We thought we'd have to do our work this morning, but it seems our good friend, The Bitter Realist, has done it for us.

Well, a happy Labor Day to the Guttersniper. The Bitter Realist spent his time off with a laptop, a flash drive, several copies of the House and Home section, and a highlighter, looking for anything idiotic he could get his hands on. The effort was easy like a Hilton sister. Or Gregg Pasquarelli near a micro-recorder. What is it with this guy? Does he have a GPS microchip embedded in his cranium that points him to the closest design critic with a pen? First, he shows up here, spouting that his firm SHoP designs with "..text, diagrams, spreadsheets, charts". All we can say to this, after having seen their work, is "shocker". He follows this up with an accusatorily idiotic statement that "we think ["the perfect form" is] a marketing gimmick by people with not that much talent." Who could he be talking about? If Gregg is going to cast aspersions our way, then TBR at least deserves a phone call from the man. Criminally, the interviewer lets these comments both slide in toto. Then, today, The Bitter Realist opened up his ramshackle 175sf, $2800/month studio apartment's door to retrieve this morning's Times, and found a story entitled "Can Design Prepare for Disaster," juicy and ripe for the picking. It was apparently published without any sense of irony - what about the design world isn't a disaster? In it, Herr Pasquarelli, somehow glomming himself onto a panel discussion for a show at MoMA (in which it doesn't appear he's participating) and the corresponding face time in the ever-blackening lady, basically admits he had no clue that New Orleans was in a flood zone, despite successfully navigating what we can only imagine was a brutally insightful interview process by Tulane University to design a building there ("Lake? Your school is near a lake?") TBR is guessing the interview began with one simple question: "what's the flavor of the month, Gregg?"

Posted in Words, Words