general

MERS explained (New York Times excerpt, reposted on The Big Picture financial blog):

For centuries, when a property changed hands, the transaction was submitted to county clerks who recorded it and filed it away. These records ensured that the history of a property’s ownership was complete and that the priority of multiple liens placed on the property — a mortgage and a home equity loan, for example — was accurate.

During the mortgage lending spree, however, home loans changed hands constantly. Those that ended up packaged inside of mortgage pools, for instance, were often involved in a dizzying series of transactions.

To avoid the costs and complexity of tracking all these exchanges, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the mortgage industry set up MERS to record loan assignments electronically. This company didn’t own the mortgages it registered, but it was listed in public records either as a nominee for the actual owner of the note or as the original mortgage holder . . .

As long as real estate prices rose, this system ran smoothly. When that trajectory stopped, however, foreclosures brought against delinquent borrowers began flooding the nation’s courts. MERS filed many of them . . .

As cases filed by MERS grew, lawyers representing troubled borrowers began questioning how an electronic registry with no ownership claims had the right to evict people. April Charney, a consumer lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida, was among the first to argue that MERS, which didn’t own the note or the mortgage, could not move against a borrower. Initially, judges rejected those arguments and allowed MERS foreclosures to proceed. Recently, however, MERS has begun losing some cases, and the Kansas ruling is a pivotal loss, experts say. While the matter before the Kansas Supreme Court didn’t involve an action that MERS took against a borrower, the registry’s legal standing is still central to the ruling.

Earlier post from The Big Picture (Barry Ritholtz) (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Loses Legal Shield):

I don’t quite agree with Ellen Brown, who in an extensive legal analysis of the decision, writes: “The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose.” It may be possible for trustees for the securitized loans to somehow perfect standing, i.e., develop the ability to claim loan ownership (perhaps via a purchase) and then move to foreclose...

But Brown is correct when she states this is a very significant legal development, one that might dramatically impact foreclosure litigation.

This ruling could send the lenders who work with MERS scurrying to resolve this in their favor. Look for a lobbying effort to get some favored congresscritter to pass legislation granting them standing to sue on behalf of loan holders (Congress may be able legislate that legal right, although there are state laws to be contended with).

In addition to the ability to predict the future, the US media has other psionic abilities. One is a kind of telekinetic second sight that informs them how world leaders feel on hearing good or bad news and also allows instantaneous creation of news photos of these emotional states. The above is from the Huffington Post, showing Ben Bernanke reacting to news that he's about to be audited. He looks so sad. Uncanny!

A smart, IMG MGMT style essay where the writer/curator uses existing social media to make an argument:

Blade Runner in San Francisco by dreamyshade (aka Britta Gustafson)

Other people's flickr photos of San Francisco landmarks provide the visuals for a discussion of the movie Blade Runner (which had Los Angeles locations) and the Philip K. Dick book on which it is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (set in San Francisco). The essay is "a mix of imaginary locations for the book and movie" and works in some trenchant commentary about the differences, e.g.:

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard and Rachael get it on at the St. Francis hotel.

Unlike the passive and scared Rachael in the movie, the book's Rachael tricks Deckard into thinking she cares about him as an attempt to defuse his pursuit of her fellow androids.

The text "defuse his pursuit of her fellow androids" links to a Google Books version of Androids (surprised that's online in full text) where Rachael and Rick have a post-conjugal discussion of Rick's future bounty hunting (he avows he won't do it anymore). The accompanying tourist-y photo of the St. Francis hotel is shot at night and all lit up like the Douglas Trumbull city exteriors in the movie. The rest of the essay makes similar, ingenious use of textual and geographic cross-cutting.

Update (forgot to write a conclusion): Using Dick's locations as a form of interrogation of the film's, Gustafson restores some of the moods and mores of the original text literally "lost to Hollywood."

A science story from ABC News's website about deadly human-eating pythons in the Everglades:

ABC tells us we should be very afraid of a hybrid between African rock pythons, which have been found in the Everglades swamps and are homicidal, and the more gigantic Burmese pythons, also residing in the swamps but not bothering humans, even though it "remains a big question" whether the two species "could produce fertile offspring."

There's nothing scarier than the things you guess might be out there. Definitely newsworthy.

Below is a positive prereview of an upcoming installation work by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, written by Rhizome.org's resident psychics.

When artist and curator Hilla Rebay hung Vasily Kandinsky’s paintings at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which she convinced her lover Solomon R. Guggenheim to open in the late 1920s, she created a sensual environment for them with colored walls, faint music, and perfumed air. It was an approximate construction of an inner, spiritual harmony unencumbered by reminders of nature, in keeping with the ideas of Kandinsky’s influential tract "Concerning the Spiritual in Art." While multimedia updates of art from an older period risk becoming mere bells and whistles on a body of work that stands on its own merits, Kandinsky’s intense interest in synaesthesia—and his exhibition history with Guggenheim’s collection—make it seem like he might be sympathetic to opportunities for multiple sensory stimulation afforded by today’s data processing technologies. Perhaps that’s why Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum commissioned an immersive light-and-sound piece from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to mark the opening of the museum’s major Kandinsky retrospective, the first for the artist in more than twenty years. Levels of Nothingness, which Lozano-Hemmer developed in collaboration with philosopher Brian Massumi, takes its inspiration from Kandinsky’s 1912 essay "Yellow Sound." The installation generates visuals from phonetic data produced by reading philosophical texts by Kandinsky and others. (At the performance, Isabella Rosselini will kick off the readings, and audience members will be encouraged to continue). Rather than translating one kind of information into another to spell out a neatly servable (sic) metaphor—as Lozano-Hemmer did, for example, with Pulse Park, which presented Madison Square Park as a living organism by animating it with lights activated by the heart rates of passers-by—Levels of Nothingness promises to be more meditative and fuzzy, suggesting the connection between thought and feeling, or objectivity and subjectivity that the writers it featured tried to put in words. When visualization is so commonly used as a tool to clear things up, it’s encouraging to see artists using it as a way to hint at the murky and unknowable. (emphasis added)

It's not clear who has the greater foreknowledge here: the writer of the review or Kandinsky himself, speaking from beyond the grave. In any case, hearing about a light show triggered by a movie star reading a painter's writings makes it seem like a situation where we might be unsympathetic to the opportunities for enjoyment it affords. (See also - "Avant Garde Establishment.")

Updated: Edited to be more in line with a series-in-progress on predictive criticism.