Whipped Cream Difficulties

Greenspoint Mall in Houston.

At one point, it was the largest mall in Houston until the Galleria mall surpassed it with multiple expansions in the late 1980s and early 2000s.

That was the mall for my family for a long time. We saw “Star Wars” at the theater there, and I spent a lot of time as a teen in that mall. But Willowbrook Mall opened up closer to our house, and that became the mall of choice (unless there was some compelling reason to go to Greenspoint).

After we all moved away, the mall and the area around it went into decline. Crime got so bad, the mall was nicknamed “Gunspoint Mall” by locals.

Part of the area’s expansive campus will be transformed into a new apartment complex called Summit at Renaissance Park, developed by the Zieben Group. It will replace a vacant Sears Auto Center.

I’m sorry. Did someone say “Sears Auto Center”?

(I thought about putting a language warning on this, but: it’s Ron White. If you need a language warning on Ron White, well, welcome to our universe, I hope you enjoy your stay here.)

(And both Lawrence and I would be firmly in the “fark Sears Auto Center” camp, if Sears Auto Center still existed.)

I haven’t watched all of this yet, but here’s a “Dead Malls” YouTube video on Greenspoint:

This one’s for Mike the Musicologist: Richard Crawford.

“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.

…

“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Mr. Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.
“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”
Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African-American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Mr. Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.