“. At one time, Wilson listened to his 45 record of the song he “could never do” up to 100 times a day.” – Wikipedia
…It might have started with J.K. Huysmans’s A Rebours, as scholar Kenneth Mogg suggests. Structureless but simplistic, we had figured the book would tell us nothing and everything. Through the dripping pages we hoped to diagnose it – and up the brackets to a coked-up, loquacious rock star it might die. But we could also pursue it to Dorian Gray, and in between and through those pages (“It [A Rebours] was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed…”), again, we could catch faint glimpse of the strand; the thread always leads to spool, or is it the other way around? And we find it hidden, and then relapsed – something like that – and brought out in Vertigo. Lord Henry remarks, “everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.” And Scottie’s lover replies, “There’s someone within me and she says I must die. Oh Scottie, don’t let me go.” But can you really grab within the next world? Or the world-spirit? Nevertheless, you thought it should have died there. But we didn’t; and through sheer fate we found it again in Chris Marker – in Sans Soleil. We knew the West Banke would never let it pass, and, once again, we heard it: “He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.” The earnest, uncapturable writer told us – through diegesis – that it couldn’t be smothered. It couldn’t go away. But we knew that from the first frame – from the black leader that told us that all of us are haunted by images – images that can’t be “linked” to any other. And that we would try anyway.
“Be My Baby” was Phil Spector’s magnum opus, but even more tragically was that it wasn’t Brian Wilson’s. He tried making it his dozens of times and inevitably reached more fame and success than the Ronettes, or even Spector. For all the reasons it’s acclaimed, and moreover, for all the reasons its excused – as “sheer homage but also vintage Beach Boys” or as something else – it’s just as much “jouissance addressed to no one.”
We could say more but why try?
