Fixing Karl Fischer 1

To fix this Karl Fischer monstrosity, lurking like a one eyed pervert at the edge of McCarren Park:

Find the oiliest strain of ivy you can find, plant it on top, and grow a massive, verdant Jheri curl (plus extensions on the side).

Sorry, I know it's not the greatest illustration.  But digital animators in Hollywood have spent billions trying to simulate realistic hair and it still looks phony, so I would be an idiot to waste any more time on this than I already have.

[ Fixing Karl Fischer 2 ]
[ Karl Fischer in The Showerhead ]

Karl Fischer in `The Showerhead`

Every time I walk by architect Karl Fischer's timeless Empty Clockface building on McCarren Park, I think: I know I've seen that look somewhere.  I believe I am getting closer to the source of his inspiration with the picture above.

Having recently watched The Fountainhead, and watched Karl help turn this area into a luxury condo theme park, I'd guess it's only a matter of time before his life story is immortalized on film; let's call it The Showerhead.

The Showerhead will tell the story of the architect "who could not say NO," who brought the soul-deadening plastic of the suburbs to the city, and designed buildings that make you wish The Fountainhead's Gary Cooper would blow them up.

Developers couldn't care less about what the rest of us have to look at, and condo owners live inside the hideous creation, the one place where they don't have to look at it.  It's up to supposedly high-minded architects to save us, and Karl's just not getting the job done.


The fantasy boulevard setting of Karl's Warehouse 11 promo picture, above left (compare it to the less spacious reality, right), betrays its purely suburban origin, designed for a world where people drive everywhere, and where a home is not part of some organic neighborhood rich with diversity and history, but just a garage where residents park the alienated corporate work-unit their soul has become.

The only good looking building Karl's produced is the Ikon, left; they are not done yet, so they still have time to wreck it.

It looks like a slick Swedish ant farm, the perfect setting for another movie or reality TV show -- call it The Glass House -- about the problems of Wall Street worker ants so filthy rich and hollow it hurts, and leaves them wondering if their life of shuffling other people's money from one esoteric financial instrument to another has lost all meaning, so they spend their nights in drug-fueled debauchery, and greet the dawn with their naked bodies stuck to the Ikon glass like suction toys stuck inside a car window.

If only Karl could return to the inspiration for that one.

[ Critical Fountainhead ]

McCarren Park Lights 1

I look at the picture above all the time -- it's my computer desktop background -- and though it looks like it should be dreary, it never feels that way to me.

These pictures are of McCarren park and Automotive High School.  I've learned to admire their matter-of-fact, durable appearance, accented here by the lights' hint of sentient life under foreboding skies.