Did You See Jupiter?

Hats off to Yancey for a masterful write-up of the Brian Wilson show. It really was as bad and as good as he says. My main take from the evening was the two full-body rushes of endorphins, adrenaline, whatever that came with “Sloop John B.” (the first song played by the band as a band) and “Wonderful,” a Smile song whose vocal harmonies all but opened the roof of Carnegie Hall. As full and intense as they were, the rushes shot me back to watching Mulholland Drive, the scary parts of which last made me so conscious of that sensation—a slow, methodical ooze that wanders its way to your extremities, a shot that’s both visceral and attended by the realization that there’s something very real, empirical, physiological going on. There’s something to the link between Wilson and David Lynch…something there enough to be at least counter-counterintuitive but also something less pat that I regrettably haven’t the mental energy to do the math for right now. (Another side-take would be the guy sitting to my right, a middle-aged guy having the time of his life and singing so grotesquely and haphazardly off-key that I couldn’t help but wonder what music sounds like to a brain whose bearing would seem to be so lost in the simplest manifestations of melody.)