Fuck Frank Gehry

In 2001, Barnaby Harris, as he put it recently,
“got married to a beautiful woman who was extremely passionate about
her yoga practice.” Not long after, he decided to have a special
T-shirt made for her birthday. It was white with blue lettering: “Fuck
Yoga.” The marriage didn’t last, but the sentiment did: Harris, a
former Broadway stage manager, is now a full-time purveyor of “Fuck”
paraphernalia. Despite the popularity of the anti-yoga slogan, Harris
struggled to produce a follow-up hit. The only other suitable direct
object he has come up with is “Frank Gehry.” “It has a lyrical
quality,” Harris said.

Inspiration for the second saying struck several years ago, Harris
said, “when, with all the press for Bilbao, the Disney Concert Hall, a
tolerance center in Jerusalem, it was like Frank had just put his foot
down on top of us and crushed us. He had Brad Pitt making his coffee.
You win, Frank.” (Urban myth has it that Pitt, who is an acquaintance
of Gehry, worked with him as an apprentice.) Harris had the “Fuck Frank
Gehry” shirts made in brown with orange lettering and in navy blue with
silver lettering. He sold a few hundred, many to Europeans. Opponents
of Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development, in Brooklyn, kept asking
for donations.

Then, in March, a friend of Harris’s named Howell Caldwell was
working as an assistant director on a weight-loss commercial starring
Valerie Bertinelli. Get this: Caldwell’s limo driver, Geoffrey
Cushing-Murray, also drives Gehry; on set, he mentioned to a friend
that he had run into her husband wearing a “Fuck Frank Gehry” shirt at
a Super Bowl party. Cushing-Murray had told Gehry about the encounter,
and Gehry, he said, had been intrigued. Caldwell volunteered that he
knew the guy who made the shirts. Within days, a sample batch was on
its way to Gehry’s office.