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From: Stephen Lauf
To: design-l@lists.psu.edu
Subject: Re: Papers of the HTAFCC
Date: 2004.05.17 11:01
Otto is indeed the key of "my Rita Novel idea." He is such an unknown.
I watched Vanilla Sky for the first time last night. I saw an interesting blurring of the real and the virtual.
My brother Otto was in a drug induced coma for about two weeks after his lobotomy 20 March 1980 (my 24th birthday). It took about nine months after that for the schizophrenia to come back.
Otto, the great virtual King of Bavaria, was a very tortured soul. His body was his real cage.
My brother Otto said some strange (and obviously memorable) things to me when he was at Friends Hospital for the first time back in 1976.
In 1971, soon after Otto got his first car (a VW Beetle), he took me to 'Stokesbury Mansion' (sic). He knew I really liked architecture, and he too knew good architecture when he saw it. Otto and I made many trips to Whitemarsh Hall. In fact, he was the one that helped me rip off some of the marble wall paneling that enveloped Mr. Stotesbury's bathroom. [One panel now has Anonymous Saint In Bikini While Jesus Is Walking On Water (1983) painted on it.] I have some old Super-8 movie film with Otto walking on the parapets of Whitemarsh Hall, a scene remarkably similar to Charles and Sebastian walking on the roof of Castle Howard in Brideshead Revisited.
Edward Townsend Stotesbury suddenly died in the grand foyer of Whitemarsh Hall 66 years ago [not] yesterday [but on 21 May]. You could say that was the beginning of the end of 'the Versailles of America.'
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