Wouldn't It Be Nice...

From a review in the Financial Times of a recent Brian Wilson concert in London at the Royal Festival Hall:

There were more between-song comments than three years ago, most of them charmingly off-beam. “Imagine if there was no one here,” he wondered aloud at one point. “It’d be empty. We’d be playing to an empty audience.” Occasionally a smile bobbed on to his features. At other times he looked lost in reverie, as if concentrating on a problem whose solution was in danger of eluding him.

If there is a more concise summation of Wilson's concert-in-my-mind way of seeing (being-in) the world than his quote from above, I'd like to read (not "hear," for certainly Wilson has provided the musical soundtrack to his quote) it.

Juxtapositions

Today, while doing a bit of stacks maintenance work, I came across a curious, at least to me, juxtaposition of books. From left to right I found: The First John Ford, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and John D. Rockefeller's Secret Weapon. Having not read Pirsig's book, I can't say for sure that it has nothing in common with either of those two titans of industry books buttressing it, but I still have to wonder about the original cataloging decision to place Pirsig's mid-seventies veiled-autobiography within the non-fiction CT (Library of Congress' Biography subclass of Auxiliary Sciences of History) classification.

Correction: The book to the left of Pirsig's on the shelf is The First Henry Ford -- not John Ford. At least on the level of title John Ford's The Quiet Man would link up vaguely, very vaguely, to the usual public perception of Zen.