Oh look, there’s a new attraction in Manhattan for the downtown art crowd:

The husband-and-wife pair stepped out alongside Morgado on Tuesday night for the opening-night gala for “The Bible Experience,” an exhibit in downtown Manhattan featuring photography from the mini-series as well as biblical artifacts by way of the Vatican and a giant, two-ton crown of thorns hanging from the ceiling. A spooky Old World ambiance was enhanced by dim lighting, a fog machine and Hans Zimmer’s musical score in the background as guests wandered through a cavernous space built to seem centuries-old with earthy walls and barely any heat circulating. “This is a gift to New York City,” mused Burnett of the week-long event, a half-museum/half-marketing gimmick.

This is, by the way, the cable miniseries that has an “Obama lookalike” playing the Devil. And the Mr. Burnett who claims some tacky cable-channel promotion for the megachurch demographic is a “gift to New York City” is Mark Burnett, the person who must be held accountable for both the “Survivor” show and “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

“Most of my buyers are averaging four offers before they have one accepted,” my new real estate agent in the Bay Area said yesterday. “It can be an emotional and stressful time.”

Probably! And especially if you’re moving from a still-depressed housing market, which is roughly the area between the Eastern Seaboard and San Francisco. But, as NPR is reporting as I type these words, the American housing market (in the coastal elite cities) is “fast changing.” From causing the collapse of the Earth’s economy just five years ago to a breezy NPR feature about an insane couple putting in offers at 2 a.m. after driving by a new listing, at night, the simple matter of having a place continues to cause misery, heartbreak and insomnia for those who would like to not deal with landlords and $5,000 monthly rents.

When the radio man says that “historically low interest rates are driving the recovery of the housing market” — a quote I just invented that you can probably hear, word for word, on Bloomberg right now — what he’s really saying is that rents are going crazy because enough people have money again to drive up the rents, but 3.4% annually on a half-million-dollar home means a monthly payment of about $1,800, after the 20% down payment of $100,000 (plus closing costs) you somehow have in the bank. Bring up your monthly house payment to $2,400 to include property taxes and homeowner’s insurance, and it’s still less than a three-bedroom place in a city with an economy. Especially if you need a patch of dirt outside for your dog to poop on.

If you cannot afford $5,000 a month for rent because you do not work for Facebook an hour away from San Francisco, buying is a “good idea,” and also the only other option beyond sleeping beneath the 101 … but only if you’ve somehow maintained your credit during the worst financial crisis of our lives, and also somehow saved a hundred thousand dollars, etc. And so people are buying anything, any old moldy box of urine-soaked flooring between a poison factory and a Pentecostal church, because it “makes financial sense.”

But is this growing frenzy real or is it just another bubble that will deflate as soon as underwater mortgage holders figure they can finally get out from their terrible investment of 2007? From another NPR housing story, this one about how it’s not actually fixed after all:

Despite a recent upturn in sales and prices, “the housing market is still very weak,” said Sheila Bair, who headed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 2006 to 2011. Bair, speaking at a Washington “economic summit” organized by The Atlantic magazine, warned homeowners that “we need more experience and data to know if it’s really turned around.”

Bair said lenders may be sitting on huge numbers of foreclosed upon houses that have been held back from the market. As housing prices start to perk up, that hidden inventory may come flooding into the market — and pushing prices back down, she said.

Moreover, millions of homeowners are “under water,” i.e., they still owe more on mortgages than they could get by selling their homes. As soon as they can sell at prices high enough to pay off old loans, they’ll put their properties on the market — and again drive down prices, she said.

This is still a problem even in fancy Twitter cities such as San Francisco, which is where Twitter is based and where Twitter itself stands as a temple to the way a cool tech company can save even a forever-doomed stretch of hobo land and plywood-covered windows like mid-Market Street.

Across from the new Twitter headquarters is an ugly brown stucco high-rise called Fox Plaza. It stands on the site of the beautiful old Fox Theater. When redevelopment bores approved the demolition of the grand theater in the 1960s, the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVay put a curse on the new building. Over the next forty years, not only the hideous Fox Plaza but the entire mid-Market Street corridor suffered endless humiliation and decay. The magic of Twitter has even reversed this satanic curse: Fox Plaza with its 1970s-style prison apartments now has a waiting list for bigger units, but you can get this nostalgic 1970s’ garbatecture one-bedroom for $3,070 per month.

Should all the financially strapped San Francisco homeowners suddenly put their homes on the market, it would make a dramatic difference in the current low inventory — 8% of the city’s homeowners still owe more on their bubble-era mortgage than the property’s current market value. But with values rising so fast, even houses that sold at the height of the 2007 insanity are getting close to parity. More houses on the market might bring some sense back to people, because it is reportedly damaging to sanity when you’re shown four crappy little houses that all need a lot of work, and you’re outbid on all of them, immediately.

Meanwhile, just an hour away in California’s Central Valley, lots of towns still have a huge shadow inventory of foreclosed homes and people waiting for the good times to return to Adobe Falls Estates behind the old Circuit City and the Applebee’s.

Related: Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley’s Unbuilt Manhattan?

Photo by Charles Weever.

Ladies Would Rather Spend Time Yappin’ Than Doing Math

“Our study shows that it’s not lack of ability or differences in ability that orients females to pursue non-STEM careers, it’s the greater likelihood that females with high math ability also have high verbal ability. Because they’re good at both, they can consider a wide range of occupations.”

If that Oz movie with James Franco didn’t provide the witchy horror you hoped for, try this new music video by Franco. It features the infamous occult director Kenneth Anger as a satanic priest. The music is by Franco’s musical duo, Daddy, but we are mostly interested in the half-naked people wearing animal masks in a dark chamber of mystery.

As it turns out, we won’t be able to properly judge whether or not Tom Friedman was right about that whole invading Iraq thing until “9 months and 21 years” after the invasion, so let’s all check back here in December, 2024 and see how things turned out.

“Saudi Arabia has rejected accusations that it is covering up details of a deadly new SARS-like virus, which has recently been shown to be capable of spreading from person to person.”

So: “After 11 years, Future Bible Heroes return with Partygoing, which features 13 quick and catchy songs in their signature mix of dance-floor-filling club anthems and super-sad ballads. Future Bible Heroes are comprised of celebrated songwriter Stephin Merritt (the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies), longtime friend and collaborator Christopher Ewen (Figures on a Beach, the Hidden Variable and a popular Boston-area DJ) and Magnetic Fields pianist-singer-manager Claudia Gonson.” Also? This is happening. I guess I’ll stick around for June.

“Jedi knights could soon be performing special intergalactic weddings in Scotland, Presbyterians have predicted.”

City Paper: There’s a lot I don’t remember, because I was 17 years old and I managed to get served everywhere, so that was fun, plus on top of that I was an American, so I was like a thing from a zoo and everybody was trying to get me loaded.

Gerard Butler: You’re either gonna get punched or fucked.

CP: I went into a bar, I had a green shirt, and I had a jacket on over it, and I went into this bar with some friends, and I sat down and took the jacket off, and I had a green shirt with yellow sleeves, and it was an Orange bar —

GB: Ohh.

CP: All these hands came out and grabbed the jacket and put it back on my shoulders, but then for the rest of the night, they would reach over and pull down the jacket and show people, “See? Look at this idiot.” I had no idea about any of that stuff.

GB: [Laughs] Oh, it’s crazy. You say that, and it’s like saying, “I walked into the favelas in Brazil with a fucking T-shirt on saying ‘I hate Brazilian cunts.’”

CP: Kill me.

GB: Kill me! Exactly. Target!

See? Interviewing celebrities is easy.

Actor David Thewlis turns 50 today. If you have somehow never seen Naked I envy you the overwhelming sensation of “wow” you are about to experience as you rush to address this glaring deficiency in your viewing history.