April 7

Renters of the world, Felix Salmon has got your back:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/04/06/the-national-housing-survey-and-the-real-estate-bear-market/

The whole April 2010 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine is devoted to "L.A. noir." I've barely started to dig into this feast, but can immediately recommend Denise Hamilton's list of "20 Noir Essentials":

http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2010/04/basic-black.html

http://www.latimesmagazine.com/issue-archive/#April-2010

The blog Killer Covers offers a terrific post on paperback cover illustrator and all-around commercial artist Al Brule, who did his share of noir covers:

http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot.com/2010/04/man-who-had-too-much-to-lose-by-hampton.html

Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! critiques the very first film out of "East Germany," Wolfgang Staudte's 1946 The Murderers Are Among Us (incredibly apt title). In Germany in 1946, films weren't noir, life itself was noir:

http://diedangerdiediekill.blogspot.com/2010/04/murderers-are-among-us-east-germany.html

For a more tongue-in-cheek take on noir, check out the audio dramas at Two-Minute Danger Theater:

http://audiodramareview.blogspot.com/2010/04/two-minute-danger-theater.html?zx=566fb19450aa2c99

http://www.outcastmultimedia.com/dangertheater/

Michael Orthofer of The Complete Review has purchased a Sony e-reader, and if and when I do the same, I imagine I'll use it just as he plans to use his:

http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/201004a.htm#ri5

This new biography of historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis sounds exceptionally good, and is well-reviewed by philosopher Simon Blackburn. This passage on Collingwood's philosophy of art is very relevant to (and of course much more acute than) my comments on artistic "greatness" the other day:

Collingwood’s philosophy of art is also an extraordinary resource, and here, too, he puts communication--a unity of thought between the artist and the audience--at the center. He quotes with approval Coleridge’s dictum that we can tell a great poet because he makes us poets: in other words, we find, perhaps only with effort, that we can make the poet’s words our own, and it is this unity that makes up understanding. Collingwood carefully separates art proper from art as craft, where there is a predetermined, independent aim to be achieved; and from art as amusement, where the function is to arouse an emotion so that an audience can indulge it; and from art as magic, where the aim is to facilitate some practice or stance toward the world, by the arousal of an emotion that aids it. Art proper is none of these. It is the expression of the way in which the artist feels and thinks about the subject, and in great art it is the imaginativeness, the truthfulness, and the rarity of those feelings and thoughts that overcome us. Collingwood’s description of what is involved in communication, expression, imagination, and truthfulness has never been bettered. Even stripped of its context, his final sentence bears remembrance: “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, corruption of consciousness.”
 
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/being-and-time

Marc Myers at JazzWax celebrates Sonny Rollins's 1957 album Way Out West. I've been listening to Rollins lately, and what one commentator has called "oh that wonderful sound, the beautiful rich tenor sax tone" is utterly remarkable. The On Point hour featuring the about-to-turn-80 Rollins, at the second link, is from just last month and is completely worth your valuable time (and features music from Way Out West):

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/sundaywaxbits-3.html

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/03/sonny-rollins  

Sarah Morris's new show of paintings and film is called "It's All True," after Orson Welles's famous unfinished documentary about Brazil:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37072 

http://meyerkainer.com/artists/MorS/morr_sw.htm

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%281942_film%29

Here is a textbook demonstration that if you want your building to be a statement, adding color is surely one way to make that happen:

http://www.archdaily.com/55428/moderna-museet-malmo-tham-videgard-arkitekter/

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

Among the notables born on this date are jazz singer Billie Holiday, columnist Walter Winchell, broadcaster David Frost, philosopher Charles Fourier, activist Daniel Ellsberg, film directors Francis Ford Coppola, Alan J. Pakula, and Werner Schroeter, painter Gino Severini, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, pianists Robert Casadeus and Leif Ove Andsnes, poets William Wordsworth and Gabriela Mistral (Chile), fiction writers Donald Barthelme, Herve Bazin (France), and Roger Lemelin (Quebec), science fiction novelist Henry Kuttner, singer/songwriter Janis Ian, and actors Russell Crowe, Wayne Rogers, James Garner, and Jackie Chan. Chan has been a great performer throughout his career, but I want to put in a special word for his amazing paired historical drama-comedy-martial arts films Project A (1983) and Project A Part 2  (1987). You will never, I assure you, have more fun watching a screen.