Live at the Roxy Theatre (25th Anniversary) by Brian Wilson (2025)

This is one of the few recent releases that I have played on vinyl LP, streaming, and most recently as a Christmas-present CD.

I was lucky enough to have won the 3 LP version last month from a chat with Endless Summer Quarterly magazine and Oglio Records!  Besides the LPJT with winnings I also won a 2000-era autographed promo picture of Brian, which is so precious in the year that Brian passed.  I haven’t bought a vinyl album in a long time–the best part is that the art and liner notes are just amazing to look at in the larger form factor!  The 2 CD set has the same notes, but they are definitely harder to read.  Streaming, of course, gives you NO notes.

The other thing to remark upon is the number of tracks. One of the reasons I wanted the CD set is that it has the most number of tracks. Vinyl, of course, can’t fit as many minutes of audio on six sides as you can in 2 CDs. I think a savvy decision was made to limit the songs on the streaming album, which makes sense for the record company.

I wanted the extra songs–they are from other non-Roxy live performances  and for a “Brianista,” must haves.

If you’re a casual fan of the Beach Boys, listen to this set and marvel at how Brian could perform so well after all he had lived through.  I was blessed to see him live several times and this set is a good reminder about what those early tours were like.

 

Judith’s Journey by Susan Jo Lewis (Amazon, 2025)

I am not normally one for historical fiction, but the author is a friend who has been working on this story for a long time, and I am proud of her that she made it to publication.  As you can tell by the full subtitle of “Book One: Born with Wings”, Judith’s Journey is only the start of what may end up being the full life of a proto-English Queen who packs a lot of experiences in what stops here with her late teen years.

If there are anachronisms in the book I am not learned enough to have picked them out; I just went along with the story.  I will say that the amount of sex in the book surprised me, but it is logically placed if you’re telling the story of a woman ‘coming of age’.  In its own way it’s probably just as informative to a teen as Judy Blume’s Forever.

My main complaint with the Kindle edition I read  is that there were too many typos/errant punctuation.  I hope those can be fixed in a future edition.

I am looking forward to Book Two in this tale and hope it doesn’t take too long to be published.

Spirited (AppleTV, 2022)

Watched this last night, and it was perfectly suited for a ‘heartwarming’ Christmas movie.  Not a huge fan of Will Ferrell, and Ryan Reynolds is mostly tolerable because he makes fun of himself.

You can’t stop watching yet another take on A Christmas Carol, though, can you?  Even one that is a musical with only one good singer who doesn’t get much to do (for the record, the actress playing the Ghost of Christmas Past).

I will say the production numbers are really well done, even if the movie could have been a very enjoyable 90 minutes instead of bloated past two hours.

I might watch this again if it were on, but I’m not going to seek it out.  The best part of it was watching it with family.