Your Name Here.(The Talk of the Town)

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.

"Somebody sent it to me," Gehry said the other day, over the telephone, "and I thought it must have been the people in Brooklyn who are sort of angry. But then I thought, well, it must be loving, too. So I decided it was funny, and I put it on. ...