(1) Club 8: The People’s Record (Labrador). You know that Dire Straits song “Twisting by the Pool”? If a whole album of twisting-by-the-pool music by a demi-Abba—Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angerg˚ard, Swedes with a bossa-nova collection—sounds appealing, this is for you. Especially on “We’re All Going to Die.”
(2) Alfred: “Like a Rolling Stone,” in Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs (Norton). Almost everything here is destructively literal, to the point that most of the pictures meant to illustrate the songs are accompanied by matching lyrics that instead illustrate the pictures—or reveal the complete lack of imagination behind them. By stunning contrast—and in stunning use of shifting color schemes, where each chapter in the story of a woman attempting to escape into a life of her own and continually finding herself imprisoned by the life she was born to is governed by shadings of blue, taupe, yellow, olive green, brown, gray, and finally a bright, light-filled page that is scarier than anything darker—Alfred trusts abstraction. Until the very last of his sixty-seven panels there isn’t a word to be seen. The story he tells isn’t obvious, isn’t clear. It doesn’t match Dylan’s soaring, heat-seeking-missile crescendos and choruses—it brings them down to earth. It isn’t a social allegory. It’s one person’s odyssey, a lifetime that returns her to precisely the place she first flees. And the Siamese cat isn’t a symbol of evil, or anything else. It’s the woman’s conscience, or what, all along, has been singing the song that has been playing deep in the farthest back corners of her mind. Following the tale as Alfred sees it, it’s as if you’ve never heard the song at all, and now you must.
(3) Scott Ostler: “Bay Area Sports Scene Is Giants and Disasters” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2010). On the so-far futile attempt of the Oakland A’s to move to San Jose, with disaster rating by tornado: “The A’s (three tornadoes) are Running Bear, the American Indian in a 1960s novelty song of the same name by Johnny Preston. Running Bear is in love with Little White Dove. In our local drama, Little White Dove is played by the city of San Jose.
“Bear and Dove can’t get together because their respective tribes are at war. All they can do is gaze longingly at one another across a big river.
“That’s the A’s. Their very existence depends on finding a way to overcome politics and hook up with San Jose. Frankly, most of us wish the two would get a room.
“The song, by the way, ends with Running Bear...
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