A Van Dyke Parks simile

From Pasadena’s KPCC: Kevin Ferguson interviews Van Dyke Parks, in a conversation that runs from Spike Jones and “The Bare Necessities” to Song Cycle to SMiLE to VDP’s recent collaboration with Inara George. Here is VDP describing SMiLE — “a wonderful piece of work,” he calls it — via a simile:

I look at it not as a mural, as I’d hoped it would be, like muralistic. But in fact, it’s about as big as a postage stamp, I think, and about as worthy.

What do you mean by that?

Well, number one, it gets you somewhere. The work is of modest dimension. It’s a small thing. Like a stamp, it has a great deal of handiwork in it. It’s quiltwork; it is not pixelated information.

Listen: Van Dyke Parks interview (KPCC).