Stan Lee turned 88 yesterday and he’s still going strong. Further proof:  Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Business Journal recognized him as one of their “Eight Over 80”:  business people in Los Angeles in their 80’s still leading professional lives. Here’s the piece.

Yesterday on KPCC, one of the local national public radio stations, I caught a nifty little profile of Van Dyke Parks, another of my preferred musicians. Parks hangs out in the best of company — Brian Wilson in his prime (and since), and David Thomas of Pere Ubu, to name just two — and I enormously appreciate his influence wherever he spreads it.

Here’s the transcript of the profile, which ends with the writer putting out the little paper sailboat that perhaps Van Dyke Parks might tour with his (only now) acclaimed album, “Song Cycle.” Yes, here’s hoping.

This quote from the Parks suggests why I’ve always been interested in him:

“We’re still learning not to laugh at funerals,” said Parks. “Especially those of people who are leaving us something. We are supposed to cry. But the arts demands something else, often. Sometimes they suggest uncertainty.” It’s that uncertainty in music — discord, contrapuntalism,”mistakes,” and other elements that allow the music to break free of rigid formal demands — that’s interesting. Witness the  lyrics Parks supplies for the Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up”:

A diamond necklace played the pawn
Hand in hand some drummed along, oh
To a handsome man and baton
A blind class aristocracy
Back through the op’ra glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?

Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn
The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumperter swan
Columnated ruins domino

I don’t care that they don’t make “sense” or that Mike Love remains outraged. The sonic shape of the words demands the elegaic reading given them in the Beach Boys’ recording.  The surf’s up, and something (youthful innocence?) is washing away:

Surf’s Up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children’s song

I hope I get the chance to see Van Dyke Parks play live.

More coverage of the recently departed Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.

Here’s a nice remembrance in the New York Times.

Finally, if you’re going to read just one piece to understand the appeal of Captain Beefheart to those relatively few of us who care, this is the one to read. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Randall Roberts notes: “on first listen the best of Van Vliet and band, even 40 years later, sounds wrong – but only in the way that, say, Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ looks wrong.” That’s exactly right. As Van Vliet noted in a radio interview 30 years ago, the 4/4 mandate of rock music sounded so boring, and so he wanted to break that up. And that’s something he did to great distinction with every album.

Courtesy of the Huffington Post, herewith a Venn diagram for the three people who get paid to touch your junk.

Recomended reading: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen deconstructs Jean Shepherd, the storyteller behind the beloved holiday classic “A Christmas Story.”

My youngest’s cold. He couldn’t even bother to wrap it.

So that’s partly what I’ve been up to the last few days.

Earlier, I related some big changes that have come to Archie’s old crowd. (Among them: Moose has both a learning disability and anger-management problems.) Now the old gang gets to learn about mortality, with the demise of a character whose age at time of death I estimate at 135. (So I can’t feel too sad about it.)

Simple plain wisdom from the redoubtable Fred Willard. Plan your future behavior accordingly.

What’s the ideal gift for that special Star Trek fan on your Christmas list? How about one-of-a-kind hatbox dioramas of Kirk and Spock celebrating the most wonderful time of the lightyear?

While I’m waiting for the hatboxes featuring Mr. Fantastic and Samuel Beckett, I’m betting my friend Larry would like to have these.

Here’s how you can get them.

(And p.s. to Larry and other nitpicky Trek fans:   I know “original” Trek didn’t have the holodeck. So leave me alone.)

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much coverage the dearly departed Don Van Vliet has been getting.

Today’s LA Times had a large obit smack on the front page of the Calendar section. Here it is.  I especially appreciated the degree to which Richard Cromelin noted the Captain’s influence (although I couldn’t help noting that the band Talking Heads is referred to as “The Talking Heads” — despite their having once released an album entitled “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads”).

Early this evening on NPR I heard a rather lengthy coverage of Captain Beefheart’s career, including a bit of audio from one of his last interviews, conducted  in the early 1990’s. In that interview at least, Van Vliet, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sounded greatly weakened, and barely able to speak intelligibly. That, in addition to his frustrations with other performers and the general state of his musical career, made it easier to understand why he quit music for a highly successful career as a painter. Still, it was an odd experience hearing what I’d always considered a rather obscure and nigh “unlistenable” favorite act of mine profiled so lovingly on NPR.

Finally, I caught Henry Rollins’ show on KCRW. Although the online setlist doesn’t mention Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, Rollins spoke passionately about the impact of their music, and played three tracks — one from the band’s first album, “Safe as Milk,” one from the masterpiece, “Trout Mask Replica,” and one from “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)” — spanning their career. All three were exciting and showed the impressive range of their inventiveness. Rollins said that all the Captain Beefheart albums are worth listening to (I agree), even though some are out of print. (Including the debut, “Safe as Milk.”) He said that often when an artist as significant as Beefheart does, someone will do a reissue or a compilation collection, and he’s hopeful for that. But then, more importantly, he said that he’s got ten 90-minute tapes of unreleased Captain Beefheart music and that he’s going to start digitizing it and throwing on the air. Some of us have been waiting almost 30 years for new Captain Beefheart music. Stay tuned.