In honor of his sixty-eighth birthday yesterday: sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson. Several are new to me. Brian Wilson and Thomas Pynchon?
Monday, June 21, 2010
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
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- Duke Ellington, morning person?
- Joya Sherrill (1927–2010)
- Visualizing the Gulf oil spill
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- Review: Liza Kirwin, Lists
- Errol Morris and David Dunning
- Sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson
- Forty years apart
- Canned Heat
- Happy Father’s Day
- Charles Mingus defies bomb threat
- A plucky, smart cashier
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- Write 5 sentence [sic] about cat
- Infinite Jest and the iPhone
- Review: Made by Hand
- Pencil headline
- Marriage, something to work on
- Mozy, continued
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- Mozy :(
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June
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favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
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- On “Politics and the English Language”
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- Some have gone and some remain
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- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 6
Thanks for this. Great stuff. I’m continually surprised, however, by how few people know Brian is deaf in one ear.
If I remember correctly, he talks about it in I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times — a great documentary.
Here's the biggest thing I do not know about Brian Wilson: who IS Brian Wilson? I don't know his significance, and although I did read at least 3 or 4 things about him, I still have only a sketchy idea that he wrote (or performed, or both) popular music. But on the plus side: I know I don't know anything about him. And I am too polite to say whether I regard this as a serious deficit.
Tsk.
Brian Wilson was the leader of the Beach Boys. He sang, played bass, wrote songs, arranged, and produced. Pet Sounds (a 1966 Beach Boys album) and SMiLE (an unfinished BB album, finally finished as a BW album in 2004) are generally considered BW’s greatest accomplishments. BW’s collaborator on SMiLE: Van Dyke Parks.
Wish they all could be California Giiiirrrrrllllz!
There you have it, unless 'Good, good, good vibrations' is also a BB song.
I'm just not a popular music person, no doubt a flaw in my otherwise admirable character.
Van Dyke Parks?
For VDP, start here and here.
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