Muse, Hugh Cornwell, Gordon Gano & The Ryans, The Dynamites and Charles Walker

The death of Patrick Swayze and the cartoonishly rude antics of Kanye West at the MTV awards will dominate the news for days to come and are likely to overwhelm any attention that might have been rightly paid to the passing last Friday of poet/author/Punk frontman Jim Carroll. A fitting salute would be to seek out a copy of 'The Basketball Diaries' and read his journal kept as a teenager whom Jack Kerouac once called "better than 89 percent of the novelists working today."