I Live By The River

Two Boys at Swim

We took Sam and Caleb to their Granny & Poppa's condo yesterday for their first dip in the pool. They took to it like little ducklings, if ducklings were wedged into inflated cartoon animals and made to wear Spiderman floaties over one of their wings.

Art, Rock, and the X-Ray Style

I'm still literate!

I finished reading a book this week! I hope that gets me a gold star from my library's summer reading program.

Although there was a bit too much focus on Joe Strummer's inner emotions, it's a worthwhile biography. In the book's NYTimes review, Robert Christgau complains that it spends too much time on Joe's non-Clash work, but having previously read Marcus Gray's book on the Clash, and having seen Westway to the World, and having been an avid fan of the band for the last 25 years, I was far more interested to learn about the pre- and post-Clash Joe Strummer. A lot of page space was spent on establishing that Joe suffered depression and that he had a dark side, and Salewicz seemed really interested in digging up long-term psychological after-effects of his brother's teenaged suicide despite the lack of evidence of same.

Somewhat surprising was the late-period drug use by Strummer, who never struck me as someone who would go in for ectasy and cocaine (though certainly a drinker). He's not presented as an addict, by any means, but there certainly seems to have been more recreational use of illicit substances than in your typical 40-something.

Reading the book led me to listen to the soundtrack to Julien Temple's The Future is Unwritten, which looks to be a film biography of late-period Joe (see also: Dick Rude's Let's Rock Again!). The soundtrack for Temple's film is mostly culled from tracks played on Joe's late '90s radio show on the BBC World Service. One track -- "Minuet" by Enerst Ranglin of Jamaica with Baaba Maal of Senegal -- is so fantastic and hypnotic that it has followed me from one CD player to the next over the last week or so. The song -- nearly seven minutes long -- feels like dropping your feet into warm surf, as Strummer himself says on the CD.

So even nearly five years after his death, Joe Strummer points the way.

The Fat Lady Sings

I, for one, liked the Sopranos finale. It hasn't been the best show on TV in awhile -- Deadwood and The Wire were better -- but I always appreciated how unpredictable and funny The Sopranos could be. I liked how the old neighborhood had become a ghost town, with most of Tony's associates now dead and/or gone. Uncle Junior's sorry state nicely suggested how even war's survivors can not win, and how A.J. -- after flirting with complexity -- turned out to be just as shallow and materialistic as we all suspected he would.

I see that a lot of people are curious about what the cat "symbolizes," but I'd rather just remain curious -- overt symbolism and its suggestion of clear, constructed meaning are the trappings of too many bad English teachers. (In a previous season, Meadow helped A.J. understand a Robert Frost poem by explaining that its snowy woods represented death. A.J.'s response: "I-I thought black meant death...")

Which is sometimes tue, because, as to the sudden ending, black = death. Why else show Meadow's trouble parking and thereby explain a lateness we don't actually witness?

Entertainment Weekly offers a swell recap and analysis here.