April 4

Here is an interesting article from today's Nevada Appeal, "The next big crash?: Commercial real estate market faces wave of defaults":

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20100404/BUSINESS/100409888/1070&ParentProfile=1058

Although the article is not without value, I love the way the author, in the usual MSM way, tries to sugar the bad news at the conclusion of the piece:

Stan Wilmoth, president of Reno-based Heritage Bank, said while there are landlords lowering rents, which is causing property values to fall, there are opportunities for potential buyers.

“We can all sit around and lament about them going down,” Wilmoth said. “There's a lot of money sitting in the sidelines that is looking for a home.”

And given lower costs, eventually the inventory of unused commercial property in the region will eventually be purchased — it just might take awhile.

“I believe it's an opportunity we haven't seen for a very long time,” he said.

I worked in commercial real estate for a number of years as a broker, and let me tell you, that is total BS. This country had a severe over-supply of retail and office space before the 2000-2009 decade even started. And then developers went completely wacko with speculative building. We are in the beginning stages of the mother of all contractions, and there will never be a need for all that space. Ever. Besides, why would "money sitting in the sidelines" want to park itself in buildings that are, and are going to remain, largely untenanted? It makes no sense.

Kevin Hartnett has written a lovely essay for The Millions on "Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life":

As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess. But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects. And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/reading-war-and-peace-the-effects-of-great-art-on-an-ordinary-life.html 

I recently got into an argument in a Chronicle of Higher Education comments section (I know, I shouldn't bother) with a "cultural studies" twit who modishly denied that the word "great" had any definable aesthetic meaning. As Hartnett admits, greatness can be hard to define -- certainly in a way that would that would satisfy a logical positivist philosopher -- but that doesn't mean that we should pretend that all like objects are equal, either. If you listen to one of Mozart's best operas and then to one of Salieri's best operas, and can't discern that the Mozart is great while the Salieri is merely very good, I would suggest you don't have much of an ear for Western classical music. Of course greatness operates within traditions, and of course traditions differ, but all traditions recognize distinctions between greater and lesser quality. When the cultural studies guy wants to rejoin the world of ordinary human discourse, we'll all still be here.

I ignored Ian Sales's list of the worst science fiction series because I'm not that interested in tear-downs, but I'm happy to link to his take on the best science fiction series:

http://iansales.com/2010/04/02/the-best-science-fiction-series/

The acclaimed Scottish crime novelist Philip Kerr shares his prickly thoughts on many subjects with The Rap Sheet:

Being a copywriter is about taking seriously that which should never be taken seriously. It’s about staring out of windows, and in mirrors. It’s about talking bullshit, which I had been trained for, as a lawyer. It’s a job for the young and the inane.

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2010/04/intimidating-mr-kerr.html

I'm excited to have discovered an excellent jazz blog, Marc Myers's JazzWax, that I imagine I'll be linking to quite a bit. Here is a fine, lengthy post on saxophonist Sonny Stitt:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/03/sonny-stitt-roost-studio-sessions.html

The provocative operas of the long-underappreciated Austrian composer Franz Schreker (1876-1934) are beginning to be staged in North America:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/removing-the-stigma-on-franz-schreker.html

http://www.latimes.com/la-ca-stigmatized4-2010apr04,0,900102.story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schreker

A few years ago, James Conlon conducted a San Francisco Symphony program that included music by Schreker and his also neglected contemporary and friend Alexander von Zemlinsky (1971-1942), a natural pairing:

http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/29430/music-of-banned-composers-revived-by-s-f-symphony/

I'm quite taken with the "X" paintings of Albert Contreras on display at the Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles:

Gesture-saving efficiency meets hedonistic abandon in Contreras' colors, which tend toward extremes: Ferrari red, glistening silver, sparkling chartreuse and sumptuous plum.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/art-review-albert-contreras-at-peter-mendenhall-gallery.html

http://www.petermendenhallgallery.com/

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/30/entertainment/ca-contreras30

This is a very striking design for a footbridge, except -- won't people fall off? The sides seem a little low for drunks crossing at night, and I'm assuming that in Maribor, Slovenia, as anywhere in Central Europe, at least some people know how to put away a few pints:

http://www.archdaily.com/55017/footbridge-in-maribor-arhitektura-d-o-o/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maribor 

Christopher Lund's photographs of the Fimmvorduhals volcanic eruption in Iceland are incredibly vivid:

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=360310

http://chris.is/

Let's face it, you simply don't know enough about President James K. Polk, and this new book is your chance to remedy that:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/a-fire-bell-in-the-night/

Among notables born on this date are French novelists Louise de Vilmorin and Marguerite Duras, adventure novelist Mayne Reid, science fiction novelist Stanley G. Weinbaum, poets Comte de Lautreamont, Remy de Gourmont, Bettina von Arnim, and Maya Angelou, playwright Robert Sherwood, film directors Eric Rohmer, Amdrei Tarkovsky, and Aki Kaurismaki, film composer Elmer Bernstein, television auteur David E. Kelley, composer Eugene Bozza, conductor Pierre Monteux, bluesman Muddy Waters, jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, painter Maurice de Vlaminck, activist Dorothea Dix, Yale President and later Commissioner of Baseball A. Bartlett Giamatti, baseball players Tris Speaker and Gil Hodges, and actors Anthony Perkins, Christine Lahti, Craig T. Nelson, Pierre Fresnay, Barry Pepper, Hugo Weaving, Robert Downey Jr., and Heath Ledger.

I was a sophomore at Yale when A. Bartlett Giamatti, a phenomenally popular English professor, was named President, succeeding the important and influential Kingman Brewster (and interim Acting President Hanna Holborn Gray, who went on to serve as President as the University of Chicago). Giamatti's appointment was announced in the spring of 1977, and he was to take over from Gray at the end of the school year. Suddenly and naturally he became a man whom everyone wanted a piece of. I and three friends were very desirous of spending some time getting to know him -- one of the four of us had had some slight dealings with him, the rest had not -- but wondered how we could pull this off. I am still very proud that we came up with the perfect idea: knowing of Giamatti's intense baseball fandom, we invited him to join us for a college game at the venerable and beautiful Yale Field (later the site of the famous Frank Viola/Ron Darling pitching duel in 1981, which Giamatti attended and which was memorialized in the great Roger Angell essay "The Web of the Game").

How could Giamatti turn us down? He couldn't, of course, and so the five of us spent a wonderful afternoon at the ballpark. By the end I felt we students had to gotten to know Bart in just the way we had hoped. I'll always cherish the memory. Giamatti died young at 51 in 1989, just a few months into his tenure as Commissioner of Baseball. The great actor Paul Giamatti is his son (although it's funny, it took me years to make that connection!).