Rule number one of situational awareness: Don’t [pretend to] lick Francois Roche’s new book when he happens to be standing right there. And by right there I mean way in the back lurking in the shadows setting up his computer for a lecture later that evening but still able to see you pretend to lick his book. However, if you do find yourself in this awakard position, you might find it is a great way to start a conversation with a guy who will then proceed to lecture in public about drinking his own urine, homosexual mosquitoes and the conception method of his ‘bastard child’ of a new book.

I liked most his description of himself as a famous architect, flying all over the world and meeting shady women by night and doing incomprehensibly architectural things with them in a memory erasing alcoholic stupor. Sever years later, this book arrives on his desk as a child of one of these women of the night (Princeton Architectural Press) and informs him that he is its daddy. Barely recognizing his own likeness Francois Roche declares the book a bastard child and signs every copy at the AA that night “Its ugly but it isn’t so bad…” Although, in the shadow he was lurking in before the lecture started, we decided that the problem was not that it was ugly but that it was not ugly enough and that if we rephrased ‘bastard’ to ‘hybrid-monster’ it could actually be quite successful. The really funny thing was his moment of realization that now that the book doesn’t resemble Francois Roche’s style, everyone is buying it.

And then everybody came into the lecture hall and saw me talking to Francois Roche like we go way back… and thought I was cool… The end.