Until now, you've probably thought of Alex Gorlin only as a townhouse maven, a go-to source for scathing Gotham commentary, and the brave soul who dared to design a Tribeca apartment for Danny and Nina Libeskind. But you, like us, didn't know the half of it! Alex parties like a rock rap star! This just in from a snoop on permanent assignment in Miami:

hey gutter. check it: i was at craig robins' place the other night. wine, women; typically awesome. fat joe was there. he collared ALEX GORLIN and i heard him say "gorlin, come walk on the wild side with me." walked with them to a spot under a highway where fat was shooting a video. shot some pics. are they too blurry? night proceeded from there. hitting the pool. holler!

Some quick research reveals that this is not the first time the seemingly mild-mannered architect has partied 'til dawn with—or at least encountered—the rapper in question. To which we can only say: Go Alex. Go Alex. Go, go. Go Alex.

· Fat Joe on Alex Gorlin. Not Literally! [Unbeige]

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So, we learn today, esteemed Gutter fodder Cameron Sinclair will not allow news crews to film the sites where his Architecture for Humanity is at work, nor will he put the AFH crest on the completed jobs. He will, however, take time off from his peripetesis to sit for lengthy interviews that result in aggrandizing profiles. There is one place, however, where we can find common cause. No, not in housing the stricken and poor (we've covered that). Per Cameron: "The idea that an architect is this person who flies in, jumps off the plane, and goes to the rescue is just about the worst image possible."

Why does it always come back to Danny?

· His Design is to Meet Human Needs [CSM]
· L'Affaire Sinclair: It's On! [The Gutter]

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So many of you write in as if we were the People's Court, hoping that this platform might be used to cudgel your legal persecutors into submission, into seeing that your version of mutable reality, that slipperiest of slippery eels, stands alone in the bright light of truth. So it was refreshing to receive the letter that you may enjoy after the jump—stripped of identifying features, but nonetheless telling a rollicking good tale. Starwood Hotels, the folks who blight our cities with W after W after W, recently got up to no good whatsoever while hiring architects for some new work. Lying! Cheating! Corruption! Work stolen, agreements sundered. A tale for the ages. And our chirping birdie calls it a "clusterfuck." Which is, you should all know, one of our very favorite terms of art. More, this good, gracious bird seeks no retribution other than the public shaming of his foe:

I am not litigious - and even if I were, I couldn't afford to pay my attorney to sue them.  I sublimated my rage with alcohol and have since moved on...

Excellent advice!

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Not that kind of smoke—this kind. Word has just come in that, on this holiest day, the cardinals are meeting in their annual conclave to select a new architectural papa. Far from the festering family frolics, the sage Pritzkerians—among them Frank Gehry, Karen Stein, and our dear, dear Ada—will make their will known, though the lucky winner, soon to be burdened with his/her secret, won't be announced for months. But the time to act is now. We've tried to send our message; join us, via the comments forum below, in sending your prayers.

· Pritzker vs. Pritzker [The Gutter]

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Nine-hundred or so, to be exact. When we brought you word last week that the president of the AIA New York Chapter had launched a denial of service attack against, well, everyone, that was just the beginning. At least 500 chunky emails ultimately clogged the inboxes of Mark Strauss's close friends. And then on Friday the 13th, the apology came. Read all about cyber loops, spoofing, and spam-free living.

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What's the deal with architecture types and, like, technology? Remember when Max Protetch spilled his entire contact list into the ether? We felt then that it simply was not fair for the elect alone to feast their eyes on the bounty, to savor the incongruities, to chuckle and cluck. So when we were on the receiving end of similar email trouble yesterday, courtesy FX Fowle, we knew what we needed to do: share. Attempting to distribute some bit of self-promotion, Mark Strauss, a partner at the firm and the current president of the AIA's New York Chapter, got a little jiggy with the send button (we were graced with thirty identical emails in a few hours), for which a lackey eventually apologized—without mentioning the nearly 900 addresses dumped into the cc box for all to see see. After the jump, meet Mark's friends, including lots of local press, developers aplenty (Douglas Durst!), builders galore (Toll Brothers! Avalon!), the planning czar for the City of Yonkers, sundry out-of-favor Ground Zero operatives, our own ever-spectacular Charles Renfro, and even, for the love of god and all things holy, a super sleazy divorce lawyer!

Oh yeah: we're in there too.

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It's down to the finalists, friends, in the informal tourney for a new architecture curator at MoMA. And informal it is: our ever so well-placed mole revealed last night—without even the coercion of a single drink—that there is no formal search committee in place, just Peter Reed and Glen Lowry and the ghost of curators past, ruminating, fulminating, wondering if they too can get a sinecure in Miami. Strangely, none of our original picks made the final cut, though Bob Stern was consulted, Aaron Betsky considered (for a Nieue Amsterdam minute), and—we meant to have her on our list—Karen Stein, publishing honcho, was "bandied around." It's fun to quote anonymous sources! But more fun still to cut to the chase: it's gonna be Jean-Louis Cohen, brilliant scholar, or Ray Ryan, ketchup kurator, about whom we know nothing but hear good things. Boring. Too bad Herbert's late-breaking attempt to impress the judges fell so flat.

· Terry Riley: I'll Take Miami! [The Gutter]
· Terry Riley is Gone. Long Live TK! [The Gutter]

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A year has passed, and with it a brazilian tons of tsouris; 2006, welcome. It has been a long and glorious end-times hiatus since last we met in Gutterland, friends. Long and glorious. Premonitions about our death are of course premature—are we not here with you right now?—and beg so many questions: Has no one heard of secrets? Has no one a hobby of their own? We'd love to bring you up to date, to tell you—nay, to truly share with you—all the long and glorious things that have transpired since our last emission. But naturally we can't. Some things are ours, ours alone. Ours! Ours! Ours!

One thing we can relate are the gleanings of a spate of holiday film viewing—with an eye, as always, for the architectural and urbane. The Post, as ever, brings the important news about King Kong. It is, as they say and you know, "enough to drive movie fans bananas because it's full of king-sized mistakes." They cite a slew of rather obnoxious continuity gaffes (moving plates, self-cleaning costumes; the usual), but we would like to add to that an amazing urban design screw-up of primping primate proportions: the period set of Ye Olde Nieue Yorke that erstwhile wizard Peter Jackson assembled is lined—no: studded—with lamp posts of a retro-nostalgic type that only began to appear en masse in NYC in the early 1990s. And not where Kong saw them. Erp. Call rewrite. And, yes, it's the same infernal bishop's crook that, in a prior life, HM used to decry with some regularity in the Times. How we miss him.

Moving on, we were pleased, too, to catch the just-out and back-in-form Woody Allen thriller. More pleased, even, when, a bit of a ways in, Larry's latest love was co-opted as set designer and major action started to go down inside the Gherkin. Brilliant. And then there's the thrill of seeing Herzog and DeMeuron's Tate Modern, not sung, not aggrandized, but called out, as any visitor there can attest, for the circuity of its circulation, in this instance, almost enough to keep Jonathan Rhys Meyers from finding, and then, of course, eventually boning and killing—for love or money?—our very own Scarlett. Glorious.

· 'Kong' Phooey, Say Film Flub Counters [NYP]

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Snore. But if Cameron is really itching to "take it offline," Becca, whom he dissed en passant (scroll down), is itching to respond. She wrote in, pissed, and wants to end this. Face to face. Mano a chick. Tonight: midnight. Look for the pink scrunchy.

· Attacks on AFH [Archinect]
· L'Affaire Sinclair: It's On [The Gutter]

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Yesterday, as we were tending our garden, and as you—some of you, at least, perhaps an organized phalange?—were filling one of our exclusive Gutter Fora to the very brim, Cameron Sinclair was rallying his lawyers. Remember how they nailed Capone? Taxes! Fucking taxes!! Irked at our tweaking twirpishness—so full of heart and soul—the thought police rallied; seems Architecture 4 Humanity's stable of photographers is pissed that we used some of their images and, because we're good doobies (or at least Our Keeper is...), they (the pics, not the photogs, silly!) were yanked. Look at the utter sterility of it all, the lowly, pixel-poor poverty of abject horrortude that is the unillustrated post! And they were glorious, glorious images! Cam striding the stage at the 2004 GOP convention, astride a yak in Mumbai, drinking from a fetid pool in Regina! What use are they if they reside on but one server? Is not the point of making art to show it? And we're not hypocrites: Take these words! Give them wings!!!!

Then there's the little issue of Mr. Sinclair accusing this site of ruining some do-goodness he had in the works. Just because a previous 'sniper called a crack ho a crack ho? Seems kinda...precipitous. He spelled it all out in a letter to Lock. Confront our demons after the jump.

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