6 Links
April 14, 2006 by nonotes
1. Pal Karen Schoemer talks about her new book on the radio show On Point. She’s joined by Nellie McKai (who reviewed her book for the NYT), Patti Page, and Fabian. The book is called Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music. Here’s an excerpt on the NYT site, which I guess might require registration.
2. Earlier I made passing mention of books about albums, or about songs. A site called PopMatters has a huge blowout on the 33 1/3 series of books about albums, and my esteemed friend Zoilus has interesting thoughts about it.
3. There’s a very long piece in LfNO about people who did not want to leave the Desire housing projects, even though they were being torn down. One of the things I learned in writing about that was how sorry the history of public housing in New Orleans has been. But of course my real interest was in why people would fight so hard to stay in a crumbling project. Anyway, the issue of what will happen to the projects in New Orleans, post-Katrina, has been getting some attention, in this Times-Picayune article, and this NPR story. Not a lot of good news there.
4. Something to keep an eye on: The New Orleans Kid Camera Project. Thanks again, Mr. Franklin.
5. The Business of Muzak, from The New Yorker.
6. The History of Western Music, in two parts. This is a longish essay from the New York Review of Books, but it’s a lot more concise than 4,154-page, six volume work it discusses.
Actual number of links in this installment of “6 Links:” 13
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a 
