THE LEFT LANE
White Stripe week
Advertiser Staff and News Services
White Stripes, same time tomorrow and the next day ...
Blues-rockers the White Stripes, in a bit of late-night history, will be the musical guests tomorrow through Friday on NBC's "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." It's the first time a band has been booked on a late-night talk show for so long, according to NBC.
The Detroit duo, faux brother-sister/ex-husband and wife Jack and Meg White, will play a different song each night from their new album, "Elephant," which Rolling Stone called "the best thing you'll hear all year."
Papa's postscripts
A collection of intimate letters, telegrams and Christmas cards written by Ernest Hemingway to actress Marlene Dietrich between 1949 and 1959 has been donated to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum by Maria Riva, Dietrich's daughter.
Ernest Hemingway
They won't be made available to the public until 2007. Library director Deborah Leff has seen the memorabilia, however, and said the communications show "a tremendous intimacy ... There's a sense of sharing souls."
Lava lifestyle profiled
Jack Thompson, who continues to occupy his home and bed & breakfast inn in a kipuka in the devastated Royal Gardens subdivision on the Big Island, will be featured in a new book, "Braving Home," by Jake Halpern (Houghton Mifflin, hardback, $23). The collection of essays, due out in July, profiles people who live in odd and edgy locations, including Thompson, who has a home in Hilo but prefers the solitude of his house amidst methane gas explosions, smoldering vegetation and steaming lava.
Halpern, a journalist who has written for the New Yorker, spent several days with Thompson. Thompson reads, gardens, listens to the radio, and gives a daily report on lava conditions to a helicopter tour company. His biggest problems appear to be wild pigs, the din of tour helicopters when there's lava flow in the area, and occasional loneliness. But, says, Thompson, "it's the home that matters."
