Curbed, the smartest and funniest real estate blog in New York (besides the one called The Real Estate, natch), will be honored next month at the Historic Districts Council's Preservation Party.

The Web site's honored peers include State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick ("Friend in High Places Award") and the illustrious Broadway-Flushing Homeowners Assocation.

From the release:

Mazel tov, gents!

- Max Abelson and Chris Shott

Earlier this month, a Round-Up linked to an Interior Design profile of the design world's Super Agent Man:

Late last week we heard from Mr. Granet, who would like to tell the world that he is not a hater. "All I said was that I did not believe in bringing designer to stores like Target "too low too fast," he wrote via email. "You can not imagine how many requests we get from designers to go directly to stores like Target."

Fair enough. Mr. Granet's full email is after the jump.

- Max Abelson

To the Editor:

I was quoted in your newspaper by Max Abelson regarding an article about me and my company in Interior Design Magazine. What upsets me most is that he says I hate Target. I have no idea how he gathered that from the article. All I said was that I did not believe in bringing designer to stores like Target "too low too fast". You can not imagine how many requests we get from designers to go directly to stores like Target right out of the shoot and we believe you need to reach a certain level of creditability ala Thomas O'Brien before you can go to the masses. Start high and then work your way down in the price point categories.

The truth is I love Target, how could I ever speak poorly about a company that has lifted the awareness of good design to the masses. This is what I have built a career around and I support whole heartily their efforts and their products.

This is very upsetting I wish to request that Mr. Abelson quote me on this.

A former photo director for Life magazine (now “editor of creative development” at Vanity Fair), David Friend comes tantalizingly close to answering many of the questions about what these images of 9/11 mean and where that meaning comes from. But in this insider’s account of Twin Tower photojournalism, he refuses to wrestle with the toughest issues.

For instance, when it comes to Rudy Giuliani’s emergence as a heroic leader, Mr. Friend never stops to consider how the photographs themselves played a critical roll in the Mayor’s transformation, which he seems to accept as a necessary and therefore inevitable apotheosis. Without apparent irony, the author refers to Mr. Giuliani’s now-historic post-9/11 press conference as “really a much-needed photo opiate.” In his discussion of the resulting photographs, Mr. Friend points out admiringly the Mayor’s “clenched jaw of security.”

Is it too much (or too soon) to ask for a more skeptical look at the politics of photographed 9/11 heroism? At the very least, it’s unhelpful when Mr. Friend insists instead on seeing only hope and strength in such complex images. His preference for optimistic interpretation, and his lack of curiosity about that optimism, shuts off broad avenues of investigation.

When he discusses the U.S.-government-sponsored global tour of Joel Meyerowitz’s 9/11 photography, Mr. Friend writes that the work’s “pathos” was strong enough to justify the project, even if the traveling exhibit did become “a calling card of the Bush administration … the ultimate State Department p.r. coup—Ground Zero and its nameless heroes, recast as an export.”

Here Mr. Friend again seems perfectly positioned to give a fleshed-out biography of images that have acquired lives of their own—as New York iconography, as advertisement, as propaganda—but again he stops short.

Sometimes it’s his wholehearted reverence for photography that gets in the way. He comes across as an enthusiast instead of an evaluator. He writes, “I believe, in short, in the power of pictures … [even] in this era of political spin, agitprop, Photoshop, and made-for-TV reality.” He never explains why he brushes off the engrossing problem of the reliability of photography in the digital age—and the problem of our own inconsistent interpretations.

Chapter 1 of Watching the World Change offers a glimpse of the book’s unfulfilled potential. Here Mr. Friend creates a flowing narrative of the World Trade Center attacks, cinematically cutting between a variety of the witnesses who survived and documented the Twin Towers’ destruction. He segues from artists to financiers to first responders to photojournalists: “I felt him cover me,” a CBS reporter says of a fireman who pinned her down, saving her from the South Tower as it fell over them, and “I could feel the pounding of his heart against my backbone.” The chapter is a promising beginning: dramatic first-person accounts, a coherent storyline and shrewd insights into how different photographers—some barely experienced, some barely surviving—captured instantly historic images.

But the book rises to that level again only once—in the 12-page section of glossy color photos. When images are fiercely articulate, the words describing them had better be good. Mr. Friend’s are not. Like so many of us, he’s left tongue-tied by the enormity of the photographic record.

Sadly, words fail him at other times, too. About a widow’s scrapbook he writes, “They were a deep well into which she could dip to get a swig of Tommy. The drink was soothing, slightly narcotic, with a bitter nip … a picture-lined comforter, soft as down.”

When he quotes other commentators, Mr. Friend does himself no favors. For example, he shares with us these astute remarks by Temple University’s Fred Ritchin, first published in Aperture: “The destruction of the Twin Towers made for riveting imagery, but resulted in a series of instant histories whose intent was to produce immediate icons of the event. [They] were provided to replace doubt with the reward of instantaneous resurrection.” Wouldn’t it be fascinating to hear a veteran magazine editor’s view on the tendency to exploit images of violence? Does the exploitation comfort or enlighten us? Or does it just expand the magazine’s readership? Mr. Friend gives scant response to Mr. Ritchin’s provocative assertion—a sharp reminder of the ideas that the author leaves unexplored.

Mr. Friend also quotes communications consultant Nikki Stren, who wonders: “The question is: What’s the truth you’re trying to show when you keep trotting out the same pictures?” If only David Friend could tell us.

Max Abelson is a reporter at The Observer.

This morning, assistant managing editor and web editor Jake Brooks distributed a surprising email. (It follows after the jump.)

His email announced a stunning victory over the staff of Trader Monthly at last night's softball game in East River Park. This morning, the bullpen was abuzz.

"They were worthy competition," said politics reporter Jason Horowitz.

"Except for the girls," said intern Max Abelson. Hey now.

"There was one guy who basically slid the distance from first base to second base," said Mr. Horowitz.

Were any of the Trader Monthly fellows... well, hot?

"I'm no expert," said NYTV reporter Rebecca Dana. "There was one guy.... he was sort of bridge-and-tunnel-hot."

"They were really nice," said Mr. Brooks sternly.

"Except for the one," Ms. Dana said.

"Their two best players were on vacation," Mr. Brooks said.

And what about heat exhaustion incidents?

"I had one later that evening," Ms. Dana said. To wit: "I was exhausted and hot."

"Friendly!" said Mr. Horowitz. "Friendly bunch!"

"I hit a guy with a ball," said Michael Calderone, media and real estate reporter. Indeed he did. Right in the back. And: "There was a lot of glove sharing. And bat sharing."

"Athlete's hand!" said medical reporter Lizzy Ratner. "And fungus!"

The email from Mr. Brooks:

The only thing more glamorous than high-end luxury real estate in New York City and the Hamptons is a magazine exclusively devoted to covering high-end luxury real estate in NYC and the Hamptons.

"A New York edition was a natural next step for Haute Living," said publisher Kamal Hotchandaniin a morning press release. "Obviously, New York leads the way when it comes to luxury real estate." Obviously.

South Florida-based Haute Living Magazine has already covered the divas of Manhattan real estate--and, less successfully, the Cipriani Club.

Where will spin-off Haute New York be found? In "400 luxury buildings where the average price of an apartment is $4.2 million." And: "in flight on private jets."

- Max Abelson

(Full disclosure: The Real Estate's haute Michael Calderone has been a recent Haute Living contributor).

Midlake is a quintet from the talent-incubator town of Denton, Tex. Their newly released sophomore LP, The Trials of Van Occupanther (Bella Union), achieves a sophisticated balance of past and present. It boasts the kind of serious songwriting, arranging and instrumental chops that hark back to the heyday of the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills & Nash—a mellow moment before punk made proficiency taboo. The album is full of lush, resonant acoustic guitars and warmly overdriven electrics, lilting pianos and vintage keyboards, soaring vocal melodies paired with honeyed harmony parts and orchestral touches.

Yet it never succumbs to the slickness or blandness that can plague the genre. That’s probably because the band adopted the indie-rock approach, playing virtually all of the instruments and producing the album themselves. With its complex arrangements and dense layers of overdubs, The Trials of Van Occupanther has a rich, organic ensemble feel.

Lead singer and songwriter Tim Smith’s supple, mellifluous tenor could easily be exploited for operatic gestures, but he’s careful not to hog the spotlight. There are wailing, honest-to-goodness, classic-rock drum fills and guitar solos, most notably in the infectious “Head Home,” but they fall in all the right places, supporting rather than overwhelming the songs. It all adds up to a generous rush of feeling, conjuring up a pleasant (sometimes gloomy) place to get lost.

Lyrically, it’s an eccentric vision. Mr. Smith evokes an invented past much more distant than the Me Decade, painting a landscape of hillsides and forests populated by villagers and hunters. “Roscoe,” the propulsive and hypnotic lead track, imagines rural life at the end of the 19th century; the first verse is about mountaineers traveling far to fix someone’s leaking roof (an odd motif that reoccurs later in the album).

Like many of the songs, “Bandits” doesn’t follow an easily identifiable verse-chorus structure, but it’s an immediately poignant and engaging mid-tempo ballad. Mr. Smith asks, “Did you ever want to roam around with bandits, / To see many places and hide in ditches?” Then he tempers that romantic image of the carefree outsider, singing, “It’s not always easy,” before invoking the need to find shelter when the winter comes.

These are fairy tales minus the happy ending (most just trail off without concluding at all). In “Van Occupanther,” the title character is a shy scientist who’s shunned by his neighbors. He seems on the brink of revealing an important discovery, but instead cries out (to gorgeous harmonies), “Let me not be too consumed with this world.” And in “Chasing After Deer,” an affectingly artless description of tragic, unrequited love, a deer, frightened of a pursuer who’s already given up the chase, runs headlong off a cliff into the sea. It’s that kind of mixed emotion—a compound of sadness and beauty—that Midlake captures on this quietly stunning record.

—I-Huei Go

LIKE JOHNNY CASH'S FIFTH VOLUME OF THE American series, another of this year’s finest albums, Ali Farka Touré’s Savane, was released posthumously (Touré, who was in his late 60’s, died in March). But if Cash’s last record is a collection of casket lullabies, the Malian guitarist’s final songs have a teeming lushness—a lively, organic beauty—that makes it difficult to imagine that he was suffering from bone cancer when he recorded them.

Touré’s crystalline guitar buoys his music, even on gluey, hot-sun hymns like “Ledi Coumbe,” or on the funereal title track. But nothing here floats by sadly: These songs knead together that pristine guitar with heart-grabbing harmonies, slender instrumental echo and bucolic percussion. This is an album of pure molasses melody. It’s intoxicating because of its wide landscape: The panorama created by Touré and his collaborators is verdant yet dignified and demure. Its yogic reiterations evoke the splendor of Lee (Scratch) Perry’s dub reggae, yet this album matches the dreamy lilt of dub without the nuisance of nonstop reverb or tyrannical bass lines.

Not a single note here oversteps its bounds, even when the tracks add a second guitar—or a choir of wiry n’goni lutes. By filling the spaces behind and beneath one another, these musicians build up limited alternations on slow themes into electric crescendos.

Touré has been memorialized as “the Bluesman of Africa”—but that nickname backwardly confuses which hemisphere the genre’s roots grew in. Savane is not the stuff of wannabe Delta barroom blues, and it’s not hard to hear why.

Touré is best known for 1994’s Talking Timbuktu, his Desert Island Disc–worthy collaboration with Ry Cooder, the Californian slide-guitar divinity. Like Mr. Cooder’s more popular international collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club, Timbuktu is immediately likeable for its swaggeringly pretty hooks.

The prettiness of Savane is much less important than its lastingly beautiful craftwork: The caramelized growl of Little George Sueref’s harmonica on the opener, “Erdi,” melts into the quintuplet vocal harmonies of “Machengoidi” and “Soko Yhinka”; vintage James Brown bandleader Pee Wee Ellis plays a late-night barfly tenor sax on “Beto” to match the translucent flute of “Banga”; on “N’Jarou”, the album’s last and most magnetic track, Touré’s stately acoustic soloing hypnotizes the brass and African lutes beneath it.

His guitar—sometimes a crisp acoustic, sometimes a crisper electric—has often done the talking for him. But Touré’s languid charcoal vocals on Savane are a weighty addition. Though the lyrics are sung in Malian dialect, with a few gushes of French, only jealous Anglophones will be disappointed. The vocals are so melodious and percussive that it’s a pleasure listening to them merely as abstract expressions of emotion. At their core, Touré’s velvety moans and elderly grumbles are never unintelligible. Muddiness has never sounded clearer.

His singing is always eloquent, but the flickers of spoken incantation on “N’Jarou” are supreme. These vocals dance above an ebullient seven-note guitar riff, which eventually relaxes into free-flowing improvisation. Contrasted against the airy, paced breaths of Pee Wee Ellis’ tenor saxophone, the alternating outbursts of voice and guitar are cataclysmic.

To insist that any such piece of music has its own inherently global and globalizing voice is the stuff of colonialist choir teachers: Touré’s music isn’t fratty or gleeful enough to be universal. Nonetheless, he reportedly sang in all three dialects of northern Mali as a gesture of unity.

There’s something in Savane’s transcendent Malian songs that demands hyperbole: Its quiet jangle blossoms into pure elegance, getting richer and lovelier as it rolls along.

—Max Abelson

For a writer who revels in gunning down slow-moving targets (hookers, handwriting analysts, Paris Hilton), Mr. Bing has outstanding respect for his book’s subject matter. His introduction walks us through info on the global practitioners of professional BS, then pops the Big Idea: “Guess what? They’re having fun, making a living, and enjoying their lives, perhaps more than you.”

Sure, he lays down some prickly zingers on allergists and agents, but he kids because he loves! After all, these folks “enjoy the best lives imaginable,” getting big respect and big money from little effort.

Mr. Bing’s starry-eyed account of bullshit’s wonders (“This is art! Feel it with your gut!”) is often unfunny and rarely convincing. A serious weakness for exclamation makes it particularly hard to tell when he’s joking (“lace ’em up and do it!”). Would it matter one way or the other? As Princeton’s Harry G. Frankfurt’s shrewd treatise On Bullshit (2005) concludes: “[S]incerity itself is bullshit.”

Whether sincere or ironic or neither or both, the joke can only be on Mr. Bing when he opens his work with an Aristotelian axiom, then analyzes Beowulf, then describes Thomas Wolfe’s novels as “flaccid, egoistical lumps of prose.” Look who’s talking.

Though he mentions Mr. Frankfurt, Mr. Bing declares that defining bullshit “turns out to be difficult.” (Indeed, it would be hard to pinpoint a meaning that stings the hated perpetrators without insulting the broader art.) And yet he later ventures a description of BS as the difference between happiness and misery, succinctly delineating the first (George Stephanopoulos) from the second (Anderson Cooper).

Not shockingly, Mr. Bing’s methodical breakdown of bullshit falls short of his introduction’s mathematical aspirations. Thus the construction-site flag waver (Job No. 26) somehow comes to represent bullshit at its “most aggressive and … satisfying.” Mr. Bing’s, unfortunately, is neither.

The book’s 100 entries blithely inform us on how to enter each profession, its pay, downsides, the skills required and oh so much more—including well-calculated Bullshit Quotients and Borscht Belt routines on famous examples. Here, Mr. Bing has an awful habit of segueing (“not long ago,” “a few years back”) into overweight anecdotes on the issues at hand. We’re constantly told that names have been changed, which nicely reminds us that the onomatopoeic “Bing” is—surprise!—a pseudonym.

His Fortune staff biography (not to mention his write-up at the Greater Talent Network speaker bureau) tells us the man is “an ultra-haute executive vice president at a huge multinational corporation.” There’s no kind of haute like ultra-haute.

Mr. Bing fondly alludes to his significant day job, rattling off a “mind-bogglingly enormous conglomerate” here and a “veritable titan of industry” there.

But like The Office’s wisecracking David Brent, Mr. Bing doggy-paddles in the choppy waters between straight-laced corporate expertise and slapstick satire. It can get ugly, as in awkward invectives against bloggers (Gawker, Drudge and McSweeney’s are lassoed together), hip-hop posses (50 Cent is “Fif”), postmodern art (Jeff Koons is “interesting, not edifying”) and, sadly, divorce lawyers.

Mr. Bing also has Brent’s painful indelicacies. The ceaseless repetition of the book’s scatological keyword gets unseemly: First it’s “pungent,” then “mung,” then “chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

Considering his willingness to put together phrases like “self-important claptrap” (Job No. 1: Advertising Executive), Mr. Bing seems oblivious to his tireless ego. He cutely role-plays as old-school sexist (equating managerial and sexual powers) and homophobe (warning agents against those that “take it up the butt”). His fearless tirade against critics even recounts that “my friend Stanley” hit a New York Times writer after a bad review. Bing! As the man says himself, when it’s impossible to be funny, hateful often suffices.

But even these silliest sucker-punches would be forgivable if the pugilist seemed to be having more fun. (Exclamation points do not count as fun.) Mr. Bing makes so many references to his advances and his agent and his editor and his publisher that it’s no surprise when “Writer of This Book” clocks in at Job No. 96, though it’s thankfully awarded a minimal Bullshit Quotient.

Mr. Bing describes his work as “funny” and “trenchant,” but more cringe-worthy (and pragmatic) is his sales pitch to potential book buyers “reading this while standing up in an airport bookstore.”

Will businessmen bite? It’s hard to imagine that the powerful professional friends of Stanley Bing (his real name is Gil Schwartz) will split their sides on jokes about hairiness and vice presidents. As the slick American attorney tells the slick Helen Mirren in The Long Good Friday: “It’s not a good idea to bullshit us.”

Maybe that’s why the book is at its best when abandoning its corporate hang-ups for pop satire: Mr. Bing takes some sharp jabs at Kevin Federline (though he doesn’t mention “PopoZao”); gives a brilliant history of game-show hosts; and does more to Bill O’Reilly in two pages than Nicholas Lemann’s much longer New Yorker profile.

And then come the October 2005–era jokes on Harriet Miers and FEMA.

Max Abelson is a writer living in New York.

Don't really expect us to post to The Real Estate till July 5, unless one of us gets drunk and decides to ruminate on the pleasures of listening to Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass while sitting on a porch upstate, or in Maine, or in Matewan, drinking Fog Cutters.

We'll be back with intern Max Abelson's Morning Read stylings earlier than you on July 5, so don't count us out for long. And keep writing and calling. We love all of you crankpipes!

- Tom McGeveran