Did You See Jupiter?

I've been too entranced by the rain that's been swelling and trickling for like eight-straight hours now to think of anything less fleeting, so here's a Devendra Banhart piece I wrote for the Washington Post to stand in for something/anything else.

It’s always left me irrationally irked, being the kind of saying favored by pompous businessmen with starched shirts and overdetermined golf swings, but if you were a news reporter reporting on the mess at CBS News—if you were Aaron Brown, say, fresh off a segment on Iraq and hostages and the like—would you continue to insist on asking if, at CBS, “heads will roll”? It’s amazing the awkward skidding sound that makes every time I’ve heard it the past few days.

The new Brian Wilson Smile album is a whole lot better than I’d imagined it would be: more or less faithful to most of the bootlegs I’ve heard, strung together with a mind toward “story,” not unweird. Wilson himself sounds really haggard, even terrible in spots, but there’s something really touching in his out-of-key warble, something that leaves me more than willing to defer to his having made some sort of huge psychic stride in reclaiming ownership over music I’m sure he’d just as soon have left to wither away. I was pretty much horrified by the whole resurrection project from the moment I first heard about it, but this…well, there’s an awful lot of goodness in it.

(This after a really cool moment a little earlier, when a miniature stuffed pumpkin w/ voice box I have on a shelf, for no discernible reason [untouched, unprovoked, not looked at or even remembered for many months], blurted out, out of nowhere, “Happy Halloween!”)

{A thousand thanks to Woebot for the whip-crackingly rad picture posted here.

There's a piece I wrote on the two-disc set World 2004 for the Washington Post here.