Don't

I just finished Alice Echols' Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, and since it's not due out until March, I won't say much about it beyond a note on the ending. After Echols deals extensively with the '70s for most of the book, she rolls through the next 20-plus years in 20 or so pages, then concludes by seeing traces of disco acceptance in such band names as the Disco Biscuits and Panic! at the Disco. In short, a book that moves at a smart pace becomes cursory in the home stretch. The only thing I find less convincing is the attempt to link the past and present to show continued relevance. Joe Bonomo tries this in Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, where his last chapter tells us that Dave Alvin and Rev. Horton Heat love classic Jerry Lee. Since they're in their 40s and 50s (I assume), those aren't the best examples. More to the point, though, are such gestures necessary? Does disco need to be accepted and enjoying some sort of normalized place in the culture for the book to matter? Do famous people now have to care about Jerry Lee for Jerry Lee's recordings to be relevant?

An "Unplanned Take Dose"

A friend forwarded me this - obviously an English story mechanically translated into a foreign language then mechanically translated back. The result is accidental dada poetry, made finer by the celebrity subject matter:

Lindsay Lohan‘’s incommunicative has revealed that her famous girl was dating Heath Ledger when he died.

Dina claimed that the ‘Mean Girls’ grapheme and the ‘Dark Knight’ grapheme were in a relation at the instance of his unplanned take dose in Jan 2008.

In a leaked sound call between Dina and her ex-husband, she has said that playwright never genuinely recovered after the Joker actor’s death.




“Lindsay was dating Heath when he died. I don”t undergo if you undergo that, but I undergo ”cause I would modify her soured and they were friends very, rattling close, ok?” The Sun quoted Dina as informing archangel in the sound tape.

In the conversation, which was transcribed in 2008, Dina attributes some of Lindsay’’s individualized problems to Heath’’s passing.

She also feared her girl haw modify up feat the aforementioned artefact cod to ingest and medication take addictions.

“When she’’s inebriate or takes an Adderall with it she module do something same Heath Ledger did in a ordinal without thinking. His modification f***ed her up,” the Sun quoted her as locution on the phone.

Blowing in the Wind

After Katrina, New Orleanians were castigated as a bunch of slackjaws who didn't know enough to get out of the way of a hurricane coming straight at them. It was as if hurricanes are just like warm fronts and rain bands, and that once set in motion, they'll go in the predicted direction until they run out of United States and do whatever they do in the Atlantic. But hurricanes aren't that predictable, as Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Mild Breeze Ida illustrated yesterday. Despite predictions of 70 percent chance of rain all day, it barely sprinkled.

What critics also failed to account for is the cost of dealing with a storm. Hurricane Gustav was small "D" devastating to the region last year because the mass evacuation meant a whole city went on a forced vacation and people had to spend money earmarked for such frivolities as bills and groceries on evacuation. When they returned, they came back to businesses that had gone a week without cash flow and struggled to make payroll. Gustav sent a shiver through the South Louisiana economy that took a few months to work off last year, and even Ida's weak miss affected a lot of lives as many working parents suddenly had to figure out what to do with their children yesterday when many schools pre-emptively closed.

Bottom line: As always, what seems simple is rarely simple.

A Simple Question

Friday night at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans, hip-hop group the Knux played on one of the side stages. Unfortunately, the rains earlier in the day created a 10-foot-wide mud mote around the stage that fans had to brave to see the band. That and the rapidly cooling night kept the crowd down, but it didn't stop the hype man for the Knux from trying desperately to get a "KNUX! KNUX! KNUX!" chant going. When it didn't work, he badgered the crowd and tried again, then repeated the process until I walked away, tired of being yelled at. I feel for the group because Krispy and Al are from here, but because they got their act together out of town, they have little following here. Still, what's more likely to move a crowd - a hype man yelling at the audience, or playing something funky?