Brian Wilson created some of the most beautiful music ever to be heard on earth. Music that could not possibly have been written by anybody else. Music that will be loved and studied for as long as the earth is habitable. He belongs in the pantheon of great composers, period. Case in point-one of the few songs where Wilson wrote the lyrics, this one apparently caused by ‘an existential crisis, having recently threatened to drive his car off the Santa Monica pier and ordered his gardener to dig a grave in his backyard:
Al Jardine, the no-drama Beach Boy, shares some fascinating insight into how he did it:
He describes his professional relationship with Wilson as “musically sympathetic, and I appreciated almost everything he did, and he tolerated most everything I did. No, I’m kidding. But he liked my songwriting. Through experience, he was a great teacher, and all of us learned how to write original material because of him, original material, as we watched him at work. And he was a wonderful vocal coach. He knew how to deliver a vocal and (translate) the kind of sounds that he heard in his head. We were equally beneficial to each other, in that regard, because without us, he wouldn’t have had anyone to interpret the music. So it’s a great marriage, and I felt very included in the family. It was three brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson) and a cousin (Love), and then they accepted me as an equal, which was a wonderful feeling. We just always had that feeling of belonging. Musically, we worked very hard at our craft. We were the engine, and he was a starter, clicking it off with all that great music that then we delivered.
“I couldn’t have had a more bountiful experience than sitting around the piano, learning the parts and hearing them all come back to us as an ensemble. What a trip that was,” Jardine continues. “Often, we wouldn’t even hear the songs” before entering the studio to set to work on executing the vocal parts. After Wilson retired from the road just a few years into the Beach Boys’ success, “Brian would do the tracks while we were out on tour, and later on, we’d just come in straight into the studio and start singing. He had all the parts ready in his head, and he’d just deal ’em out to us, and with very little fanfare, we’d just start finishing the songs that he had started while we were gone. It was really amazing when I think about it. Because we were gone quite a bit, so he had to be very patient and wait for us to come home. That really got on his nerves, because he was so excited to share the music with us. But it worked out really great for us: We’d go and do the hits and he’d be writing the next album.”
An Interview With Miranda July. I know that her latest book, ‘All Fours’, has created a bleepload of buzz. If you’ve read it (I haven’t), I suspect this interview is for you. A sample:
The story opens with a 45-year-old woman about to take a road trip, a break from her husband and child and general domestic noise. She’s intending to drive from LA to New York, but is derailed in the first half hour by a young guy, Davey, in a car hire place, to whom she is passionately attracted. The next several weeks pass in a lust so intense, so overpowering, so lusciously drawn, it’s like a cross between ayahuasca and encephalitis. The narrator is subsumed by her obsession, and disappears her normal life. The road trip is a bust from the start, but the effort of breaking the spell and going home looks, for a long time, like way too much for the narrator, and when she finally does, to borrow from Leonard Cohen (perhaps describing a similar situation), she’s somebody’s mother but nobody’s wife.
The New York Times called it “the first great perimenopause novel”, which is incorrect – not because you could easily name 10 others, rather because what it ignited was not an honest heart-to-heart about hormones, but something far more radical. What if a woman just told the truth, about sex, monogamy, marriage, mortality, domesticity, friendship, the life of the mind? The disruption of norms would be so immense that you wouldn’t, as a reader, necessarily need your circumstances or feelings to correspond to the author’s for that to upend your life. One woman who nearly divorced her husband after reading it said: “I think what I felt, which I think is what a lot of us feel, is permission to be undone.”
Reader response has been all over the map:
More than that, though, they were angry with the narrator, and nowhere was the conflation of fiction and fact more complete; if she was narcissistic, self-involved, “immature” then so was July. “Yeah, I need to talk about that with someone,” July says, “probably not you.” (I wish it could be me, but it sounds like she means a therapist.)
Sometimes, it’s just that they weren’t expecting it – “They thought it was going to be a beach read.” But more importantly, “They’re very sympathetic to the husband.” Of course, it’s that – no question, he is betrayed by the narrator, not just with this brain fever emotional infidelity, but on an even more basic level; it’s that he’s so nice, so personable, so thoughtful, so empathetic, and yet … he’s not enough. “And I’m thinking, ‘I created the husband, too! So he’s also me!’” she says, laughing. This is possibly the most radical act of the book: not a woman getting divorced, but a woman leaving a Good Guy.
If you’ve read the book, what did you think?
The Family Tree Of Pope Leo XIV–‘One Of The Most Diverse Family Trees We Have Ever Created’:
On May 8, moments after the world learned that an American cardinal named Robert Francis Prevost was becoming Pope Leo XIV, my inbox was flooded with emails. For the past 13 years, I’ve hosted a PBS show called “Finding Your Roots,” where, with the help of a team of genealogists, we trace the family history of prominent figures, often turning up fascinating details about their ancestors that they didn’t know they had. As soon as Prevost became one of the most eminent people in the world, fans of the show wanted to know what mysteries lay in his family’s past.
They didn’t have to wait long. Hours later, news broke: The New York Times, drawing on research by Jari C. Honora, a genealogist, revealed that Pope Leo had recent African American ancestors. Prevost’s maternal grandparents, residents of the Seventh Ward in New Orleans, were described in records as “mulatto” and “black.” This was earthshaking news, but we knew it was only the beginning.
Take the journey. Be astonished and, in my case, encouraged.
Artist Of The Week–Diane Arbus. The celebrated photographer who took her own life in 1971 at the age of 48. The current exhibit featured here is so overwhelming that:
..I started thinking that Arbus’s real subject as a photographer may have been simply the color black. In the matte cloaks and jackets of her early “Nuns and their charges,” the tone is emotionally neutral, even friendly, and in a portrait of Bertold Brecht’s widow, the black background has the inky grandeur of outer space.
Arbus printed her photos so dark, and shot so many people outdoors, that the forests of New Jersey and foliage of Central Park inevitably take on a fraught psychological resonance, like so many stand-ins for some unnameable part of the human character, or of her own. In “James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theater, N.Y.C.,” the singer, smiling mischievously in a featureless tuxedo, looks like a supernatural shadow come to life.
Diane Arbus, “Masked woman in a wheelchair, Pa.,” (1970-1972). “Every Arbus portrait,” our critic said, “is its own primordial encounter with otherness.”Credit…The Estate of Diane Arbus