THE MACON MUSIC AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL 2005
WILL IT HAPPEN?????

THE MACON MUSIC AND HERITAGE FESTIVAL: Last fall, I wrote a devastating article, highly critical of Jimmy Mills head honcho and Mayor’s appointee of a disastrous fall music festival that, in three separate venues, saw less than three hundred and fifty people attend.

You can find the entire article online at http://expage.com/lukester403

The entire affair was a stinging slap in the face to local musicians and the general population as well. It was a sad, sad day for a city much of whose culture history is centered on its vital role in the development of multiple genres of twentieth century popular music. It was unadvertised, un-promoted, uninspired, and unacceptable.

In the first year of the reign of Mayor Ellis a crowd estimated at twenty thousand (a number selected by Hizzoner and entirely suspect as to its accuracy, assembled on the final evening of the inaugural Heritage and Music Festival. That was the affair run by Ms Karen Spellman who then returned to Washington, D.C. with an estimated one hundred and twenty thousand of Macon’s hard earned dollars. That she was inadequate to the task, ripped us off, or that the Mayor’s attendance estimates were off by a factor of sixty per-cent or so have nothing to do with the problem facing us in 2005. The sad fact is that our premier fall musical festival has fallen on hard times and is appealing to nobody. It appears ruderless, roughly on the order of utility as tits on a bull.

It is probably too late to plan an event like this for October. And what a shame that is. It can only hurt downtown business, driving one more nail in the coffin that is our fair city.

LANCE ARMSTRONG DOES IT AGAIN: And retires winning the Tour de France for the seventh time. Now maybe OLN can get back to its shiooting programs, pre-empted by hours and hours of bike shots.