excursive

Charm abounds — again, this is Tom Hanks — but “Masterpiece” is too often a maddeningly excursive endeavor that made me think, more than once, of a Richard Scarry book without the drawings.

Downtown, Montgomery Ward installed a new Customer’s Parlor, where excursive fair visitors could loiter on soft couches while browsing the company’s five-hundred-page catalog.

But it’s less linear — the excursive record of a lifelong pilgrim over the 40 years since her groundbreaking debut album, “Horses.”

Rather, it is a more excursive record of a lifelong pilgrim, illustrated by Smith’s own black-and-white photographs, filled with mementos mori and personal accounts of her travels, her artistic obsessions and inspirations.

Such excursive enterprise was alien to the genius of the British colonies.