Well, if you haven’t yet, you probably never will. But maybe you still wish you had a better idea of how and why the financial system nearly collapsed. If so, there’s an easy and painless solution. Read Wall Street Smarts, by Calvin Trillin, a New York Times op-ed piece from October 2009.

Google gives the driving time between the two museums (neither of which I’ve been to) as just over 2 hours. So it would be possible to see both Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose and Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber in a single day.

Images: Web Gallery of Art

The two buildings, which are part of a massive 15-tenement complex on the Upper East Side, are at the center of a dispute that has raged for more than two decades.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated all of the buildings in the complex as landmarks in 1990, but the landmark status of the two buildings at 429 E. 64th St. and 430 E. 65th St. was revoked shortly after.

The landmarks commission redesignated the buildings as landmarks in 2006, but Stahl appealed in court. A New York appeals court ultimately denied the company’s petition in 2010.

Stahl says the buildings have little architectural significance. The landlord removed Beaux Arts ornaments from the exterior a number of years ago.

“We did not believe that the facade was of landmark quality,” said Mr. Maddox.

Arguments for preserving the buildings rest on their cultural and economic significance to the city.

The buildings were considered pioneers in the “light-court” model of tenement development, intended as an alternative to the dark and unventilated tenements common at the time.

“They were designated primarily for their cultural and social history,” said Tara Kelly, executive director of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. “It was a full-block complex that was really crucial to the history of tenement development. It was intended to be humane for the city’s working poor.”

Emphasis added–all that’s missing here is a quote from the owner about the “necessary repairs” that led to the removal of the Beaux Arts ornamentation. This is an old trick from the unscrupulous landlord handbook: if you hear your building is being considered for landmark designation, throw up some scaffolding and improve the facade. That is, remove any and all cornices, pediments, pilasters, lintels, dentils, etc. Then, when it’s time for the hearing, all you have to do is ask, “Landmark my building? What ever for?”

Further reading (New York Times article on the demolition of the Dakota Stables, November 28, 2008)
Still further reading (Streetscapes column by Christopher Gray on the Dakota Stables, May 24, 1987)
Landmarks Preservation Commission report on the Upper East Side tenements (November 21, 2006)

La sensibilité, selon la seule acceptation qu’on ait donné jusqu’à présent à ce terme, est, ce me semble, cette disposition, compagne de la faiblesse des organes, suite de la mobilité du diaphragme, de la vivacité de l’imagination, de la délicatesse des nerfs, qui incline à compatir, à frissonner, à admirer, à craindre, à se troubler, à pleurer, à s’évanouir, à secourir, à fuir, à crier, à perdre la raison, à exagérer, à mepriser, à dédaigner, à n’avoir aucune idée précise du vrai, du bon et du beau, à être fou.

- Diderot

(“Sensibility, according to the only meaning that has been given to this term up to now, is, it seems to me, that disposition which accompanies weak bodily organs, and which results from the mobility of the diaphragm, liveliness of the imagination and sensitivity of the nerves, inclining us to pity, to shudder, to admire, to fear, to be disturbed, to weep, to faint, to help, to flee, to cry, to lose our reason, to exaggerate, to despise, to spurn, to have no clear idea of the true, the good and the beautiful, to be mad.”)

Lucian Roger (French, 18th century)
after Jean Duplessi-Bertaux (French, 1750–1818)
Indépendance des États-Unis
Roulette etching, printed in colors with additional hand-coloring
Paris: Blin Imprimeur en Taille-Douce, 1786

Read more here (New York Public Library)

… a formula that would, without distorting our entire view of Italian art in the fifteenth century, do full justice to such a painter as Carlo Crivelli, does not exist. He takes rank with the most genuine artist of all times and countries, and does not weary even when the ‘great masters’ grow tedious. … Crivelli must be treated by himself and as the product of stationary, if not reactionary, conditions.

- Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance

The painting is by Niccoló di Pietro, and dates to about 1410. Until February 5, it’s in the lower level of the Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition of early Venetian Art (if you go, look too for the Carpaccio drawing on blue paper). After the exhibition it will go back upstairs to its usual home in European Paintings.

The automobile is a Dodge Ram (second generation), from 1988 or so, that was parked on Wythe Avenue yesterday.

According to the Klopfzeichen (side one) charge sheet, the Bundesrepublik citizens had become politically detached, lazily content with being fashion victims in consumer society.

Unser Mut heißt Mut zur Mode (Our courage means courage of fashion)

Unsere Kraft heißt Kaufkraft (Our power means consumer spending power)

Unsere Bildung heißt Vermögensbildung (Our education means building up wealth)

What a lot of rubbish, and yet I’m completely drawn to it. At least, the one Kluster album I’ve already got on my ipod, Zuckerzeit, is fabulous. Listening to it is like being in an Antonioni movie.

Rubbish, you ask? Maybe it doesn’t sound like rubbish, to you. Maybe it sounds like a great manifesto, a profound criticism of capitalist society—Unsere Kraft heißt Kaufkraft. Or, equally likely, it sounds idiotic, and you think the music is dreadful, too. (Lärmsäge, Die Welt called it, the annoying noise of a saw.) Well, for me, no such easy harmony. I’m absolutely in favor of Kaufkraft. It’s just, I wish I had a bit more of it. Kaufkraft makes the world a better place, period. The more Kaufkraft there is, the less barbarism. The more freedom, the more individual autonomy, the more tolerance. The less foot binding, genital mutilation, dowry killings, etc. (What a feminist I am—when I think of the evils of the world, what first comes to mind are the evils perpetrated against women.) Anyway, the idea is, Kaufkraft doesn’t just make people more comfortable, it also makes people better. I feel this instinctively—people are as good as they can afford to be. Life, as a general rule, no matter what, is going to be a pretty miserable business, nasty and brutish even if not all that short, but, the more money, the less nasty and brutish. And capitalism generates money. Of course it doesn’t distribute it equally, but government can compensate for that, as it does, to a greater or lesser degree, in every capitalist society.

To get back to the main point, which is my split personality: at the same time that I approve of phenomena bringing wealth to the masses, I abhor the consequences. I abhor the stores, the music, the advertisements, the corporate culture. I don’t want anything to do with any of it. It disgusts me. And so I turn to the counterculture, so appealing, aesthetically. And then it opens its mouth: Unsere Kraft heißt Kaufkraft.

Mind you, when I say expose, I don’t mean to say I would have approached this from the perspective of a cultivated leftist who would have held his classmates in contempt for their not knowing the meaning of rococo. On the contrary! I may call a philistine a philistine, but I won’t think the worse of him for it. And I have the deepest respect, or at least a certain amount of respect, for people who do, for men of action, entrepreneurs. More respect, I am sure, than I have for a lot of people who do happen to know what rococo means and who look down on businesspeople who don’t and reproach them for their greed. There probably wasn’t anybody, out of that whole pool of applicants, more hungry to have money to spend than I am. Not that I’m too inclined to lift a finger to get it. But I’ve begun to meander. In sum, I didn’t get in, and so if I am to get out of my hated job, I need another plan. I won’t say a Plan B, because I’m probably up to Plan G or Plan H by now. But reader, don’t worry, I’ll spare you the details of the other plans. It is sufficient to state that they went nowhere.

- Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows

The caption reads:

BUST OF A MAGISTRATE

Marble
French, about 1675

The ermine collar and mantle establish the subject’s rank as a member, perhaps even the president, of one of the provincial French parliaments.

Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1907
07.225.1

Unlike the caption, the Met’s web entry for this work names a sculptor, Christophe Veyrier.

May Picture, by Paul Klee (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

They have nothing to fight for. They have nothing to live for.

- Rick Santorum, on Europeans (source: The Primary Primer, Gail Collins, New York Times)

The destruction of Peking started in the 1950s, when all the pailous that spanned the main thoroughfares of the old city were eliminated. These graceful arches broke the monotony of the streets and gave them a kind of rhythm that was at the same time noble and elegant, but they were guilty of two crimes: they hindered traffic and worse, in the heart of the Red capital, they were feudal and reactionary remnants (most of them had been built to commemorate chaste widows or upright mandarin officials). At that time, an expert in ancient Chinese architecture, Liang Ssu-ch’eng (son of Liang Chi-ch’ao, the famous publicist who did more than anyone to introduce modern ideas in China at the beginning of the century), defended the pailou and fought bravely against the destruction committed in the name of Russian urbanistic principles. He paid for it: not only was his struggle in vain (not one of these charming constructions remains in all of Peking), but he became the target of various attacks, which stopped only when he had recanted publicly, praised the merits of Soviet architectural planning, confessed his errors, and (for good measure) denounced the memory of his father.

– Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows

What is a pailou? Wikipedia redirects to paifang.

2. read fewer long books, and more short ones

3. spend more time with the Urban Dictionary

… The sensible solution would be for investors to put their money into low-cost index funds and just keep it there. But that’s hard to do when the market is extremely volatile. Most of us find it difficult enough in normal times to take a long-term approach. So when prices are rising and falling two per cent a day, and when it seems like getting in or out of the market could be worth ten per cent of our portfolio’s value, the temptation to try to time the market is hard to resist. (The way the financial media covers the stock market—with each rise and fall treated as a major event—only exacerbates this problem.)

- James Surowiecki, Year of the Yo-Yo, New Yorker, January 9, 2012 [emphasis added.]

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment.

- George Packer, Un-American Activities, New Yorker Online, January 3, 2012

Is there something wrong, fatally wrong, with America? Or will we do the right thing, in the end, when all of the other options have been exhausted, and the day comes when it’s no longer possible to put off facing the hard choices.

I always used to be optimistic, but lately I’ve begun to wonder. Is it possible that Americans have become addicted to four things that, working together, could prove to be a Spenglerian cocktail? I’m thinking of the following:

(i) rhetoric about small government and low taxes

(ii) expensive entitlement programs for the elderly (nearly all of whom, as everybody knows, vote)

(iii) flattery (that is, voters are attracted to politicians who gratify their vanity by telling them they are, innately, rather than by any specific virtues, the best of all possible people in the best of all possible countries)

(iv) entertainment, the process by which, for the benefit of the bored plebs, serious things are turned into spectacles (as seen in the quotations above)

For a country to fall apart: mix these ingredients with a semi-dysfunctional political process, in which gerrymandering bleeds away Congressional centrists; in which virtually unpopulated regions have extraordinary influence in the Senate; in which the right to petition the government allows the diffuse and unorganized general interest to be trumped by the highly organized special interest.

On the other hand, maybe there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a large supply of cheap immigrant later.

But after watching The Black Power Mixtape, a selection of footage related to the Black Power movement shot by Swedish television networks during the sixties and seventies, I realized I how little I knew, how much more extreme it all used to be. (Indeed: at one point there was even a severing of diplomatic relations between the US and Sweden.)

One wonders if the righteous Swedes touring the American slums on their high horses and fawning over Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis ever stopped to think what would happen if their own country got diverse. Would they really be better a creating an environment where everybody gets along than Americans?

Well, follow the fortunes of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party for the next ten or fifteen years. We’ll see.

Actually, now that I think about it, the superiority the Swedish reporters in the movie feel over white Americans strikes me as curiously similar in nature to the superiority that poor white Americans who voted for George Wallace felt over their black neighbors.

The phone is a two-tone model. It’s superb. It’s as if the MTA decided to beat the hipsters at their own game, and on their turf.

It occurs to me, having just finished An American Melodrama, a long and detailed account of the 1968 presidential election (which I learned about in this book review by Jill Abramson, and in which it turns out that Reagan plays quite an important role), that the more I read about the two men, the more my childhood prejudices are, in one case, confirmed, and, in the other, eroded.

That is, the more I read about Reagan, the more he seems shallow, ignorant, reckless, unscrupulous and foolish, just as I was always taught to think of him.

The more I read about Nixon, on the other hand, the more he seems cautious, reasonable, intelligent, centrist and sympathetic. As for Watergate, considering what politics used to be like, it just seems par for the course.

It’s curious that this view diverges perfectly from the verdict of posterity, at least posterity circa 2012.