Hanna hits Camp Rock

It looks like Brooklyn is going to get drenched tomorrow as tropical storm Hanna hits the Eastern seaboard. Much to my relief, however, it looks like it'll have moved out of town by the following day and so it won't get in the way of you, you and you attending my reading at Barbès in Park Slope on Sunday night at 7pm. I'll read from Abba Gold and show some vintage Abba footage.

I'm actually looking forward to the rain on Saturday so I'll have an excuse not to go out and the Sheila and I can hold our own seance on a wet afternoon, ie watch more of the fantastic Australian DVDs she brought back from her recent trip to Oz. More details later, as I'm keen to cover one of them in print, though I can reveal they are vastly superior to Camp Rock, which we watched yesterday.

Let's just say that I've seen High School Musical and Camp Rock, you're no High School Musical. Omigod it's so bad! First, it's quite difficult to get past Demi Lovato, who plays the lead and is absolutely unbearable; 90 percent of her acting consists of her opening her mouth extra wide and baring her huge, blindingly white teeth. And once you've learned to live with Demi, you realize the direction is dead flat (you can tell when Kenny Ortega is not involved) and the music completely pedestrian.

The two bright spots are the unspeakably hunky Joe Jonas, who makes Zac Efron look like Marty Feldman, and Meaghan Jette Martin as nasty popular girl Tess. Or rather the songs she gets to sing, which are the best by far: "Too Cool" and "2 Stars," both very ’80s-revival Kylie.