Arts & crafts to blow your mind

Those of us in the know are aware that an innocent strip of paper can without warning transform into a Möbius strip (via a piece of Scotch tape):






The Möbius strip has a number of horrifying properties. For example, if you were to glue two together by their edges, you'd get a Klein bottle (good luck with that).

One thing you can do is cut the strip in half along the middle. You will end up with one strip that is twice as long as the original strip of paper:



I know you're dying to know what happens if you were to cut this new strip in half along the middle. Naturally, you get two strips wound around each other (duh!):



This makes a good paper necklace or ribbon. More importantly, your cat will love it:





She's clearly wondering what she did to deserve this.

It's just a phase, we'll grow out of it: is postmodernism some kind of symptom of our cultural adolescence?

"The post-modern attitude of hyper-self-awareness, unrelenting irony, and overbearing cynicism seems to mirror Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian self-consciousness" -anonymous

The Fall in Genesis can be read as a story about growing up and becoming an adult. Adolescence is a time when we lose our childhood innocence and start to realize what the world is really like. Just as adolescence is (hopefully) a stage on the way toward adulthood, perhaps self-aware, irony-laden postmodernism is a stage of our culture on its way toward... well, something.

Once everyone in a society achieves a postmodern level of self-awareness, maybe the next stage is to become immune to it somehow. Think about your own perspective and how it changes as you get older: when you're 15 and your parents embarrass you in front of your friends, you feel like it's the end of the world. But then you grow up and maybe you realize things like that aren't such a big deal. As an adult you have more important stuff to worry about than how cool you look.

The media/advertising machine, operating under some form of quasi-free-market economic principles, seems to want to trap people in a kind of perpetual state of adult adolescence (more grown-up virtues being presumably rather less easily marketable). Personally, I do feel like the older I get the less I care about that stuff (and the less "stuff" I want to buy), so if my own experience is anything to go by, the advertisers/marketeers are being smart in trying to keep us from growing up.

Is it possible that maturity has something to do with not caring so much about whether people are judging you (though I doubt anyone can 100% not care, it's only human), but rather simply caring about other people?

I think artists in particular find it hard to lose that sense of feeling judged, not only because they're usually very sensitive, but also they really do get criticized (sometimes rudely) by all kinds of people. That's something that most people probably don't have to deal with - we get criticism from our bosses, yes, and from our families & friends, sure, but generally not from strangers who don't give a damn about us. Creative types have to put their work out there, which is often very personal, so they have to risk being deeply hurt by strangers every time they release one of their works into the world.

Maybe artists were the original adolescents (in the sense of being allowed, socially, to be the way teenagers are today). Celebrities (who are often artists and/or adolescents) are also like this. It might be impossible to really grow up if everyone acts as if the world actually does revolve you (and then punishes you for believing it's true).

I realize this all sounds kind of vague and also rather teleological (i.e. as if I'm suggesting our culture is living out a pre-planned destiny) but I think there's a way of thinking about this without proposing Intelligent Cultural Design.

In evolution, the results of natural selection, viewed with hindsight, can appear so mind-bogglingly complex as to require a creator (see Paley's watchmaker analogy). If you take the time to study evolutionary theory, however, you'll come to realize that in fact this is an unfounded assumption: natural selection (which is really just a function of the laws of physics) does the job perfectly.

If we allow that natural selection is the mechanism behind sociocultural as well as biological evolution, then there is no need for a grand design or master plan; but as conscious agents we are responsible for our culture and what it produces, just as we are responsible for our own bodies and what they produce. Maybe we should start thinking about meme therapy for our culture (Note: I Googled "meme therapy" and all I got was this boring blog).

The human uterus: merely an obstacle to removing other useful organs

"The woman was chosen to be the first donor to undergo the procedure because a previous hysterectomy enabled doctors to operate without a uterus obstructing their efforts, he added."

I know another band whose initials are AC and their song titles are way cooler

After lying in bed in the dark for an hour or so listening to Animal Collective's Campfire Songs in headphones, I think I am finally starting to get them.

Or I might just be starting to fool myself into believing that I'm not wasting my time listening to them. But I don't feel like going down that particular twisty path of logic, so screw it. Until further notice I'll be listening to AC and trying to come to grips with what they call music. I assume I'll come out the other side either a hipster, an anti-hipster or dead. Or if I'm really lucky, all three (triple whammy)!

Tea, crumpets and the living dead

So like, zombies are cool, right?



I'm intrigued. I'm not sure yet whether I'd actually want to read this. P&P is one of my favorite books and, while I'm not much of a purist and I don't have any problem with the concept, it does seem just a tad gimmicky. On the other hand, I'm a curious fellow and I would like to see just how good/bad this ends up being.

The Shins' new album

For those who have not yet indulged in its aural splendor, I can assure you that Wincing the Night Away is just as fine an album as its two predecessors, although the reviews upon its release were somewhat mixed. Like many great albums, it does take time to digest, revealing its character only after repeated listenings. Featuring several songs written in a more expansive style than anything Mercer has heretofore chosen to present us with, juxtaposed with tracks that could be outtakes from the first two Shins' albums, Wincing may later be viewed as somewhat of a transitional moment for the band.

The thing about those "expansive" songs is that, because of their comparative harmonic simplicity, some critics have chosen to characterize them as failed experiments, whereas I would counter that it is precisely these that make the album, not only a great CD, but also an independent entity of its two elder siblings. When you hear, for example, the snappy hip-hoppish beat for "Sea Legs," you know that you are listening to Wincing; one cannot make the same claim for the following track, "Red Rabbits," which really belongs to Oh, Inverted World's sonic universe.

"Sea Legs," incidentally, is one of the best tracks on the album, despite all the critics who have dis(mis)sed it. It is completely successful in its effect, showcasing a typically atypical Mercer melody that floats along atop its breezy accompaniment, followed by a long, melancholy outro that reminds me of classic Pink Floyd more than anything else. The song's title, perhaps referring to Mercer's adapting his talents to this more flowing, groove-based music (and/or perhaps to the listener's ears adapting to it as well), seems quite appropriate.

Those who expect nothing from Mercer but the same perfectly polished, two and a half minute rococo gems, churned out one after another, only have themselves to blame for being disappointed. Presumably these are the same types who begrudged the Beatles for everything they did after A Hard Day's Night. The rest of us can only pity their close-minded conservative stance while we eagerly await the next chapter in the continuing story of one of the decade's finest songwriters.

Lowe's Zappa Book Sucks, Part Two

So I'm halfway through Kelly Fisher Lowe's book (see below for my initial reactions), and it only gets more disappointing. What is really a terrible shame is that Lowe did not do his homework in trying to decipher more of Frank's lyrics, despite the fact the lyrical content is (by default) what Lowe, as a non-musician, focuses primarily on.

It astounds me that Lowe describes the lyrics to "Pygmy Twylyte" as "absurdist" and "inscrutable" when, in fact, the slightest effort to comprehend the lyrics to this song reveals that they do in fact, make perfect sense. The "green hocker croakin' in the pygmy twylyte" is just another hapless victim of drug abuse. In this case the protagonist is particularly pathetic because he seems to be a user of both uppers and downers. "Crankin' and a-cokin" indicates that the guy is presumably snorting cocaine and/or using amphetamines, aka "crank." "Out of his deep on a four-day run/hurtin' for sleep in the Quaalude moonlight" tells you how he got to this point: he was obviously on an amphetamine kick (people who do uppers will often stay awake for days at a time) and is now "hurtin' for sleep," turning to Quaaludes (a ubiquitous drug of the 70's and a powerful sedative) in order to get some relief. However, the combination of all those drugs in his system has made him sick and he's sitting there, looking all green and sickly and shaking and scared, totally pathetic and vulnerable, a complete slave to the drugs, and just scared out of his mind, afraid that he's gonna die. He has a "crystal eye" and a "crystal kidney" -- a reference to methamphetamine which is a crystalized form of the drug. Anxiety, sleeplessness, poor skin condition and kidney damage are all problems resulting from amphetamine abuse.

The term "pygmy twylyte" is, I think, connected to the song "City of Tiny Lites," another song concerned with drug abuse. The city of tiny lites is visible after the use of downers and wine; similarly, the green hocker (incidentally, he's probably a hocker because he's been driven to sell most of his possessions to pay for his drug habit) is "smokin' in the pygmy twylyte" after doing some Quaaludes in order to end his four-day amphetamine bender. I would conjecture that Frank may have heard a story about someone on 'ludes or some other sedative who, in the trance-like state induced by the drug, imagined seeing a tiny little city, maybe in a puddle or some other reflective surface, lit up by a streetlight. This would conform with Frank's usual tendency of commemorating "true stories" or events in song form.

It is also, of course, consistent with FZ's strong anti-drug stance. For Frank, anyone who allows him or herself to become suspectible to delusions of the kind described in those songs is worthy of ridicule. The proclivity of Americans to being taken in by illusions, whether drug-induced or otherwise, was a socio-cultural trait of which Zappa strongly disapproved. To him, drugs were an escape and could only be destructive, whether indirectly, by making the user unable to face the reality of his situation or by directly wreaking havoc on his body. Zappa hated deceit and felt a lot of America's problems were caused by its people being unwilling or unable to face up to the truth, no matter how ugly.

To me, if you can't get any of this out of the song's lyrics and are willing to dismiss them as "absurd," you have no business writing a book that purports to concern itself with an analysis of Zappa's lyrics. Anyway, that's why I think Kelly Lowe's book sucks.

The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, by Kelly Fisher Lowe

I am about a third of the way through Kelly Fisher Lowe's ambitious book. Unfortunately it really seems as if he is attempting to bite off more than he can chew. Maybe I misunderstood him, but he seems to promise a much more interesting and in-depth analysis than he appears capable of delivering, at least in this relatively short volume. In trying to cover so much ground (he attempts to say something about nearly every song on the 40 or so albums he's chosen to write about), he has no choice but to maintain a rather brisk pace throughout, which makes for some fairly shallow readings of Zappa's songs.

That in itself wouldn't be so bad if the book were not also as riddled with errors as any other Zappa book. This is a continual problem that seems to plague everyone who writes about Zappa and/or his music. Apparently, despite the fact that all the correct information is easily available online, it is impossible to publish a Zappa book without an enormous number of factual errors as well as typos.

Typos certainly happen in almost any published book, especially first editions, but why do so many extremely conspicuous ones seem to get by in these Zappa books? The case in point here is that in Lowe's book, the VERY FIRST PAGE has a glaring typo: he refers to a "Stratocaster and a Fender Camp" from the song Joe's Garage.

Excuse me?? Fender fucking Camp?!? Listen, if there's anybody out there writing a book on Zappa right now, please hear my plea: hire me as your proofreader, PLEASE. I promise you, by the time I am done with your manuscript, there will be no such typographical mistakes lurking within its pages.

On the other hand, is it possible mistakes like that are introduced later on, after the author is already done with his manuscript and the process of publishing has begun? I really don't know this process or how it works, so maybe there are weird things like infinite numbers of monkeys locked away in rooms retyping manuscripts for some arcane reason and this introduces these sorts of typos. I DON'T KNOW.

But what I do know is, my copy of Frank's autobiography (admittedly a trade paperback and therefore possibly not a first edition) does not have these kind of typos. In fact, although I admit I haven't gone over every page as carefully as I could, I don't recall seeing ANY typos at all in The Real Frank Zappa Book.

Anyway, moving on to more serious mistakes. There are the usual, by now expected, simple factual errors throughout the book. Disappointing as these may be for the Zappa fan, we are certainly not surprised to encounter such erroneous information in a Zappa book. However, what particularly irks me is not these sorts of errors which, as inexcusable as they are, at least can be looked up and easily corrected (for example, how hard is it to remember that the album, Does Humor Belong In Music? actually documents Zappa's touring unit in 1984, NOT 1982 -- two VERY different bands that any serious Zappa fan would be able to tell apart by ear almost instantly).

What gets me is that Lowe, admittedly not a musicologist (and presumably not a musician), nevertheless bandies about technical music terms that have very specific meanings and, not surprisingly, uses them incorrectly a number of times. He refers to the song "Mr. Green Genes" as a "half-time waltz" for example, which it is clearly not (at the bare minimum a waltz has to be in 3/4). Similarly, he asserts that "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" starts off as "a basic shuffle," which it does not. There is not a single second of shuffle rhythm in that song. It is much more akin to a march, an attribute that is accentuated on the 1988 live arrangement as heard on The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.

In fact, almost every time Lowe writes about the music rather than the lyrics, he either gets it wrong or writes a description so generic as to be interchangeable. For example, here is the rest of his description of "Peace Corps":

As the song develops, you find Zappa working in his usual vein of odd and varying time signatures [actually the entire song is in 4/4]. The song starts and stops and segues quite unexpectedly. It finally ends up with a marvelous light jazz outro with Zappa speaking over it.

What purpose do these kind of descriptions serve? For those of us who know the songs as well (or better than) Lowe, it doesn't advance our understanding of the music. For those who don't know the song, it certainly isn't specific enough to give one much of an idea of what it sounds like -- and the parts that are specific are either misleading or downright inaccurate.

Every book I have read on Zappa has contained musical descriptions of this sort and they are usually laughable at best. Ben Watson, whose book Lowe highly recommends in the bibliographic essay in the back, is probably more guilty than most of coming up with page after page of these ludicrous descriptive passages. They might provide the author and certain readers with some enjoyment, but their informational content is close to zero.

Maybe the thing I like the most about this book is that it makes me want to write a much better book on Zappa's music. I think I could do a lot better job than anybody else published so far. It would be nice if there were a book out there besides Frank's autobiography that wasn't totally fucked up in one way or another.

Ockerian Addenda

In response to my posting on Zappa the other day, David Ocker made some interesting comments I'd like to address. (His comments are in block quotes below.)

The original title of the piece (for the first, oh, week or so) was "Blow Job". But eventually he made it a narrative about Mo and Herb charging Frank for their vacation in Pamplona. Sarcastic is exactly the right word. Don't forget the airhorn at the end.

The original title is too funny. "Blow Job" sounds like the closest thing to a generic Zappa title he ever came up with. And the sarcasm, I don't know whether it came through as such to my girlfriend -- she seemed rather baffled by the whole thing.

But if you can appreciate Zappa's sense of humor and the peculiar physicality of his music -- I don't know if this makes sense, but Zappa referred a lot to the physical processes involved in making music (e.g. the air moving around a room), to the extent that I sometimes get the feeling he did think of himself as almost like a kind of scientist. I feel like a scientific attitude informed much of the way he approached music. In any case, when I listen to Zappa's music I feel a strong sense of the physical world, of an appreciation of sounds in themselves, rather than the intellectual, abstract music of most composers in the European classical tradition.

In other words, although I'm sure there are exceptions one might think of, I feel like in general when Zappa composed, he was thinking about sound itself more so than he was thinking about things like harmony, melody and "meaning". Not that he didn't possess a lot of technical knowledge, but it was being used in ways that the people who canonized Western "music theory" would not have intended (or even have been able to conceive of).

Perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch to say that Zappa took the tools of Western music and basically used them to negate the purposes for which they had been designed. However, if this is an accurate statement, I believe it was only a means to an end: to subvert people's expectations and allow them to really LISTEN, at least for a little while. Once he had done this, they would be ready to hear the true content of his music: raw, uncensored imagination, translated into the physical world through the medium of sound.

You wrote "We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation." - he wrote music of all kinds because that's what he did; it was fundamental to him, like eating or breathing.

I would be foolish to argue that writing music was not fundamental to Frank Zappa's nature. However, as I am at times an exceptionally foolish person, I'll go ahead and do it right now. I think composition was fundamental to his personality -- but I think it could as easily have been something other than music that captured his interest. It was the physical immediacy of the sounds of Varese and R&B music that drew him, I believe. Had those two types of music not been there for him to absorb as a teenager, he might have turned out quite differently.

Are you wondering why this piece didn't come out sounding like Bobby Brown or Dynamo Hum. It's trite but also true to say "because he was a good composer" - he picked the beginning materials (guitar licks for sure and some people say even a quote from Varese) and he developed the ideas creatively until the piece said what he wanted it to (in the Zappa language) and until he liked the way it sounded.

I don't have much to add here, except to say that I agree, and to emphasize the last part: liking the way it sounded was crucial for him. I think Zappa had a large variety of sounds that he enjoyed and wanted to hear expounded in certain ways. So for him, the sounds inherent in the formation of "Bobby Brown" were important enough, in their own way, for him to complete its composition. He may not have enjoyed playing that song (or "Dinah-Moe Humm") dozens (hundreds?) of times, but he recognized its appeal and felt it was a small price to pay for being able to continue his career.

What I want to know is - did your girlfriend enjoy the music - or did she just wonder why he had even bothered?

I don't think she enjoyed it. I think Zappa is really baffling to her. She's a musician but she loves music that is complex in very different ways: Carlo Gesualdo, Monteverdi and J.S. Bach, for example, are three of her favorite composers. Mind you, I really enjoy that stuff too, but Zappa will always be closer to my heart, I think, because it is what I listened to when I was young and impressionable. Even when I don't listen to Zappa's music for many months at a time, I feel like it's still right there with me.

A Brief Message of Thanks

When I wrote my last post, I never imagined it would be read and commented on by anyone, let alone David Ocker himself. I started this blog as an outlet for my arts-related thoughts and opinions. Only recently did I think about the idea of other people reading and appreciating what I'm doing here. As a teenager I thought of myself as a writer and a wannabe musician/composer. For the past 5 or 6 years I haven't thought of myself as anything other than a person trying to get over my personal problems and earn a living doing whatever I can stomach for eight or ten hours a day.

Anyway, my point is that I'm glad that not only am I writing again, but that, thanks to the magic of blogging, it's possible for what I write to be read by others. Hopefully I can keep this up.

In my next post, which should be following this one within the next hour or so, I want to address the comment Mr. Ocker left. As you might imagine, he supplied some interesting information and raised some good points/questions to which I'm itching to respond.