For those who wish to understand the forces with which flowers bloom, this song is the pop quiz you've been studying your whole freakin' life for. It's the sacred pause in the Beach Boys canon, a sleighbell bridge from the sand to the stars. Not the masterpiece, but the knock on its door so divine.
It has no home, a lone single between "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)" and "Pet Sounds," complete with a few fat full-moon seconds of silence that got radio stations so irked and confused they wouldn't play it. But for dreamers like me, if we listen hard enough we can hear the petals unfold, a tiny cantata echoing inside a sideways sinistral shell.
P.S. I took that photo on a chilly run by the river in February, knowing I'd need it for this series in the summer.
Did you catch Part 1? It kinda explains what's going on here--my holiday homage to young love--past years of crushes, ridonkulous encounters with the possibility, but not the actuality, of bonkage and hopefully, maybe, some sweet and impish bits to counter the lame moves (mostly on my part) you'll read about here. Although this time we have a coupla doozies whose lameness actually eclipses mine…
9 Painters Painting
College is a time when everyone gets their rocks off, but sadly it was like I shot my wad for the entire 4 years in the first week of freshman year alone. I met the painter the second day there; he said "hello" as I sat under the Nike of Samothrace outside our dorm, drinking ice water out of a wine glass. I remember walking around with him that evening, smiling and kissing, hidden in some sort of thicket. I was wearing a white cotton v-neck sweater, sans shoes and brazeer (wtf?!), and black pants printed with little postcards from all over the world.
As soon as the older chicks got wind of the smouldery, sleepy-eyed freshman in Adams, they swooped in, which likely caused me to act immaturely. Somehow it turned in to this choice he had to make between me and a perky sophomore with a perfect nose. Rather than tell him to eff off, I waited for his answer, as if I were waiting for the cast list to be posted. How thoughtful of him to tell me why (can we get another eye roll please?!) he didn't pick me--apparently, I "reminded him of his pain." As it turned out, he also had a crush on my best friend and rabidly made a play for her. It was a good thing he transferred to art school at the end of the year--it took way too much energy to walk out of the room whenever I saw him coming. I guess my heart broke a little; after all, it was only 18.
8 Cyber Stalkers Stalking
I liked this next gent because he sounded vaguely like a Hollywood gangster, had a beagle and gave me a "Right back at ya," when I shook his hand and said, "Nice to meet you." This was in ye olden days of the web--1995!!--when everyone, gakk!, was on aol. Truthfully, I thought he'd be an easy mark. Emboldened, I got his email address from a friend, composed a message, dialed up and sent it off:
zing went the strings. let's talk. signed, and the dish ran away with the s****.
He responded, charmingly:
my mother warned me about talking to strangers. Are you a stranger? if so this must stop immediately. Do you know that i spent 5 hours playing monopoly on saturday night? The first time i've played in many many years. I lost (and for a while there it looked good. I had boardwalk).
Oddly, I came across copies of these emails the other day (usually upon rejection, I smash all reminders of rejector, forget I ever knew them and quickly move on), but hadn't saved the one in which he told me he had a girlfriend after I suggested we meet. A few years later I saw him in a bar, where he was taking pictures with a little instamatic camera. Rather than chance a bad picture, I ensured it by taking off my shoe and pretending to eat it, mumbling something about a photo from the Beach Boys' Smile sessions, in which Brian Wilson was doing the same thing. Only Brian had a fork and knife, and the shoe was on a plate.
7 Directors Directing
There's no crushing involved here, just a little humiliation and faux-seduction, so I think it qualifies…In my freshman year of high school, my friend D's big sis was in a play at Guild Hall, and they were looking for people to do bit parts, including a cigarette girl and ticket-taker. They thought I'd be a good cigarette girl, and I also was asked to sub for a regular cast member who was out that day. The guy I was reading lines with made a snide-ish crack about my size (I was just this side of plump in freshman year). I made it through the rehearsal, albeit with a bright-red embarrassed face, but thus ended my dramatic career--until senior year, when I tried out for the class play. The student director? The fat crack-maker, who actually turned out to be a semi-friend of mine. (I'd evened the score, not even realizing it, by repeatedly throwing his physics notebook in the trash junior year.)
So, part of the audition was this exercise in which he gave us an emotion or word and we had to act it out while reciting (or stuttering, or screaming, as appropriate) the alphabet. Everyone else got fun/easy ones like anger, joy and surprise, but he looked at me and practically licked his lips in smugness when he gave me my word--seductive. Yup, I was supposed to be seducing the audience. At that point, I think the extent of my boy-girl experience were some bad, drool-filled kisses, so I had little to draw from. I was too nervous to think the whole thing through, but somehow registered these fly-by images and soundbytes of Marilyn Monroe. My seduction alphabet was whispery and plaintive, and I think I held my hand over my heart, like I was, uh, I don't know, begging for it. I can't help but laugh now, but trust me, I confused everyone there, like I decided to act out "pathetic" instead. Do I need to tell you I wasn't on the cast list? ; )
As their bloggy punishment for bad behavior, two of the individuals here will be represented musically by this cheesy Supertramp song:
If you ask me to catsit, I'm totally going to look in your refrigerator. Not to eat anything necessarily, but to procure intel about you that I couldn't get anywhere else. Unless, of course, the vinyl in the other room calls me like a siren song, choruses circling like a sleepy, shiny vulture. You get that itch in your fingers that only flipping through the stacks can cure.
So, yeah, this photo shows where my fingers first landed. I've told you my theory of Pines, right? A Pine is a visual or aural pacifier, something that's instantly, inexplicably calming. This photo represents a double shot--a visual Pine and a tactile Pine in one. I love the ragged-rainbow patterns that the jackets make, carving out the path that took me to perfect---a completely black room with a tiny window through which light shines. In my sonic journey I've never, ever listened to Mr. Monk, but clearly it's time.
The following song is the ultimate aural Pine for me. I don't know why, but the banging keyboard parts are just sobbingly beautiful. I never thought about it much, but maybe the answer is in this comment left by this annoying show-off on YouTube: "I love the contrast between the A-flat Major and the F-flat(E) Major 7th (equal to an A-flat MINOR triad over an F-flat bass). Then, going from the Fbmaj7 to B-flat Minor 7th is a very daring move, the farthest chord away!"
I have to admit, the chorus on this next one is totally Pineworthy. I'm sure the annoying Smile show-off could explain why, but Def Leppard is probably too plebeian for him. (And Hello! Who knew it was about Marilyn Monroe?)
"While stars sit in bars and decide what they're drinking…"
For some reason, I like to interpret that lyric literally. Like…stars, as in the massive-sphere-of-plasma kind. They don't sit on bar stools, silly, but sparkle outside all firefly-style, projected on a big screen like at a drive-in, tinkling and twinkling.
OK, so I'm always finding stuff on the ground--a Hello Kitty charm bracelet, a soggy clump of 20s in a puddle, an apple covered in ants that a funny little boy told his mom he was going to pick up and eat--so I figured I'd spotlight some of my more potentially poetic discoveries on sssspunerisms. I don't intend for it to always be as disgusting as this first installment, so please, uh, don't read if you have a highly active gag reflex.
Exhibit A, an engaging collection of hair shavings I found in the laundry room last week, on the floor next to the garbage can. I was so repulsed I had to leave a note, asking whosever hair it was to please clean it up. And there was more--stray shavings, ranging from 1/4- to 1-inch-long, were scattered all across the tops of the 5 available washing machines. Ewwww.
It wasn't dog or cat hair, which wouldn't have bothered me in the least. I don't know what area of the body it came from, or how it could have gotten all over the laundry room. I told a friend of mine about this later, and she thought perhaps the hairless (or at least less-haired) wonder had shaken out a towel he or she had used while shaving before putting it in the wash. No matter what, I suspect this is the hair of a narcissist. A close-shaven one, of course.
I find myself looking for Bing everywhere. It's normal, I guess, 'cause I'm more familiar with him being there than not. A couple times I've gone to the bedroom to say goodbye to him when I'm about to leave the apartment, and walking home in that safe/small heady trance that I often put myself in, I'll randomly say his name.
Binglet. Bear. B.
I realize now I used to do that all the time--like when my body got close enough to home to know I was going there, a message was sent to my brain. Home=Bing. And saying it out loud made it so.
The weirdest has got to be the urge to seek and find when I go online. Yes, I'm used to searching for all sorts of answers there--I mean, that's a huge part of my job, I'm programmed to do it--but I always want to type in those 4 little letters. Is he there? (Turns out he is, of course. So ahead of his time, and why didn't I buy that dang domain name?!)
And then there's the real world. You know, the one where matter is arranged in forms we sort of all agree on. I was cleaning the apartment the other day, and sure enough, he's all over the place. His little sweater, still in the size-small blue Sherpa bag. Little whiskers on the cat tree he used to climb up to get to the bed. Stray hairs--are they Bing's or Derrick's or both?--in the rug, on the comforter, in the dust bunnies I was sweeping up. When I've vacuumed them all up, when there's no longer physical evidence of Bing the cat, will that mean I won't be sad about him anymore?
Thinking about all this called to mind the photo at the top of this post. (Click on it and you can more easily see it's not what it first appears to be.) I took it on a morning walk in Alexandria last fall, 'cause i thought it was so beautiful--a painting left by something once growing and no longer there. A vine still clinging and singing. And the aural equivalent? An echo that's not the effect that comes after a cause, but just because. Something quiet and deep and sweet, like a backing track that's always there if you listen for it, because it's holding the whole song together.
Darn it! I'd wanted to use just the backing track for this next song 'cause I think it better explains what I'm trying to say--something about how what seems fragile (like memory or what's on the other side of this world) is actually steady and strong--but no one has posted it yet. So here's the entire song-and at least you can hear how the chorus swarms, bee-treeing up the wall, and then leaves behind the sweet honey of the verse, the what's-not-so-obvious. Listen for the "doing doing doings" on the verses--I love them so much I once used them as the message on my answering machine. Oh, that's a "doing" that rhymes with "boing." Not do-ing, like a verb. : )
Update: I found it! Classic bittersweet BW, makes you just wanna cry your eyes out:
This next one's pretty geeky, but it's cool 'cause you get to hear just the bass and, right after that, the entire song. And, sure, every white guy with a guitar has posted a video of himself playing the big old solo in this piece, but LJ kinda quietly albeit funkily holds it up and keeps it going. Ah, so maybe that's what they're doing on the other side?!
P.S. Title for this blog was inspired by the E.E. Cummings poem that goes, "ecco the ugliest sub suburban skyline on earth between whose dowdy houses looms an eggyellow smear of wintery sunset." I know that's not supposed to be one long snake-tail of a sentence, but since I didn't know the poem's name, I had to search via the phrase. The only place I could find it was without the correct line breaks, on a site full of people discussing how they hate poetry 'cause it has no balls.
When it comes to toys, Derrick's pretty easy to please. Plastic grocery bag? It is best when rustled! Smudge on the wall? I must touch it with my big paw! But he really, really seems to like this new one, a Dalmatian with a nose that lights up and a voice that says "Merry Christmas" sounding suspiciously like Pepe the King Prawn.
It makes me think of the toys I played with as a kid. Or didn't play with, rather. I don't know why, but I really didn't have many. A Chrissy doll with hair that grew longer when you pushed a button on her back. Eventually, her hair made me frustrated..short or long, short or long, short or long…and she fell permanently out of my favor. Breyer horses on an endless journey across land and sea, as they made their way across a green and blue blanket. I guess mostly I read. And drew pictures of ladies with hair piled high on their heads, in dresses with bustles (???). And wrote stories about duck families surviving on bread crusts during terrible storms. And spent lots of time looking at the sky, and zooming from room to room while dancing to my sister's records, which weren't as good as my brother's, but I didn't know how to turn on his stereo.
Re: this next one: I hate when he says he's fat as a cow, but this one does contain a few of those random Wilsonian lyrical "Wha?"s: In the morning people are so happy/And that's the time when I'm a mister businessman.
It took Bing 10 minutes to get into this position, which is actually pretty good for him. I don't know what's going on in his self-described matinee idol mind, but his MO is like this: he'll sidle up to Derrick and just kind of loom over him, staring, not moving, but very obviously engaged in some sort of special for-kitties-only spatial/energy-moving task. Then, after what could amount to 15-20 minutes of this, he hunkers down, first try, in the most comfortable, perfect position. His moves are few and well-choreographed--but then again, I've been saying all along he's a minimalist.
Lately I've been working on being energy efficient. Not like an air conditioner or anything, but as it applies to movement. I have no lack of strength or force, but I tend to fritter away my energy in the moments before and after I really need it. Like, hmmm… when you do pirouettes, the preparation is the most important thing--it's your time to center yourself and prepare for lift-off. If you get all excited and anxious about it, like I sometimes do, you might hop into your preparation, thinking you can use that extra force for pirouette-y goodness. No, no, no, though. You're actually screwing up your delicate balance. Far better to step the foot down, and use that errant kilowatt or however you measure energy--what is it? ergs? newtons?--for the actual turn.
Then of course you can waste energy on the back end, too, like fidgeting when you finish a yoga pose, which is sort of like laughing nervously at the end of an otherwise smart-talkin' sentence. Not that I'm some sort of energy prude, but geesh…things go much smoother when you don't blow your wad before you even start.
P.S. Snort! Somehow this post didn't end how I'd expected.
It’s sort of ironic that the timing’s not right for this post. For one, it’s technically Meezer Monday, and secondly, who the heck is ever ready to write—or wants to read some shyster’s (scheister’s?) blabberings—about time? The topic’s so freakin’ big, no wonder people have to wear watches to make sense of it. But c’mon, people, are we that lame that we need to see the tick-tick-tick and the second hand all herky-jerkying like Buster Keaton in order to understand that we’re all moving over/under/sideways/down/all together now?
Honestly, I tried to write this post last night, but I was too tired after a) dancing for two hours, b) watching the Yankees beat the Mets, c) writing & editing, d) chanting and e) eating a size and a half too large piece of red velvet cake. Everything I wrote was even more stoopid than this is, but heck… that’s what blogs are for. Unripened cheese.
So yes, I meant to post this last week because it was then that I was reminded of my favorite Brian Wilson-ism, and my own dorky, quasi-poetic variation on it.
Brian’s: “Time is fine when it’s in cadence.” Pune’s: “Time is fine when it’s in candles.”
Of course, I agree with Brian. That’s a given. Anyone on the street plugged into an iPod and walking into various signage and other pedestrians because, hey, they’ve got the beat, would agree, too. Or do you even need a iPod? How many of us, I wonder, are constantly moving to and counting out an 8-count (is that too Western Civilization of me?)? Do you always have a song—or at least a rhythm—in your head, or is that just me? (And of course your heart’s your very own mini beatbox.)
You don’t have to have been around a long time to get it. Actually, longevity probably makes it worse. On Friday, one of my favorite students from the dance class I assist in was telling me how she feels when she dances. “You just hear the music, and I don’t know, you get all these butterflies in your stomach,” says this 9-year-old goddess. “You can't stop it--your feet have to move to the beat.” She’s clearly fine when she’s in cadence.
(In contrast: Taxi time is NOT in cadence. A polluted arrhythmic arithmetic of stop and start and no deodorant and pavement and worn-out shocks. Immotion sickness.)
Candle time, on the other hand, is so expansive. You can fill it with all sorts of things you wouldn’t say or do in the bug-zapping light of high-noon. Not necessarily THOSE sorts of things, you pre-verts! I mean thoughts that are a little kinder, broader…untied and diffuse and…defuse. (Um, is that a word? I guess it is now.) They're tall like exclamation marks, beginning and ends in themselves, with no record but our memory, measuring our prayers and rituals and kisses. It’s glow-as-you-go.
So, yeah, that’s Derrick last week, contemplating candle time. I love how he had to get up so close in order to figure the whole thing out. I open my eyes and he’s all cat-meditating, whipping my a$$ on that front like there’s no tomorrow.
Well, you know, maybe for him there isn’t. That big lout’s already staked his claim on the ever-present, and I can assure you he’s always got something to watch but doesn’t wear one.
A couple months after I made my First Holy Communion, I was stopped by our parish priest, Father Huntington, on my way home from school. I can still remember walking next to a vacant lot between our house and the Larsens’; it was all lion-colored dried grass, a nice big mighty zero with plenty of space to hold my intense little-girl thoughts.
Anyway, Father Huntington, tall and stern and white-headed and looming large a la Snow Miser in "The Year Without a Santa Claus," stopped me to tell me there was a problem with my behavior at mass.
It seems I was biting his finger in my fervor to receive the Body of Christ.
Oh, groan. Even now I cringe for my younger self, and how completely embarrassed I felt at the time. I had an eating problem as it was, getting up at 5 a.m. to stuff my face with miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups out of the freezer, so I somehow tied that intense, insatiable, shameful hunger—for what?! Oh, so much!—to my priest-biting tendencies. I mean, it’s gotta be bad when the communion host is viewed as an hors d'oeuvres. We then practiced the receiving of communion multiple times, right there on the street, until I could successfully slide my tongue back into my mouth without grinding my teeth together like some sort of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth creature.
Ha ha now, but then--not so much. I went home crying, this strange mix of shame and excitement that someone paid attention to me, and told my parents. They thought it was funny, but what do you expect? The last 4 digits of our phone number made the sign of the cross, for chrissake. (Oops. Sorry.) I hope we’ve made up since, but I really felt like I’d fallen out of favor with Jesus & co. Transubstantiation? More like a lil’ snack from a Catholic box of Rice Chex. I know, I know, that’s not funny. My 7-year-old self just couldn’t fully fathom that level of miracle/mystery.
Fear biter? I don’t know, but it’s funny how the sacred and profane are always meeting up. It’s like if you don’t invite them both to the party, whoever didn’t get the invite is gonna crash it anyway. Like I recently found this completely ridonkulous poem I wrote oh so long ago (musta been circa 1995 per the title), and it’s sort of a strange but fitting running mate for my communion story… I don’t think I’ve showed it to anyone before, so please go easy on me. (I have no idea what prompted it, but boy, I must have been PMS or just read The Handmaid’s Tale!) Go ahead and laugh—I promise I won’t bite ; )
millionmanmarch
i am sick.
i swim in
the dizzy bright white of nausea,
catch a breath and vomit
gallons of sperm.
every last drop
swallowed by the whole of womankind,
ever.
now i know why smart girls spit:
it’s hard on
the stomach.
so, yes i drool and
sigh as it inches down a thigh,
wormsquirming past my knee only
to stall at a phlegmcrawl, stuck in unshaved traffic.
oh and at the time i meant to scream
but all i got was a mouthful.
next time will be different:
one false move and off with his head
Brian on the above song, the vocals for which were recorded in 1966: "I was sitting at my piano thinkin' about holy music. I poked around for some simple but moving chords. The boys were overtaken by the arrangement. I taught it to them in sections, the way I usually do. The purity of the blending of the voices made the listeners feel spiritual. I was definitely into rock church music."
No post on the sacred/profane is complete w/o a Prince song. I know, I should have gone for the cheap thrill and featured "Head," but that's just so obvious, isn't it? You can always find it on YouTube and read the comment from the poor guy who sang it, when he was 8 and didn't know what the lyrics meant, at his grandfather's birthday party.
Second time I'm using this song in a blog. Who's gonna complain?
Am I bad feminist because this is one of my favorite album covers? It stirs me in some weird primal harem-girl way. But despite the oozy-boozy male gaze that’s implied here, trust me, she’s the one ultimately wearing the pants.
And if this cover’s in the “Wassup with that?” family, this song’s the wacky cousin. Does anyone else love it as much as I do?
When I was little, I wanted to be a game show hostess. Not like Vanna White, but more old-school with a subtler set of skills, like the ladies who stood in front of giant wrapped boxes and encouraged us all to imagine what might be in them.
My fascination bubbled over to include TV commercials and cooking shows, and I combined the two regularly in front of the bathroom mirror, mixing up whatever I could find in the medicine cabinet—shaving cream, toothpaste, talcum powder, aspirin—and explaining to the viewers out there what I was creating.
I have a similar approach to fashion, combining whatever’s there, as long as it’s in the right color palette. Can’t decide: pants or skirt? Wear both! For example: off-white corduroys, a pinky beige-patterned wrap skirt made from a silk saari, a leopard-spotted tank top, ruffly sand-colored sweater, crème-and-tan argyle socks, a striped velvet scarf that a neighbor was throwing out (1970s vintage!), earth-toned peacock feather earrings. A layer-cake take on dressing along the lines of macho frio, which was created, albeit with a different goal, by my friend Kate’s dad. I think I actually may be dressing like a 5-year-old, which is fine with me. Nothing better than beginner’s mind.
So, it’s no wonder I couldn’t sleep during my recent business trip to Seattle. I was too darn excited! The entire city is, as Sue, possibly-most-gracious-host-ever, put it, “a hodge-podge.” Hilly streets planted with tri-colored houses in which Muppets would feel right at home…here’s a Siamese-colored one with a blue door, landscaped with crazy floofy foliage reminiscent of divalicious cornstalks, a cherry Mustang ('67?) parked nearby; here’s one that looks like a peach-colored cuckoo clock with a big tree in front that Fozzie Bear might climb. The best part is that, since it’s all hilly, everything looks completely different when you’re at the bottom than when you get to the top, and your perspective is constantly changing on the way up. Always something new to see, something new to be.
And the kitties? Story book characters, too, especially naughty orange ones like Bertie and Cooper who go around sneaking into neighbors’ houses. And what do they do once inside? Oh, they might eye a collection of old bird’s nests or take a few pictures. Seriously.
And the birds! Beautiful big-mouthed crows everywhere, and gray-brown gulls with feathers patterned like pebbles along the shoreline, and look to the right, over at 2 o’clock…a bald eagle! My first. Water, water everywhere, and some big-a$$ mountains that didn’t scare me at all. Tall trees, small trees, and green, green, green.
I really liked Seattle, everybody!
What to listen to when you’re running up that hill
When I was trying to think of a song to accompany this post, after a couple of tries this one cued up in my head. There’s a bicycle bell and a horn on it, which I thought was hodge-podgy--but it’s so carefully built that it shows that hodge-podge doesn’t mean thrown together without design. And all the vocals from “I wanna cry” on sound like the up-and-down of rolling hills.
Here’s an amazing video on the making of this song. I totally freaked out when I saw the Muppet. It’s where I stole the title for this post, too:
Summertime, and the livin’ is sleazy. At least during the day, and at least in New York City. This past month I’ve felt like a fish bein’ fried, pale and bloated and soggy-groggy, running from a smarmy sun. The Boomtown Rats’ “Someone’s Looking at You” comes to my mind…You know most killing is committed at 90 degrees, when it’s too hot to breathe and it’s too hot to think…
But when the sun sets, like a nasty drunk passing out, it’s a-whole-nother story. One Friday in early July, I found a new/true appreciation for the citified summer evening. I was walking home from yoga after a 100-degree day, and at one point I felt everyone else on the street start to collectively slink, right in rhythm with the night that wasn’t quite falling but shimmering its way to the pavement. A dusty-dusk dance done by everyone from the Chinese delivery guy on his bike, its silver bell glimmering like an urban firefly, to the curvy lady in front of Radio Shack in her red satin dress, looking down at her own boobs and feeling happy.
It makes me think of one summer night in East Hampton, the summer after we graduated from high school. And honestly, I’d totally forgotten this until some magic word or feeling loosened my memory last night. Highly unlike me, someone who still remembers my friends’ phone numbers from third grade. Anyway, we were at the bay, which is quite different from the ocean—bathtub vs. Jacuzzi, holding hands vs. up-against-the-wall, big and deep but still knowable and safe—and it was getting dark. I’m not sure how we got there, who all was there or who invited us, but I wound up kissing this boy, lying on the sand and then again in hip bone-high, just-us-in-night-black water, everything all sparkly-dark. I knew who he was but had never spoken to him before that night and never spoke to him after that, the only witness to our sole interaction being the moon.
I realize now, wow, that was a really nice time. A poem. Thank you. I should have put out but honestly had no idea what I was doing. And I salute our tongues and fingertips, whispery stars and bathtub waves, sexy stoner boys with longish hair and girls who feel the pull of the moon.
A song you have to listen to all the way through to get to the last line if you don’t already know what it is The Beach Boys, I’d Love Just Once to See You
Here's Brian doing it live in 2008:
Upfront and out there The Strangeloves, Nighttime
The English Beat, The End of the Party It takes a while to get started, fast forward if you need. Pull back your cover I can love you for all time/But do it now, you know there's never a next time. Killer!
Just 5 or so mornings ago, I was on Ogunquit beach in Maine. It was 6:30 and foggy, a black-and-white world that may as well have been the moon. There were a few other people on the beach with me, but they were faraway and fuzzy like dust, stagehands in a play building a set for Day.
Then the sun dropped whatever it was busy doing (eating oatmeal?) and out of nowhere, cut through the mist like a light switch flipping on, not rising but arriving all at once… I thought of the Beach Boys’ song "Surf’s Up"—well, the 1967 version linked to below—a song that just sort of isn’t and then kinda is…honestly, listen, it just rolls in out of nowhere and fills you up:
Beautiful, right? A ton of cool stuff has been written and said about it—the juiciest probably being Jules Siegel’s article, “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!,” in which Brian Wilson plays for the interviewer the black acetate dub of the song at his home, explaining its meaning, line by line. It’s pretty intense and very un-“French bikini on a Hawaiian Island doll,” but the best part is what he does when the song is over: Wilson went into the kitchen and squirted Reddi-Whip direct from the can into his mouth; made himself a chocolate Great Shake, and ate a couple of candy bars…
I hope no one thinks I’m making fun of Brian—you know, the stories of him hanging out in his bedroom for 3 years and eating cheeseburgers, the ones that people can’t seem to get enough of. In fact, if you type in “brian wilson” in the Google Images searchbox, one of the choices it pre-fills in for you is “brian wilson fat,” which made me mad/sad all at once.
No. I just think it’s so endearing/perfect in a fairy tale/”children’s song” sort of way that a self-described “dumb angel” would fuel a masterpiece on whipped cream. Willy Wonka, with water and waves.
Or, Brian Wilson: Friend of Vegetables (and Goats)
Today’s post was inspired by two things—Mr. Pleasant’s Top 100 7-inch Singles (major Beach Boys representation here!) and the inadvertent inclusion of the Pet Sounds mailing list on a recommended list of Internet resources for animal welfare professionals (don’t ask!). Oh, well, three things—all those long-suffering folks who actually know the next line in the song referenced above…
Here goes...
If life were a big county fair and we were all various kinds of produce, this man, or at least the creative side of his brain, would be one of those beautiful gargantuan mutant tomatoes that wins the blue ribbon, but is just so big and juicy that even the farmer doesn’t know what to do with it. Was it something in the water? Or just a highly developed root system?
Eventually the tomato rolls off the vegetable cart, and it’s not uncommon to find it introducing the onion to the peach, or the beet to the watermelon, just to see what sweetness might result. And did I mention this tomato can sing?
No matter what your favorite veg-e-table, everyone can benefit from a little extra Brian Wilson in his or her life. It just so happens that throughout his career with the Beach Boys, he never forgot to tip his hat to his favorite flora and fauna:
* “Vegetables,” written by BW and Van Dyke Parks and first found commercially on the Beach Boys’ 1967 Smiley Smile LP. This song romp-chomps along, ending with a plea for the pea: “I know that you’ll feel better when you send us in your letter and tell us the name of your favorite vegetable.”
* “H.E.L.P. is on the Way,” from disc 3 of Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys. If you’re a vegetarian/vegan who has never guffawed with delight, you will now. Written as a kind of promo for a health food restaurant, the song features Brian cautioning listeners about the pitfalls of being a meat eater: “Doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas, too/That’s what you’ll get when you eat that way!” In a moment of cruciferous triumph, he glows, “Hamburgers and hotdogs, throw ‘em all out!/You’ll feel so good you’ll stand up and shout!”
* On the Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up album is a wacky song written by BW & Jack Reilly called “A Day in the Life of a Tree.” If you listen to it enough, it just might grow on you (haw haw!). It’s about air pollution and is really, really sad: “But now my branches suffer/And my leaves don’t offer/Poetry to men of song/Trees like me weren’t meant to live/if all this world can give is pollution and slow death.
P.S. Don’t wanna end on such sad note, but…let me share my favorite BW-ism. When asked to describe himself by a reporter, Brian said he was…PSYCHEDELICATE.
P.S.S. Crap, I have to make an animal-music connection by the end of this post...Those are Brian's dogs, Banana and Louie, who you hear barking at the end of “Caroline, No" from the Pet Sounds album, and a Sparklett’s water jug you hear at the beginning of the song. If that ever comes up in a trivia contest, you have to split your winnings with me.
