“SAM CHERMAYEFF. SPY OR COMMANDO FOR HIRE”, says a business card Sam’s father Ivan designed for him when he was a boy. When I first met Sam (we briefly bumped into each other a couple of days earlier), he was wearing a headscarf and guarding a Pierre Jeanneret chair. By the early morning hours, we had become friends and worn all kinds of things. It was the same night I met Bobby. Sam has done many things, such as living in Tokyo and working for SANAA, curating the Architecture Biennial in Venice with Sejima, or setting up shop in Berlin together with the wonderful Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge under the name June 14. We are all entangled in many ways. But that’s probably not what is essential about Sam. He builds things as much as he tears them down. I often have a hard time talking to him. He leaves gentle slivering marks on your life. Sometimes, he will give you things, such as an odd little Tiffany ashtray, a spoon by Sejima, or a piece of the material he likes to work with. Sam is silver.
The Don Johnson of American Politics: Trump
Things we hate about Donald Trump, this is an easy question, it seems; but things we like about Donald Trump, the racist, the brute, the ignorant and hater? This is a more difficult task, this is what Sam Chermayeff and Georg Diez try in their conversation about the ‘Don Johnson of American politics’ (Chermayeff).
Alexine loves patterns. She makes patterns that soften the world’s inherent hardness. It and she are a subtle solution to problems that you were only vaguely aware of only until it all becomes very clear. Her and the patterns are about joy in the end. You can sink in or bounce softly back on your feet as she does.
I call Clara Meister Sugar Glider. Early in our affair of the heart and mind she showed me a video where the little creatures poke at jello, much as clara (S.G.) has been poking at me ever since. It is very cute and very disconcerting to see this footage and realize you’re the jello. (The fact that she’s the sugar gliders gliding from tree to tree, fancy and free is notable not least because ethos is about her.)
Simply, Sugar Glider is the kind of person who can keep a sweet morsel of jello in her hands for years, infecting it with new life, keeping it on its toes, laughing at and with it, keeping it fresh. The jello doesn’t feel like it is slipping through her fingers but rather a perfectly cut cube vibrating with energy. Most people would have eaten it or kept it safely out of reach in the freezer. I don’t know anyone that is both careful enough to do this and open enough to keep at it.
S.G. is not afraid of anything as far as I can tell. Not even me apparently. Her control comes from her speed. She thinks faster than I do, even about not thinking. Sometimes she knows that we have nothing to say to each other and orders another drink for the both of us. This sounds so banal but as she’s always trying to get at what is really interesting about life her ability to rest with grace becomes tremendously valuable too.
I could have skipped all of the above and just noted that Clara is the only woman who got away, straight out, more or less ever. We’re speaking about a truly superior being.
Someone else should write this. It is embarrassing how much I care for her.
I understand Paul Feigelfeld to be quite a sensitive man. By this I mean weirdly intimate. He’s apt to find your inner angst and discuss it at length with a true willingness to solve it. He has a rare empathy that sets him part from your average Facebook poster. He’s an expert on ideas that exist in far reaches of unnamed intellectual circles. He wants to dig deeper whether you like it or not.
It might be useful to know that Paul has the apartment of a seventy five year old man in an old building with uncomfortably high ceilings. The place is full of quite new things all slightly out of balance. Like the man himself, you can get yourself into unexpected situations in his company.