Author: Aaron Weber

Article: This Could Really Be Our Year (for Real Estate Disaster)

As the weather warms up, the season moves into full swing for Boston’s most lucrative spectator sport: real estate. People swap stories at bars and parties: I hear he paid six-fifty for a one-bed condo, there’s a basement studio in Davis asking four hundred grand, a ramshackle Victorian can’t be had for under a million. Every Sunday afternoon, it’s time to browse the open houses, whistling at prices and dreaming of appreciation, refinancing, and that ultimate luxury, off-street parking.

The statistics are familiar to anyone by now: the average median price for a single-family home in Cambridge passed half a million dollars last year, and three hundred grand for a condo. Somerville sold its first million-dollar single-family home this year. There are only two communities inside route 128 where a condo can be had for under $250,000. Prices keep rising, bids keep coming in over asking price and within days of opening. Winter is normally slower in the real estate market, but not this year, when the market barely paused. After all, this is a market which saw a penthouse condominium sell within fifteen minutes. For five million dollars. In cash.
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Just to Prove to You that I am Not Uncritical

I tried to read the article on teenagers and sex this weekend in the NYT Mag, but it was so poorly researched, and so full of broad generalizations, and so full of dumb teenagers, that I gave up a few pages in. It seemed that the kids were indeed reckless sexually, but also that the journalist was being suckered. Chicha has a better analysis than I ever would.

Also, w/r/t housing, I told you so.

Ring My Bells

My grandfather the Rear Admiral (ret.) Joel Parks would complain to my father that the New York Times was too liberal and too influential, and he stuck to the San Diego local paper, which was staunchly conservative in those days, San Diego being a dusty Navy town with an Air-Force base and a small college. My father, his son-in-law and a bearded Jewish academic from New York, was the only one who was willing to disagree with him. He’d say “The NYT is influential because it’s the best paper in the country, and you should read it.” The admiral liked that. Nobody else engaged with him and he was terribly lonely.

I think about that when I read up on suicide, the abstinence-only “education” our kids get these days, and the particular approach of personal essays about HIV that the paper chooses. Those topics are hard to cover objectively, and no matter how they are covered, the right is probably going to shriek about bias whenever they’re discussed.

Now, I’m not as mindful about bias when I read up on household-junk hoarding and animal hoarding, because, dammit, that’s just cool. Still, mental illness is another topic that I tend to follow — obsessively, perhaps? — and one prone to real or percieved biases in coverage.

Clean and Dry

It has not been very long now that I have owned dress shirts that I actually wear on a regular basis, and therefore take them to the cleaners rather than wash them myself. But I have a couple. And today I brought them to the cleaners down the street, where the old lady behind the counter knows me, despite the fact that I only bring in two shirts, and only every other week or so. But she had popped out for a moment– it was a bit after nine and I guess she’d taken a break after the pre-nine-am crowd had gone by. I went on by and dropped the shirts at the place near work, and now I feel horribly guilty for betraying her.

I’m such a freak.

Definitions

Today at the Museum of Contemporary Photography I saw some really neat images described as “C-Prints.” I imagined this was some sort of fancy process. Nope: any enlargement of a color photo. Some of the other good images turned out to be inkjet printouts. Fancy inkjets to be sure, but inkjets nonetheless.

My grandmother insists that photography isn’t art, and I’m sure she’d hate the digital photomanipulation artists, but I love it, especially the unnatural landscapes that a lot of contemporary artists assemble or find… the supersaturated color of schoolbuses in a flooded parking lot, the stark intensity of a highway interchange, lights blurred from long exposure. It’s as pure a mechanism of conveying emotion and image as, say, drypoint etching, or formal oil painting, or sculpture in bronze.

After the MCP visit, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and reminded myself why I really really really dislike 18th and 19th century painting, especially French and English. That extends to the 17th century in many cases. I know it’s saying a lot to write off three centuries of art, but dammit, it’s all so overblown and melodramatic and… well… foofy. Rococo, Romanticism… I don’t even like impressionists, although I did see a nice etching by Mary Cassat, which, since it was a study for something else, had a sense of immediacy and focus that her more ‘completed’ works didn’t.

I cannot spell

I’ve always been good at spelling, but I can never remember how to spell Apparel. As in “Don we now our gay” or American Apparel, maker of very nice t-shirts and other knitwear, who pay living wages, who offer after-work English classes and day-care for their employees. Although they’re not unionized, but whatever.

I’ve always felt that unions are a necessary friction, but that ethically avoiding them is probably good for all involved. The US auto industry is now seeing just how much it’s continuing to pay for its worker exploitation of fifty and sixty years ago and more: spiralling pension costs, concessions, inability to close a plant or exit a product line, inefficiencies, ossification. Unions help workers, but they don’t help The Company, and the company needs to survive to employ the worker who’s helped by the union… ideally it’s symbiotic but in practice it’s as imperfect as… well, it’s often still better than anything else.