There is a wonderfully bizarre short film of Buñuel's that he made in the '60's called "Simon del desierto." It's the story of the 4th Century Syrian Coptic, Simeon Stylites, a crazy holy man (forgiven the redundancy) who couldn't find enough ways to abase himself. He tried tightening a rope around his waist for months until his flesh rotted and maggots crawled out of him; he tried burying himself in sand up to his neck and becoming a literal talking head. And for ten years he lived chained to an iron ball in a tiny round room not much bigger than the ball itself so he could never lie down.

Finally he figured it out: he would erect a column out in the desert (but not too far out) and live on top. Hence "Stylites" - of the column. The first column Simeon tried was just 9 ft high so he could stand above the crowds that gathered to listen to his lunacy. But closer my god to thee and all that, so he got people to build him taller and taller columns until he he was up there Jack in the Beanstalk high at 65 feet. He was content enough to live up on the small flat top of this one column for 36 years out in the elements and under the stars. His mother and sisters would climb up every week or so to bring him food and sweep off his neat pile of dried shit. A few times a year someone came up and trimmed his beard. (Rather like one imagines Seth living, without the maternal shit sweeper.)

Of course, copycats put up dozens of columns - still being excavated throughout the Syrian desert. And of course, Simeon became one of the most revered Catholic saints. And, of course, he was a great obsession of Buñuel, who brought perfect hallucinatory cinematic pitch to the condensed life story. Perhaps truth, perhaps liberty with death, but Buñuel was determined to write his own Simeon hagiography. He was keen to have the devil finally seduce Simeon down off his column and move in with him in hell - which, in the film, turns out to be ... a New York disco.

Which brings me somewhat closer to home: the perch, you ask.

When I first saw images of Austin Thomas's perches, I perversely thought of Simeon Stylites. I liked the idea of installing a stump-legged vantage from which the dominion of LMCC might be defined, surveyed, and condescended to. It would be a soapbox for exhibitionism, a stand-in for the question of what to exhibit, what to show. Men around the office were beginning to talk about growing beards at the time too. And the Stylites all had beards of extravagant filth and entanglement.

I also wanted something in the office that would make me think of landscape: here we were in the barren desert of Wall Street. To stay sane we had no choice but to make it into some kind of landscape we might understand, something other than the monetary wilderness in which we would be pitching our tent. (N.B. This anticipatory rhetorical trick with the tent is called prolepsis.) So again I thought of the Stylites. They and other "desert fathers" essentially invented the idea of landscape. Before they went out making places of pilgrimage in no-man's-land, the world of walking was not scaped: it was wild. It was the unmarked void between villages and cities. The ascetics shunned society, yet once outside they were still only in the land, not of it. Doesn't this describe our condition in Lower Manhattan?

Unfortunately, I was bored by this idea by the time the perch arrived. I had gotten much more interested in decorating. (As inspiration for the office, I was rereading Edith Wharton's "On the Decoration of Houses" - which I highly, highly recommend. It's as imperiously high-handed as Seth and equally as funny in its fatuity. One of my favorite lines: "Doors must always swing in to the room.") Still, arrange the furniture though I might, I found no room for plateau vistas, however dwarfish. Up to the tenth floor, my little perch.

Oh, one last thing before bed if you're still listening: the title of this entry (blogs have titles!?) comes from one of my favorite Buñuel stories. He was a marvelous trickster, something I thought we'd have more of at LMCC - practical jokes, kick me signs taped on people's backs, etc. But no.

Anyway, one night Buñuel took his great friend screenwriter Luis Alcoriza to dinner at one of the best restaurants in Mexico City. Alcoriza was distracted by a stunning, elegant woman eating alone. She kept staring at him. This seemed to annoy Buñuel to no end. To rub it in, Alcoriza excused himself, met the woman and promptly took her home. He helped her out of her gown and she stretched out on his bed. Across her stomach, the perfectly flat stomach of a hot, hot young prostitute, was written "Buenas noches, Bunuel."

Robertino can only wish he'd pulled such a trick on Bease...