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From The Desk Of The Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor: Bernard Maybeck

Without a doubt, the Dandy Warhols is a band, a meeting of the Velvet-y minds with Brent DeBoer, Peter Holmström, Zia McCabe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor calling the shots. But drummer-turned-guitarist/singer Taylor-Taylor is its handsome face and baritone voice who pushed the band from graceful poetic garage music (1995’s Dandys Rule OK) to guileless glam (2000’s Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia) to sleek-yet-twisted ’80s-ish new wave (2003’s Welcome To The Monkey House). While the rest of the 20th century found the band drifting through three additional like-minded albums, the outfit has grown leaner and meaner with the focused, guitar-centric This Machine (The End). Taylor-Taylor, a ruminative lyricist with a caustic lean, makes the most of this particular Machine moment. He allowed novelist Richard Morgan to write the Dandys’ press notes and found his own icy literary voice in graphic set-in-Germany novel One Model Nation. Taylor-Taylor and his bandmates are also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Taylor-Taylor: Bernard Maybeck. Godfather of architecture known as “Bohemian Revivalist.” I own a house that is an imitation of his medieval style, which became a West Coast trend in the early part of the 20th century. This I believe began when he designed and built a Tudor Castle for the wife of William Randolph Hearst. This was in the Berkeley Hills and was the scene for the Cary Grants and Ernest Hemingways of the world to hunt, fish and party together. I’m making a leap of faith when I say that this is what led to the great number of mock-Tudor medieval homes of the Hollywood Hills that were built in the 1920s. I’m also making an assumption that the guy who built my house in 1926 came from Hollywood. Why he thought Portland was a good idea was a mistake only compounded two years later by the great depression. A great majority of Maybeck’s buildings were destroyed in a massive forest fire in the Berkeley Hills. This style of home has now become known as “Storybook.”

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqXVe18WV4s