Sad rap news. Keith “Guru” Elam, MC in the beloved duo Gang Starr, is apparently in a coma after suffering a heart attack. He’s scheduled to undergo surgery later today. Here’s wishing him a full recovery. Above, the video for the classic, “Mass Appeal,” which was the definitive sound of the New York City streets my first summer living here, 1994.

Don’t say the Republicans aren’t doing anything; they’re on pace to surpass a historic benchmark! “The frequency of filibusters — plus threats to use them — are measured by the number of times the upper chamber votes on cloture. Such votes test the majority’s ability to hold together 60 members to break a filibuster. Last year, the first of the 111th Congress, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the first two months of 2010, the number already exceeds 40. That means, with 10 months left to run in the 111th Congress, Republicans have turned to the filibuster or threatened its use at a pace that will more than triple the old record.”

Season three of Old Jews Telling Jokes starts today!

This must mean something: “According to the National Shoe Retailers Association, 30 years ago the best-selling shoe size for women was 71/2. Now it’s 81/2. For men, it used to be 91/2. Now it’s 101/2. Theories for the ever-spreading footprint abound. Some say the sturdy shoes our mothers put us in at an early age fostered growth. Others say it’s all the pizza that teens chow down, blaming hormone-laced cheese. Michael Weiss, Nordstrom’s national retail director for women’s shoes, says it’s a simple shoe-to-foot algorithm: Once the comfort shoe came on the scene — the clog, the Earth shoe, the recently ubiquitous Crocs — ‘women’s feet began to spread,’ he says, and getting back into pointy-toed struttin’ shoes becomes a doggone squeeze.” [Via]

Photographer Spencer Tunick did another one of his large-group-of-naked-people photos over the weekend in Australia, and much to everyone’s surprise, over 5,000 people showed up. “The organisers had only expected about half that number to take part,” the BBC noted. Australians! Always up for a beer or a naked group photograph.

“You schmoes of America, rally ‘round your bard! You sad sacks in sweaters, undershirts untucked and dangling below your belts! You frustrated artists, you terrified fathers: Do not be ashamed of your increasing girth, your outré sexual fantasies, your rampant neck-beard. One lonely man sings your song. His name is Sam Lipsyte, and right now he is eating a jelly doughnut.”
–Reviewing Sam Lipsyte’s new book was obviously just a way for Awl pal Dan Kois to justify neck-beards and middle-aged belly creep in New York Magazine.

The New York Post looks at the top-selling items at the Riker’s Island commissary, where inmates “might get shanked — but they’re never gouged.” Leading the list of purchases: ramen noodles, the seasoning package of which is used to enhance other jailhouse fare. What else sells? Processed meat products and pastries are popular, apparently. “Perhaps the last words one wants to hear in the pokey are ‘beef stick’ or ‘honey bun,’ but those two snacks have both been staples of the inmate diet for decades, officials said.” There are cosmetics on offer too! “Soap is a big seller at the commissaries. Alas, it doesn’t come on a rope.” Hahaha, you know why they said “alas”? Because if you drop the soap, you will get raped! Raped right in the ass! Like a little bitch! That is some powerful storytelling right there.

The NYT’s Motoko Rich does some e-book accounting and finds that e-books may make money for publishers, but not enough! Per copy, they will make “$4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances.” But they are also afraid that e-books will erode the audience for paperbacks, and so publishers are freaking out, but quietly, because it doesn’t seem like she could actually find any to quote on the record. (Instead she gets a guy who’s a “consultant to publishers,” who thinks publishers should “slow down the movement to e-books,” and Lindy Hess, the head of the Columbia Publishing Course, who would of course like to see as many jobs in the industry maintained so that her program may continue to invite Sonny Mehta to speak.) But Anne Rice, of all people, has the most sensible take.

Writes Rich:

“None of us know what books cost. None of us know what kind of profits hardcover or paperback publishers make,” said Anne Rice, the author of “Interview With a Vampire” and the “Songs of the Seraphim” series.

She said she did not know whether publishers had struck the right price for e-books. “For all I know, a million books at $9.99 might be great for an author,” Ms. Rice said. “The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.”

As the U.S. economy tries to unshackle itself from lagging indicator after lagging indicator, this seems like just one indignity over the line: Tinsley Mortimer, the prefab Manhattan socialite whose frothy vacuity all but embodied the self-regarding elan of the new millennial money culture, has grown “edgy.”

That’s the worrisome verdict delivered by Wall Street Journal fashion hand Ray Smith, at any rate, who conducts on a sobering tour of La Mortimer’s closet in West Chelsea, supplying a chilling account of What It All Might Mean. The Virginia-bred socialite has, you see, been “going through an emotional time-spurred by her separation from her investment-banker husband Topper a year ago and the intense scrutiny” that accompanies the debut of her CW reality show later this month. Why, just the rumors of a feud with rival socialite-cum-brand-magnet Olivia Palermo, featured already on her own reality franchise, MTV’s “The City,” sends fresh charges and countercharges of cynical hype pinwheeling through the confected uptown social scene. Is it any wonder then, that our ingenue has ventured into the dark and brooding netherworld beyond “her trademark pastel-and-ringlets look”?

Since the Topper alliance thudded to Earth, Smith notes, Mortimer “is settling into a large loft apartment in West Chelsea that she moved into last September, where she lives alone and is concentrating on building her career. While she’s brought with her a number of the brightly colored baby-doll dresses and Mary Jane shoes that she’s known for, her closet now includes much darker fare, like skin-tight Hervé Léger bandage dresses.” The sight of Mortimer idly caressing one such ebony frock is our own age’s equivalent to the Dorothea Lange portrait of the careworn migrant farm mother -it’s every bit as jarring as coming across a Jonas Brother nodding out in the midst of a heroin jag.

No less a shock awaits us when our perky blueblood pixie waxes confessional about her transformation. It all started, apparently, with a seductive gateway drug-namely “a pair of strappy, chunky Azzedine Alaïa heels” the thrill-mad Mortimer purchased back in 2008. “It was my first time not doing [my look] with a little Mary Jane like I usually do it. It felt aggressive and a little big for me. It helped me transition into chunkier shoes.”

From there, of course, it was a chunky, strappy slide down a familiar slippery slope. There were, for instance, the Samantha Travasa bags Mortimer designs for the Japan market; the fall 2009 collection featured “fringe, a funkier contrast to the more dainty bags she had designed before,” Smith writes in a tone of barely concealed horror.

And by now, everything about the Mortimer ensemble translates clearly as a cry for help. Read on, if you dare:

“I’m a girly girl but I’m having a bit of a slightly edgy phase,” she said, wearing a sleeveless black and white ombre wool tulip dress with a front zipper by Graeme Black on a recent afternoon. She capped off the dress, which fell just above her knees, with severe, black Christian Louboutin lace-up booties, a wide black studded belt and chunky studded bracelets and cuffs. The fashion house lent her the dress to wear at the designer’s show during London Fashion Week last September and let her keep it, as well as a matching coat.

Sleeveless black! Lace-up booties! More chunky accessories! And worst of all, charity swag! What could be a bigger blow to the frail self-esteem of a former high priestess of the social set who could once claim a chunk of the Standard Oil legacy? All this set piece needs, clearly, is for Mortimer’s homestate social-climbing allies the Salahis to drop by, perhaps with an opium dealer in tow, to permanently seal the dark tabloid degradation of this former star of the first magnitude.

Then again, we all should have seen it coming. Doesn’t the vision of ringlets and pastels bedecking a notionally mature American adult amount to the same exercise in delusional wish fulfillment that one finds lurking in the higher math of a credit default swap? Isn’t the fancy that one can solider into one’s thirties as a “girly girl” the life-cycle equivalent of the dogmatic conviction that housing values will never decline? Just hearken to La Mortimer’s envoi, a whiff of nostalgia evoking that magical time when she, like all America, was beguiled by the dream of a perfect, if desperately overleveraged, existence:

She recalled the time in her life when her style had to be rigidly consistent. She darted to a purple, flower-print Marc Jacobs halter ruffle wrap dress that has a folk-hippie vibe. “I bought it to wear at one of the little events before my wedding [in 2002], like a day lunch,” Ms. Mortimer said. “I felt stylish when I bought it. It was probably one of the first dresses that I put some real money into it. I justified it because it’s for my wedding and everything had to be perfect.”

Now, of course, Mortimer finds herself pursuing the opposite of perfection in the public eye. As of March 10, she’ll be marketing her brand as a lurid case study in monied squalor-even if the absinthe-fueled catfights she’s bravely mounted before the reality-TV cameras are largely fake. There’s no doubt a lesson there for the rest of us, too-self-abasement, however insincerely choreographed, being the new reputational currency in a bailed-out social order.

Perky blueblood pixie Chris Lehmann is also having a bit of a slightly edgy phase.