VLVL Beach Boys

[Doug Millison]

At 4:39 PM -0500 12/7/98, Peter Petto wrote:
>I saw the Brian Wilson documentary when it first aired on VH1, and would
>have attended the concert if I had the time for a road trip to exurban
>Illinois.[snip]

Thanks for adding detail I left out. After seeing the documentary I went
out and bought Wilson's new "Imagination" CD, which has repaid several
listenings. "Imagination" offers fine, deep music, offering the complexity
and beauty of "Pet Sounds" and the ill-fated Beach Boys "Sunflower" album
which, to my knowledge, hasn't yet been released on CD (does anybody know
if it has?), but with 20+ more years of living and suffering to express.

Regarding possible parallels with TRP, what I had in mind was that, if the
characterizations some people have made of Pynchon as a paranoid recluse
(Jules Siegel has probably done more than anybody else to perpetuate this,
with his Playboy article and _Lineland_, which characterize TRP as a
paranoid druggie with misogynist tendencies and out of touch with what he
was writing) were accurate, and if he re-emerged, we might expect to see
the sort of fragile, shaky person that Brian Wilson appears to be. To the
contrary, reports are that TRP is a relatively normal human being, a family
man, and an astonishingly gifted artist who has chosen not to talk to
journalists and to shun celebrity.

-Doug