
• Smoking will make you impotent.
• He knows “Goodnight Irene” in German.
• He was raised by nuns because he was an orphan, but he was kicked out when he made a pass at a nun novice. “Early pooberty.” He was 9. She was 13.
• Crazy hats get you a good job.
• Irene’s skin has a pink glow so she’ll have at least 3 children.
• He dated a “porn movie star” of German descent. She was 20 and the most beautiful woman he had ever met, but he had to break up with her because she was a “porn movie star.”
• He dated a 40-year-old woman and went to live with her, but she had a 16-year-old daughter, whom he also had relations with. So he attempted to flee, and she followed him out to his car, and he said “No, with me, you won’t know if you’re going or coming.” And she said “I’ll always be coming.” (He winked.)
• The tobacco company puts hard drugs in their cigarettes. “That’s more important than anything you’ll learn in college.”
• He married his current wife because of her resemblance to her mother, who had 10 children. He assumed that his wife would also give him 10 children, but she only gave him 3, the bitch.
• He was making his living spearing fish in L.A. He was making 30 cents a pound. Most only make 3. His girlfriend at the time taught him to dive underwater, down to 150 feet below, and go through the underwater caves. She was very intelligent. She was, in fact, a sea lion. An actual sea lion. She taught him to body surf when humans weren’t body surfing yet. She took him to a mating party. At the mating party, there were hundreds of female sea lions. His girlfriend told the other sea lions, through her body language, that he was a fun guy and a good provider. Sea lions look for a good provider in a male, just like human females. “Did you know that?”
• He also worked on an assembly line as a riveter. His boss wanted to fire him because he talked too much. He didn’t think this made sense, because the riveting was so loud — how did his boss know? But then the boss got in a car accident and died. And Bill got the boss’ job because he was a good talker.
• Once, during his rocket science job, he got an 850% pay raise.
• Cigarettes are impossible to smoke in space.
• He got his rocket science job on a fluke — he didn’t even know much math — but he corrected the brilliant interviewer’s arithmetic. The brilliant interviewer was so humbled that he gave Bill the job.
• Irishmen with red hair (like Bill in his youth) are genetically more attractive to women because of a pheromone that they secrete. Also, they are directly descended from the Neanderthals.
• Never marry a smoker. They objectively do not care about others. You’re four times more likely to get a divorce. They feel no guilt.

Will Arbery graduated from Kenyon College in 2011, and now he lives in Brooklyn where he’s trying to be a playwright and an adult.

★★★ The wind tousled hair or whipped it around. On the steps up from the subway, warm air contended with and briefly edged out the chill. Out on the street, though, fingers went numb. Sparrows chattered in the shelter of the bushes behind the shelter of the netted scaffolding. One tiny wayward puff of cloud crossed above the avenue. The doorman scooped up a windblown cardboard box and made small talk about how cold it was. Winter, practically, still. In the night, the full Dipper stood over Broadway and Amsterdam, every star of it shining, if you looked up between streetlights.

“Badgers are digging up the cemetery where the poet and author Dylan Thomas is buried, causing damage to graves.”

“For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers. ‘No good film is too long,’ he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. ‘No bad movie is short enough.’ Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago.”

American straight ladies no longer wish for a white wedding dress the way they did when we had Traditional Values, before they were born, because “living in sin” is the new normal for a nation without a Vengeful God. Now that nobody believes in religion, U.S. women are shacking up at record levels — in the popular 30-and-under demographic, 77% of American girls have “shared an address” with their dudes.

While straight people have all but given up on marriage, gay people have become the only moral examples in a nation that has utterly turned its back on both decency and responsibility.

But some experts say it’s not just the morals of heterosexuals that are to blame. It’s the fact that most of them are so desperately poor.

More people are putting off marriage either because they can’t afford it or because it’s financially risky, said Gail Wyatt, the director of the University of California Los Angeles’s sexual health program …. “Marriage is for people who have money and want to spend money just on the wedding itself,” Wyatt said in a telephone interview. She wasn’t involved in the study. “Some people would rather buy a house, or just pay the rent.” People who are poor or less educated may shy away from marriage and its legal complications, she said.

Perhaps marriage has become too complicated, what with its “legal complications” and wedding expenses. Even the Supreme Court is involved with marriage these days — that’s how complicated it has become! Surely there’s a way that straight people could marry without taxing their minds or having to go to the CoinStar machine again.

Or, perhaps marriage just isn’t in the cards for America’s beleaguered heterosexuals. It’s really kind of a luxury market, and we can’t all be the 1%.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Excerpts from my difficulty telling jokes

A shadow of a penis walks into a bar. No. A bar
realizes it’s a Rabbi. No. A pope shits on a bear. Yes.
A pope shits on a bear. Now we need a new pope. We have
the bloody pointy hat just not the pope. A bear
walks into a bar and asks what goes with pope. Fries,
of course. How many light bulbs does it take to screw in
the dark? Four. One to be left on in your head, one in mine,
one to be smashed against the dark husk of night
in celebration when the humping and lowing is over,
the other to light the telling of the story of a christening
that sounds like a brittle rain falling from a broken sky.

Elegy with lies

This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.
When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin
under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her
and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)
and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine
calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).
When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin
pointing a gun at my memories and telling me
to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.
When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun
pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.
When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.
All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.

Bob Hicok’s new book is Elegy Owed

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Open up, here come more poems! You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“Our national zombie obsession can help us understand real public health risks”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gEuKmvM8a8

A lamb with an extra leg was born on Easter Sunday at a farm in Northumberland, England. Named, “Quinto,” the lamb has a fifth leg sticking out of the middle of its chest, between its normal front two legs. For some strange reason, it has taken a full five (5) days for video to reach YouTube, but it is finally here. She’s cute! And thriving! The extra leg does not hinder her walking and she has become a tourist attraction. (Though it remains unclear whether or not she was featured in any of the “beastie shows” or bottle-feeding exhibitions the farm offered as part of its “Easter Eggstravaganza.”) But what might this miraculous birth mean? It must be a sign of something, right? A special lamb, born on Easter Sunday? What might Quinto’s extra limb tell us about God’s plan for our future?

Traditionally, the lamb has been a symbol of innocence and sacrifice. (And deliciousness. Have you ever had the Haneez at the Yemen Cafe on Atlantic Street? Oh my God — slow-roasted lamb shank, “seasoned to perfection.” It is sooooooo good!) The lamb is the ultimate offering. You might have heard Jesus referred to as “The Lamb of God.” This is why.

According to Biblestudy.org, the number five is a very important number. The way they put it,

Five is four plus one (4+1).

As such, the number is associated with “redemption” and “grace.” For example:

The Hebrew word “the earth” is Ha-Eretz. The Gematria (substituting numbers for letters) of this word is 296, a multiple of four; while the word for “the heavens” is Ha-shemayeem, the gematria of which is 395, a multiple of five. The numerical value of the Greek words “My grace is sufficient for thee” is 1845, of which the factors are 5 x 3 x 3 x 41.

So, obviously, the birth of a five-legged symbol of Christ tells us something. I just haven’t quite figured out what it might be yet. There are five (5) fingers (counting the thumb) on the human hand. We humans wouldn’t be able to do much of anything without our hands, would we? No.

Quinto is “a bit of a celebrity,” according to her caretakers. Which only makes sense. The Virginian heavy metal band Lamb of God were on the cover of Rolling Stone in 2010. Last month, three weeks, before Quinto was born, Lamb of God singer Randy Blythe was cleared of manslaughter charges in Prague. At a concert there three years ago, Blythe pushed a fan who had rushed the stage off the stage and the fan died. Blythe said he was acting in self-defense. Perhaps Quinto’s fifth leg came as a sign that Blythe was innocent.

Also, there are exactly five (5) members of Lamb of God. Count ‘em.

And guess how many members in Genesis when they recorded their prog-rock classic The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway? That’s right, five (5). Again, exactly five (5).

Soon after recording that album, however, Peter Gabriel split from the band — leaving it a quartet, with drummer Phil Collins singing and writing most of the songs and making most of them suck. Here’s a video Gabriel performing the title track of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway with his new band in 1978.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w8Q-zXgC0s

Perhaps the birth of a five-legged lamb on Easter Sunday heralds a new era of the Lord’s Grace? Of redemption for all us sinners and peace on Earth? Maybe the original Genesis is going to get back together for a reunion tour?! I hope they play only Peter Gabriel-era songs if so, and Phil Collins has to just sit there and play drums and keep his mouth shut. He is a pretty good drummer, after all.

But I don’t know. It could be anything. Or, I guess, nothing at all. They’re probably going to hire a vet to amputate Quinto’s extra leg. Which, that seems like the humane thing to do, doesn’t it? Even though she appears unbothered by her extra leg, it seems like the thing’s gotta get in the way, right? And the I’m sure the poor creature doesn’t like everyone coming around gawking at her like she’s some kind of circus freak. Jesus!