"When do we send them an airmail message?"

Question answered: February 28, 2026.

Nearly 20 years later.

Goodbye to Brian Wilson.

"And we're going to have some fun with this, aren't we?"

Harris murmurs into the phone to Obama and Obama:

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

I call her "Harris." I was going to call her "my girl Kamala" — because that's what Mrs. Obama calls her in that phone call — but the powers that be have warned us not to call her "Kamala" and of course you can't say "girl" — unless you can — and "my" is a terrible problem, perhaps insinuating a perverse sense of ownership. So I'll keep my distance. "Harris" is it. Don't harass me.

Now, about this concept of "fun." It might be the new word of the day, the word on the memo that everyone got. It came up in this new Ezra Klein podcast, "This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin":

I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris... And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall outta the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been, and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is gonna feel until it actually happens....

People talking about fun... enthusing This is fun... that's not a good marker of fun... whatever fun is....

I think of Zippy the Pinhead: "Are we having fun yet?"

And "And she'll have fun fun fun/'Til her daddy takes the T-bird away...."

And "Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy."

"In unguarded moments over a 33-month tenure, he suggested that liberals were un-American and that the popular Beach Boys rock band was unwholesome."

"He likened his critics to Nazis and Bolsheviks, and insulted Black people, women, Jews and handicapped people.... 'I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,' he said in a favorite line. 'It’s liberals and Americans.'... He banned women’s pantsuits in his department, but the edict was flagrantly violated. Heralding divisiveness, he reversed the bison on the department logo from left-facing to right-facing. 'If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box,' he quipped, 'perhaps the cartridge box should be used.' He accused his critics of using sham environmental concerns to achieve 'centralized planning and control of the society.' He told Business Week: 'Look what happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the forces that this thing can evolve into.'"

From "James G. Watt, Interior Secretary Under Reagan, Dies at 85/Mr. Watt once declared that Interior Department policies over years had swung too far toward conservation under the influence of 'environmental extremists'" (NYT).

Watt resigned on October 9, 1983, after his attack on The Beach Boys and that remark about "two Jews and a cripple":

"I was dead set on centering my life on the patriotic ideal. I was a son of the American revolution..."

"... and there was blood on the tracks. Recent blood, and it was still drying. The whole record seemed like a real effort toward figuring out what Manifest Destiny was all about. We’d come as far as we could, as far as Horace Greeley told us to go. And so we looked back and tried to make sense of that great odyssey."

 

Said Van Dyke Parks, about the "Smile" album, quoted in Episode 153: “Heroes and Villains” by the Beach Boys, of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs."

I've assembled 10 TikToks to keep you occupied for the next 10 minutes. Let me know what you like best.

1. This is your pilot speaking.

2. The puppies are not yet ready to play.

3. She's scared to drop in.

4. If you baby-talk, will your friend baby-talk back?

5.  Drew Barrymore really wants you to go out in the rain.

6. Backstage with The Beach Boys.

7. When Sting had to endure the Jose Feliciano version of "I'll Be Watching You."

8. A "Moonstruck" visual.

9. When the Wisconsin man goes to Hawaii.

10. The deadline gave us purpose.

"He introduced a descending bassline... 'a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers.'"

"It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this...  And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F.... This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from 'Sunny Afternoon' by the Kinks to 'Go Now' by the Moody Blues to 'Forever' by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll."

From Episode 115 of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals."

I love hearing about influences that surprise me, about songs I've known very well for over half a century. Another example of that from this podcast is from Episode 113: "'Needles and Pins' by The Searchers":

"'Vibe' as slang, referring to an aura or feeling, emerged in the sixties, in California, and gave the word its enduring hippie associations."

"The underground paper Berkeley Barb made frequent use of it as early as 1965. The following year, the Beach Boys hit 'Good Vibrations' exposed the slang to broader audiences.... In some ways, the rise of digital life allowed for a vibe revival....  Whereas Instagram’s main form is the composed tableau, captured in a single still image or unedited video, TikTok’s is the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage....  TikTok’s technology makes it easy to crop video clips and set them to evocative popular songs: instant vibes.... When I watch a morning-routine TikTok from 'an herbalist and cook living in a Montana cabin,' I take in the mood of December sunlight, coffee in a ceramic mug, a vegetable rice bowl, tall pine forest, with a slowed-down Sufjan Stevens soundtrack—a nice creative-residency or hipster-pioneer vibe. After absorbing a dozen such videos at a stretch, I look up from my phone and my own apartment glows with that same kind of concentrated attention, as if I were seeing it in montage, too. The objects around me are lambent with significance. I can take in the vibe of my home office: hibiscus tree, hardwood desk, noise-cancelling headphones, sixties-jazz trio, to-go coffee cup. I suddenly feel a little more at home, as if the space belonged to me in a new way, or I had found my place within it as another element of the over-all vibe, playing my part."

From "TikTok and the Vibes Revival/Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence" (The New Yorker). 

ADDED: Speaking of hippies, I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which was published in 1968. It never uses the word "vibe," but "vibrations"/"vibrating" appears 61 times: 

I have adopted an answer to the mystery of the strange photograph: The Phantom Gnat!

You remember this photograph I posted yesterday, an image I was surprised to find among my sunrise photographs and not something I was trying to do:



I had said in the comments: "I know it’s out of focus, but why? And why is the sun a full circle? It was only a quarter of the way up."

Oddly, some people were talking about the "circle of confusion" (a complicated subject in photography) and others were talking about the song by Cyrkle, "Red Rubber Ball" (because, as Paul Simon wrote in the lyrics, "The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball").

Several commenters usefully brought up bokeh — which I understand — but, as I said in the comments, "I thought the camera would do that in the parts of the photo that were not deemed to be the subject. I've aimed the camera at the sun like this thousands of time and I've never seen it 'decide' that the sun is the subject and everything else should be gently fuzzed — especially with this additional effect of completely reshaping the sun, showing a circle for something that was visible as less than a half circle."

Kylos responded: "It’s actually the opposite. It’s focused on something nearby instead of the sun. My experience is that shooting into the sun can cause autofocus to get confused. Possible a lens flare or glowing dust particle caused the autofocus to think the subject was inches from your camera. Because the sun is also completely out of focus, it’s circle of confusion ends up projecting on top of the darker horizon."

That pointed me at what I declare to be the answer: "Maybe an insect flew by, got focused on, then went off camera as the image was captured. That's my theory! The phantom gnat!"



Interesting to wear a buzz cut in 1966. From the Wikipedia article on Cyrkle:

"I Watched 185 Mike Bloomberg Ads/And I figured out what this weird, expensive, suddenly ubiquitous campaign is trying to do."

Writes Justin Peters (at Slate), in case you're wondering what all those Bloomberg ads are. I was. I'd only seen a couple Bloomberg ads, because I skip ads. I avert my eyes. Sometimes I see that an ad is being talked about and I go out of my way to find it, but only because I want to blog about. I have my wits about me and I'm analytical and critical and inclined to make fun. But what's going on with the people who do let ads wash over them? I can't imagine. Are they influenced? What is Mike doing with all his money?

Well, this Slate accumulation of all the ads is a helpful place to start. I have no idea if these things are ranked correctly — whatever that means — other than that I'm sure they're not. One viewer can only give his opinion and these ads are intended for micro-targeting voters. That's what makes it interesting to get in there and find things that you know weren't made for you but for somebody else. Or to find things that appeal to you, like, for me "Big Gay Ice Cream":



I love ice cream. It's my #1 favorite food. And I'm as gay friendly as a nongay person can be. And I have an aversion to politics, so this ad is great. It does nothing but show the candidate eating ice cream, saying "mmmm," and calling it "Big Gay Ice Cream." I'm going to assume that's a brand name and not just a way to say excellent ice cream.

I notice the title of the ad is "Mike Love Big Gay Ice Cream." Is that bad grammar, intentional caveman/baby talk, or a Beach Boys reference? Mike pays so much that I can't imagine a plain vanilla mistake.

Okay, let's see what the Slate writer has to say. He ranks this ad as #10 (out of 185):

In its lonely quest to make the internet believe that Rich Mike, who wears expensive purple sweaters and spends lots of time in Bermuda, is Weird Self-Aware Mike, Bloomberg’s team has released several low-budget, shot-in-a-minute spots in which the candidate stands in a campaign office and woodenly endorses various foodstuffs and/or holidays. This message, in which Bloomberg calls out for ice cream from Big Gay Ice Cream—an ice cream store in New York—is my favorite of these, in part because never before has someone seemed so wooden and odd while touting the virtues of ice cream. Bloomberg comes across like Mr. Burns in that one Simpsons episode where he had his first taste of “iced cream.” Oh, Weird Mike, you awkward, lovable, billionaire scamp!

By the way, the real Mike Love is almost a vegan, but he says, "I will succumb to an ice-cream shake." He likes "A Cold Stone Creamery coffee shake. I have a hard time passing that up."

What's my point here? It's: Who the hell knows what is going on with all these ads sloshing around in the mind of the American voter?

"Through Mr. Obama, I have been hipped to the Congolese singer Jupiter Bokondji... His prose, always electric, assumes an extra whiff of fire when applied to music."

"'American history wells up when Aretha sings,' Mr. Obama wrote to The New Yorker in response to an email query about the artist in 2016.... 'That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings ‘A Natural Woman,’ she can move me to tears,' he said... United States presidents tend not to be celebrated for their groovy record collections. The current officeholder’s favorite Beach Boy is most likely Mike Love, which alone should qualify him for yet another impeachable offense. If this is a bewildering time to be an American, so, too, is it a disconcerting time to be a fan of rock and pop, among the country’s maddest and most characteristic concoctions. Barack Obama, music critic, has become an unlikely balm, his beautifully detailed lists acting as strange flickers of continuity and survival."

From "In Praise of Barack Obama, Music Critic/The former president’s annual year-end playlist never fails to delight" by Jim Ruttenberg in the NYT.

"Balm" is aromatic ointment. Is it strange to say that a person is balm? Perhaps it's wrong, more wrong than calling him a nonhuman animal. He's a gooey substance, to be spread on the skin, for comfort. So weird! But "balm" has long been used figuratively. It can be anything softly soothing. No one, even his fans, would call Donald Trump "balm."

Did you know that in Jamaica, "balm" is "A faith-healing ceremony typically involving drumming, dancing, and ritual feasting; a herbal bath or other treatment administered during this" (OED)? There is a sense that Obama had healing powers, and yet where was all the healing? Why did Obama lead to Trump? It's a strange mystery!

The link on "is most likely Mike Love" goes to "Mike Love to Trump: ‘You Tried Your Best to Help Whitney Houston’/You’ve always been a big supporter of some of the best music that America has ever made,' Beach Boys singer told president" (Rolling Stone, October 2018). Love was at the White House for Trump's signing of the Music Modernization Act, which aimed to protect the rights of artists in digital media.

I love the idea that loving Love is "another impeachable offense." It underscores Trump's characterization of impeachment as "Impeachment Lite." Everybody's doing it, defining impeachment downward. It seems peachier than ever. And now, we're adding Love.

I note that Ruttenberg did not say Trump's favorite musical act is The Beach Boys. He only said that Trump's favorite Beach Boy is probably Mike Love. If you pay attention at all to Trump's rallies, you would conclude that Trump's favorite music act is The Rolling Stones. Not only does he always end with "You Can't Always Get What You Want,"* the pre-speech song list of perhaps 22 songs may have 3 Rolling Stones songs — "Time Is on My Side," "Let’s Spend the Night Together," and "Sympathy for the Devil" — while having no repetitions from other artists, with exactly one exception, Elton John.

Hey, it's Christmas, so I feel I should say something Christmas-y... and that got me wondering whether it's true — as my instinct tells me — that The Rolling Stones have a never done a Christmas song. According to Showbiz Cheatsheet, I am right about that, but they did do this “Cosmic Christmas” in "a hidden coda" on "Their Satanic Majesties Request":



And their song "Winter" has this line: "And I wish I been out in California/When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out/But I been burning my bell, book and candle/And the restoration plays have all gone around."

And Mick Jagger, sans other Stones, recorded “Lonely Without You (This Christmas)." And before you say, But Keith Richards wouldn't do something like that, he recorded "Run Rudolph Run" in 1979.

Now, go slather yourself in balm and get some strange flickers of a merry Christmas!

______________________

* You know what I think about that. I wrote last year:

To me, this message, played at the end of a political rally, feels like a critique of all politics. Yes, I've stood here and promised the sky, but you must realize you might not get it, and what you do get may even be preferable. You're feeling your wants, and I'm stoking your wants, but I might have something else in mind, something that I think is good enough for you or actually better than what you want. And you really shouldn't be taking those drugs and drinking that wine or even drinking that soda. What kind of a thinking adult are you anyway, preferring "cherry red" soda? Grow up. You've had your fun at my rousing rally. Now, straighten up and try to see what you're getting as all you really need.

"People close to the president say his proclivity to retreat to the residence during work hours has built up over the course of his presidency...."

"Early in this presidency, Trump’s staff tried to nudge him out into the city more often for dinners or to attend events, but the plans always fell apart, said one of the former senior administration officials who called Trump a 'homebody.'...  Now he tends to go to the Oval Office and adjacent private dining room for five to six hours a day for formal meetings, lunches and ceremonial events, current and former administration officials say. But the bulk of his work in the mornings, late afternoons, evenings and weekends happens in his private quarters where Trump can call staff and advisers as early as 6 a.m. and up to midnight.... He also uses it during working hours as a place to watch TV freely, tweet and serve as own his one-man communications director and political strategist. The residence serves like a bunker for his impeachment response and his real-time reaction to testimony, witnesses and public hearings.... Trump also loves to open up parts of the private residence to special guests, personally taking them on tours of the Lincoln Bedroom where he’ll show off a copy of the Gettysburg Address. It’s a party trick he deployed in an attempt to wow German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a move he uses with a wide array of other White House visitors...."

From "Forget the Oval. The real Trump action is in the residence/Fixated on impeachment proceedings against him, Trump is increasingly taking his official business to the White House’s executive residence to escape perceived risks of his formal office space" (Politico).

What a lonely weirdo he is!



ADDED: The article suggests it would be better if he'd go out at night in Washington, go to restaurants, as if he could just go out to a place and it wouldn't shut everything down. He can't really get "out." He's in the bubble wherever he goes and cannot just go be a regular person somewhere. At most, he can try to put on a show of doing something a normal person would do, like go to 5 Guys for a cheeseburger....

"American Idol" top 3 revealed.

2 contestants were cut last night. I only liked 2 of the remaining 5 and predicted both would be cut. But one survived:



She also sang what I long ago identified as my all-time favorite song:



She also auditioned with one of my favorite songs:



You have to endure so much loud, show-offy belting to put up with the show. It's amazing that someone with restraint, taste, and quiet charm made it to the end.

Goodbye to Glen Campbell.

The great musician was 81, and we knew he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. From the obituary in Variety:

Born into a sharecropping family in a tiny town in southwestern Arkansas, Campbell was the seventh of 12 children. Picking up guitar at an early age, he left home at age 14 to pursue music... Out west, Campbell soon found himself an in-demand session musician... recording guitar parts for such varied acts as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, the Monkees, Merle Haggard and Elvis Presley.

Campbell reached the height of his session player power in 1965, when he became a touring member of the Beach Boys — playing bass to compensate for the absent Brian Wilson — as well as contributing guitar parts to the group’s landmark “Pet Sounds” album...

... Campbell’s career experienced a sudden, dramatic upswing in 1967, when he recorded a rendition of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.”... Follow-up single “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was an even bigger hit.... [H]e began hosting a weekly CBS variety show, “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour”....

"The University of Kentucky has punished me in a 'sexual misconduct' case, in part, for singing a Beach Boys tune covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks."

Instapundit quotes the first line of a column by Buck Ryan, director of the Citizen Kentucky Project of UK’s Scripps Howard First Amendment Center. It's fascinating that the University of Kentucky punished the director of its First Amendment Center for his verbal expression. You'd think they'd steer clear of trouble with someone in that position, but — as he tells it — the university's Title IX coordinator deprived him of travel funds and an "award worth thousands of dollars" without offering him any process whatsoever.

Now, what did Ryan actually do? He had taught a course called "Storytelling: Exploring China’s Art and Culture" in a University of Kentucky program at a Chinese University, and during "closing ceremonies for an inaugural Education Week," he sang some version of the Beach Boys song "California Girls." We're expected to assume that the Title IX coordinator was plainly wrong to judge his performance to be offensive "language of a sexual nature," but we are not given a full text of the song, let alone a video that would convey the tone of voice and any physical gestures.

If you care about process, give better process to us, the people you seek to enlist in your outrage. Don't begin with the distraction of The Chipmunks. I'm not going to assume that any song covered by The Chipmunks is impossible to rewrite with sexy lyrics. Even if something is an outright children's rhyme from the start, it can be rewritten dirty, as brilliantly demonstrated here (NSFW):



But "California Girls" is not a children's song. It's about finding lots of different women sexually attractive. Evans only quotes one line of the song he sang: "Well, Shanghai [changed from East Coast] girls are hip; I really dig those styles they wear." That sounds relatively inoffensive, but why is a teacher singing to students about digging clothes worn by females? Other lines are sexier, notably "And the Northern girls with the way they kiss/They keep their boyfriends warm at night." And "I dig a French bikini on Hawaii Island dolls."

However that may sound coming from a cartoon chipmunk, it is at least arguably creepy for a teacher to be singing that to students. And I don't know what variations were made in the text — who wore what and how they behaved at night.

I love The Beach Boys, and I think this is relatively wholesome...



... especially when males are singing about females their own age who are not their students.

I'm all for due process, so let's hear the point of view of the Title IX coordinator, and let's see the evidence that person relied on, such as the full lyrics to the song.

50 years ago today: The albums "Blonde on Blonde" and "Pet Sounds" were released.

An amazing day!

From Rolling Stone: "'Blonde on Blonde' at 50: Celebrating Bob Dylan's Greatest Masterpiece":

Recorded fast with Nashville session cats who were used to grinding out country hits, Blonde on Blonde has a slick studio polish that makes it sound totally unlike any of his other albums, with sparkling piano frills and a soulful shitkicker groove. Yet the glossy surface just makes the songs more haunting.... [H]e never sounded lonelier than in "Visions of Johanna," funnier than in "I Want You," more desperate than in "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." It's his most expansive music, with nothing that resembles a folk song – just the rock & roll laments of a vanishing American, the doomed outsider who's given up on ever belonging anywhere. "I don't consider myself outside of anything," Dylan said when the album came out. "I just consider myself not around."

"Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds': 15 Things You Didn't Know":

When the group reconvened in the studio... to record vocal parts for what they assumed would be another sunny Brian Wilson anthem, one of the first things they heard was a track called "Hang on to Your Ego." Written with the band's road manager Terry Sachen, the lyrics were inspired by Wilson's experience using LSD. The whole band was taken aback by this jarring new direction, but Mike Love reportedly took particular offense to the piece, which he rejected as "a doper song." "The prevailing drug jargon at the time had it that doses of LSD would shatter your ego, as if that were a positive thing," explained Love in 1996. "I wasn't interested in taking acid or getting rid of my ego." During outtakes from the sessions, Love can be heard belching in the background, singing the lyrics in the manner of Jimmy Durante and James Cagney, and generally clowning around... Ultimately, Wilson let Love alter the title to a less inflammatory "I Know There's an Answer"....

"How Adele makes middle-aged music cool for young people."

 A Slate article. I haven't read it yet but I think the answer is that "middle-aged music" is just something a lot of people want to be freed to like.

The author, Carl Wilson (not the dead Beach Boy, I presume)  is "concerned the younger generation may be suffering alarmingly low levels of acerbity."

Even teenagers and college students are capable of looking back gauzily on what they’ve recently grown out of or projecting themselves into the future and retroactively romanticizing where they are right now. The young are often the greatest sentimentalists, particularly in times of instability. (Do economic inequality, climate change, and maybe Snapchat help explain their eagerness for Adele, like YA novelist John Green, to make them weep over old, eternal clichés?)

 Enough of that. Here's the late Beach Boy Carl Wilson:



Best song ever. Does age mean anything at all?

"11 Things We Learned About Harry Shearer From His 'WTF' Episode."

I found that listicle just now — "8... Shearer got his start as an actor at the age of 7, booking his first audition for The Jack Benny Program... 7. The Beach Boys Helped Him Avoid the Draft... " — as I was looking for a specific quote from that podcast, which I listened to yesterday. I've been listening to episodes from the "WTF" archive ever since President Obama made me notice the existence of the show. Anyway, what I was looking for was a quote of Maron quoting something he'd heard Shearer say long ago, something Shearer didn't remember but that Maron had been quoting for years.

I found this 2011 episode of The Mental Illness Happy Hour (a podcast I've listened to a few times) where Maron is the interviewee. At one point, he says:

I quote this a lot, but Harry Shearer once said that, to me, and I’m paraphrasing, that the reason comedians do what they do is to try to control why people laugh at them.

That got me thinking about the recent fuss over something former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said:

"Some of y'all don't understand that this kind of clapping is killing black folk."

"Do you understand what I'm saying? Killing us."



"It's killing some white folks, too."

At a Carnegie Hall concert recently, Neil Young stopped in the middle of a song because some people in the audience were clapping off-beat. Mike Love of The Beach Boys says that sometimes, it's a cultural thing.

"For instance, the preponderance of American pop music is based on the beat of two and four," he says. "You'll have a lot of cultural influences that cause people to do one and three. I remember being in the Vienna Stadthalle — the town hall in Vienna, with about 12,000 people in it — and it was, like, Teutonic."

ADDED: Remember how the crowd clapping screwed up the beat in "Give Peace a Chance"?

And there was like Tommy Smothers and Tim Leary and Dick [Gregory], and all people sort of clapping along and singing on the chorus. And if you hear the record, it's funny actually, because my rhythm sense has always been a bit wild, and halfway through it, I got on the on-beat instead of the back-beat and it was hard because all the...there were non-musicians playing along with us. And so I had to put a lot of tape echo to double up the beat to keep a steady beat right through the whole record, so it goes Bo-boom, bo-boom, instead of Ba, Ba.

What Van Dyke Parks found "so oxygenating about the Beat era."

"When I walked into a coffeehouse, eclecticism was not a big word. It was good to be interested in a whole bunch of stuff."

Audiences embraced it. Audiences were jolted by it. They did not resent it. They didn’t need to be told what to think. I’m not prepared to tell people what to think. I may leave more questions than answers. I believe that anything worth its salt in the arts must create a wobble. We are not polestars We are here struggling in the dynamics of justice, between the absolutism of faith and reasonable doubt.

Parks, who worked years ago with The Mothers of Invention and The Beach Boys,  has a new album called "Songs Cycled." 

ADDED: I'm not sure that quote says anything. I just liked the idea of finding beatniks oxygenating. I started a beatnik tag and went back and added it to old posts, so click for all my beatnik-related postings.