Like the music industry or the neighborhood video store, the publishing industry is witnessing a transition of its own; a farewell, perhaps, to hardcopies as a way of life, and an emphasis on the transitory nature of the screen-read. In November of 2009, Amazon, the powerful online purveyor of books and music, flew out several of New York’s most prominent literary agents to Seattle to break down their business plan. This business plan featured drastic cost-cutting on the prices of new hard covers from $25 to $8.99, and an aggressive marketing focus on so-called ‘e-books,’ virtual copies of literature that can be read on mobile devices such as the Kindle.

Suzanne Erickson is constantly surprised to find that she is just like her parents. “I used to get really freaked out when my dad would dig for junk. I’m exactly like my dad now,” she laughs. “I drive through the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for someone else’s garbage.” Suzanne and I are sharing a couch in her studio that might have been garbage itself, were it not for her magnificent reappropriation, inscribing the upholstery with a florid patchwork of paint and needlepoint. She tells me this sort of transformative creativity is inherited from her mother—a woman who would disassemble a bed and convert it into a wet bar in the scant free hours between ferrying Suzanne to and from day school.

It’s been a while since I’ve lost my mind in Venice Beach, but even longer since I had ridden along the entirety of the bike-path. Six years, to be exact. Back in those days, I was crashing at my brother’s boardwalk pad — a glaringly pink building in the dirty heart of it all. We were writing a screenplay about getting lost in Italy that never came to fruition – like so many other hopes and dreams before and since.

Lounge singing is one of the perennial occupations of pop culture. Most elegantly embodied by Frank Sinatra, and most cheesily realized by karaoke, lounge singing is a cultural touch-stone, a greasy but instantly recognizable symbol. What is it about the sight of a man leaning up against a piano, tie slightly askew, a once primo cocktail disintegrating into the watery dregs, that digs so deeply into the soul? It is every man’s dream to prowl a softly-lit stage, tossing off harmonic platitudes to a crowd of clingy drunks?

What if buildings were unreasonable? What if they could express emotion? Along with human feeling, would they take on our features? Would they grow hair, breathe, excrete? It is common sense that in architecture, form follows function. But what if that scheme were reversed?