The other day I learned that some guy founded a religion based on The Big Lebowski. It's reasonably legitimate, according to Wikipedia and its official website, and in Ireland there appear to be more Dudeist priests than Catholic ones.
Becoming a Catholic priest is a slightly more rigorous process, I'd imagine
A wee bit of research suggests to me that merchandising might have been a not-so-small part of why this all came about, but I'm sure it brings pleasure to many and it doesn't seem to do harm. I'm not judging. Well, my first reaction was a leetle judgy, but then I went why not?
Last night I was thinking about Brian Wilson. Sometimes, in order to keep the lid on a persistent earworm, I assemble weird mixes from my iTunes on the fly. The more I confuse my music center, the less likely it is that the Jem theme is going to kick around in there all night. Why not listen to the Bellamy Brothers next to Dr. Dre? Last night, along with some Dylan and some Feist and some Daft Punk & etc, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" got in there. Every time I'm listening to the later Beach Boys (i.e. not the "Surfin' USA" era), I think about poor Brian Wilson and the misfortune of being born a Salieri.
The legend goes that Wilson worked himself to the bone making Pet Sounds in response to the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Today neither album sounds crazily different from what preceded it, but at the time they were both big leaps. Fun, fluffy pop marked both bands' careers in the early 60s, but Rubber Soul was richer, folkier, more varied, more album-like, even a little experimental at times. Pet Sounds tried to mimic these qualities in its own way.
Rubber Soul happened at the end of 1965. The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds in 1966. Yay! Totally worth it!
And then, in 1967, the Beatles made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
And Brian Wilson had a total nervous breakdown.
I'm not kidding. Wilson's mental health was pretty fragile throughout the mid-sixties, but evidently Sgt. Pepper was the breaking point. McCartney has said that the band was inspired by Pet Sounds to make Sgt. Pepper, which is nice and all, but, um...Sgt. Pepper. Your argument is invalid. The Beach Boys were never the same; Wilson went somewhat AWOL until the early 70s, and they kind of bounced back later, but it wasn't like before.
I think it broke Wilson that the Beatles were revolutionizing pop music pretty much right under his nose. He probably had, in greater abundance, the same feeling I have about Randall Munroe (the creator of xkcd), which is like "I totally hate you for your brilliance, but please don't stop making art, but you're making all of us look bad, but I love you, but I also hate you." (Don't misunderstand - I am a little ant trying to make little ant art, and Munroe's had enormous, widespread success, and anyway he and I aren't even in the same field. So it's definitely not the same thing. But that IhateyouIloveyouIhateyouIloveyou feeling's gotta be the same.)
Like this. Remember this? In Ratatouille? When Skinner eats the ratatouille at the end, and is immediately astonished/in love/furious?
The problem is, when you're confronted with once-in-a-century genius and you're just a once-in-a-decade artist, you can't see it as history will. You can only take it personally. That was the best part of Amadeus (aside from three hours of superlative music) - that interesting problem of well, I can't really blame you, Salieri, for hating Mozart, because if you're a composer other than Mozart in the eighteenth century, it sucks to be you. It probably sucks about as much as it does if you're a band other than the Beatles in the 60s.
So, there we are. Poor Brian Wilson.
But this is another reason why spite and envy about the creative works and/or success of other writers is such a waste of time. If they're better than you, even if they're on another plane of better than you, there isn't much you can do about it but be the best Salieri you can be. History will roll on with or without you; you can't control it. And, after all, Pet Sounds is a really good record. Well worth a listen.
Last night I finished the draft of the opera story I started on Wednesday. I had a moment whilst drafting of wanting to end the story immediately after the climax, because I was so pleased with it that the denouement just seemed like it would be no fun at all to put together. But I kept writing anyway, and I'm glad, because the denouement was potentially even better. Tomorrow I'm going to type it up and start rewriting it. This one will take HEAVY rewriting. Certain sentences in the first half I knew, even while I was writing them, that they were terrible; a few have "[ugh!]" written above or after them. But I think it's a good skeleton.
Speaking of opera, this month there are three live opera performances to enjoy in theaters. I went to the first this morning, La Clemenza di Tito, the last opera Mozart wrote before he died in 1791. This makes the third Mozart opera I've seen, and although the other two are MUCH more famous (Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni), and the general opinion on Tito is that it's an "also-ran" (a term of which I don't actually know the definition, but I think it's derogatory), I liked this one the best. The characters were surprisingly complex instead of being sketched, the arias were shorter so I felt less as if I was listening to this
(that's a repeat sign), and the cast was, with one exception, breathtakingly wonderful.
Also, it was Mozart. I will never, ever miss an opportunity to swim in Mozart.
In other news, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five, and I'm...not sure about it. I don't know if I don't get it, or if I do, and the confusion is the point. Also, I felt growing dread and sorrow as we got closer and closer to Dresden, and then the actual experience of the horrors of Dresden felt kind of minimal. I'm not denying that there was despair seeded all in and throughout the book, but I expected (not wanted, expected) a more horrific climax. There's a reason he did it the way he did it, and I haven't grasped it yet. Unless he simply tried to imitate the experience of life, in its weird inconclusive experientialness.
I read the first two stories of Olive Kitteridge, and...uh...this won the Pulitzer Prize? I'm going to read until at least page 100, but if by then I have no further insight about what's so awesome there, I'm giving up.
I also started 2666. It is very long. It's by Roberto Bolaño, a South American author who died unexpectedly not unlike Stieg Larsson, only on the other side of the world. (RB was born 1953, died 2003; SL was born 1954, died 2004. Weird, eh? But RB had a lot of success as a fiction writer before he died.) I haven't gotten lost in a lovely long novel like this one in seemingly ages, and I think it's time. After 50 pages, I still feel like we're cruising pre-Plot Point One, because I seriously have no idea where the writer's going with this. It's a delicious feeling, because it's fascinating what happens on every damn page, but there's no arc of any kind developing. It's just a story. Or really a series of stories which occasionally envelop other stories.
Sort of speaking of that, I finished Lost in the Funhouse. I found it mostly frustrating, with some pointillist delights. I want to read it again in ten years when I've read more experimental lit. Maybe by then I'll have more recently read ancient Greek lit too and will have some idea of what he's talking about in the second half of the book.
Definition of ALSO-RAN (Merriam-Webster online)
1
: a horse or dog that finishes out of the money in a race
2
: a contestant that does not win
3
: one that is of little importance especially competitively
Well, I suppose. If you even accept that Mozart had winning and losing works. Which I'm not sure I do.
