All eyes turn to California...

[cruise_elroy]

I don't do much these days. I get up, I drink coffee, I write, I work, I go home, I spend my evenings in "leisure activity," I read, and I go to bed. Repeat. Eerily close to what normal people are "supposed to do," but I like it just fine this way. As long as it doesn't go on forever

Comments

[circumgoy]

There's a pretty gushing, nearly hour-long interview of Brian Wilson conducted in 1999 (I think) by Sean Lennon out there to be heard. If you have yet to hear it, you should find it and listen to it. It will make your day a better one. It will resurrect Jesus, and in so doing thrust the smoking sword of Judgment through the soft skull of blasphemy.

* * *

I know neither the reach nor the inclination of Brian Wilson's hexing capabilities, but I have been listening to Brian Wilson's Smile pretty obsessively since I gained access to it. I chose the more legal route, and have been listening to it on the album's official site (it's Flash, so it sounds pretty awful. The sound quality, I mean, and the album). I have been calling friends and freaking them out with superlatives. My friends are not used to hearing me use superlatives unless I am using them derisively.

I've been waiting for Smile since 1967. I was waiting for it before I was born. Once the shock of actually getting to hear it wears off, I may have to acknowledge that

a teenage symphony to God

[cruise_elroy]

I was reminded of it by this NPR story, in which everybody interviewed seems to be really, really scared around Brian Wilson. Like he could make them explode if he said "BOO!" So I'm convinced he has some kind of special powers. Even Van Dyke sounds a little scared.

I'll let you know what I think about the album; I haven't had a chance to listen to it, yet. Such things take time. But I've been excited about it since I heard it was finally going to be released, which was a year or two ago by my count.

Re: a teenage symphony to God

[circumgoy]

I said it "sounds pretty awful. The sound quality, I mean, and the album."

I meant to write "and not the album." It sounds nice (or, at least, I have decided to believe it sounds that way without giving much thought to it), and it seems to know enough about what I want to hear to let me hear it (if any mass-produced and marketed piece of music can know something about its listeners, it must be this one. Right?).

I need to learn to reread what I have written before I post it. The omission of a "not" can be a pretty big deal.

I let myself get excited about Let It Be . . . Naked (despite the title) before it came out. I should not have done that. I should know by now that to anticipate something is to let oneself be led, invariably, down the crooked and unpaved road to Disappointment (population: humanity).

[johnnyshades]

he also dropped acid, thought he'd been drinking water, and declared the water supply had been sabotaged with lsd. see my essay "great musician as idiot: art versus stupid."

paper trail

[cruise_elroy]

You can submit it as a companion piece to my paper, "Undue Influence: The Themes of Joseph Campbell in the 1978 CBS Star Wars Holiday Special."

May the best paper win!