entry four

I thought it interesting after my last entry that you named Absolutely Free a "pageant," since those are typically associated with children and dress-up. This concept dovetails with Zappa's perceived immaturity and a conversation I was having in my poetry class about appropriation. Where does one draw the line between wilful appropriation and a kind of mockery, of the subject and oneself, an uneducated playing at the real thing?

This is a tough question to answer and I'm sure I'll continue to wrestle with it for the rest of my artistic life, and it's a question that can be really sensitive. Those who lack education or the means to obtain it, or even those who are fans of supposed autodidacts like Zappa, radibly oppose the need for education in the formation of a star or a genius. But then education seems to be the biggest factor in making the difference between that sense of authenticity and the sense of play-acting. My answer is that it's the hunger for knowledge that makes the difference between real geniuses and posers--even if Zappa did really have no formal education, I'm sure his devouring of composers like Varese and Stravinsky helped to develop his skill.

Some things that threw me off last class: the lines in Brown Shoes Don't Make It, "go to work, be a jerk." I think this delves a little into my discussion before of respect for the working class that isn't really seen in Zappa's work at all, rather something of a contempt. I understand the criticism, but sometimes the bluntness of Zappa's treatment of things tends towards the blindly inconsiderate. This also delves into a little discussion of ego. I've been having a lot of problems with unity and perfection lately. Discuss art all you want, but nobody's perfect. It becomes a problem of divorcing the work from its creator: I put down a book by Heidegger yesterday because I was advised of his Nazi leanings (and because I was $7 short). You brought up last class how it's possible that a large part of Zappa's creativity may have been inspired by revenge on the people who threw him in jail for making porn. I choose to attempt to reconcile the different parts of a person. I would rather have a complete, imperfect image than an untruthful, incomplete one. You have to attempt to find the beauty in that ugliness, that imperfection. You said in class that the willingness to personify ugliness is the sign of a good artist.

You also have to reconcile his role in society with his role as a father. I watched two movies recently which star eccentric fathers, David Lynch's documentary of R. Crumb and Get Him to the Greek. It's difficult to imagine people who seem so representative of everything wrong, lewd and perverted raising children properly. Sophie Crumb said of her dad in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, "We didn’t have orgies. He’s different toward me than he is with other people. Gentler. He’s the one who played Barbies with me. We had a name and a personality for each Barbie, and he gave each one a tone of voice."

You can read the whole interview here if you want.

Maybe all this stuff about children and immaturity is just coming up because I listened to Zappa when I was younger, though. When we were listening to Brown Shoes Don't Make It I was instantly reminded of City Hall by Tenacious D:



I used to love those guys.

this one's a little off-topic

I am consistently maddened by academia talking down to the puerilent audience. No one ever remembers what it's like to be a kid. Don't they know we all want to be treated as equals?

Firstly, they somehow place themselves in this category and simultaneously hover outside of it. I am but a lowly scholar, how could I attain the wisdom of Plato or Longinus or Milton? But as scholars, they at least cling to a higher rung than the common working class. All they enjoy is car chases and chicken wings, let them stuff themselves silly.

But in these searches for defects, obstacles, limits to art and what it can be, we forget that the true moment of creation happens not when the pen touches down on the page or the brush strokes the canvas, but rather when the final product of all that creative effort is enjoyed by another person. No matter their scholarly aspirations. I'm reading Longinus' On The Sublime for History of Criticism, and though in beginning to tackle his problem he says "It is necessary now to seek and to suggest means by which we may avoid the defects which attend the steps of the sublime," it was just a little further down the page that he inspired this idea by saying, "as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it had heard"... (70)

Food for thought. This is certainly going to be a place of digression.

Also interesting: I just learned the word puerilent today, and doesn't that bring up all sorts of fun things? We might consider what one considers juvenile sounds and subject matter when it comes to Frank Zappa, with his kazoos and profane lyrics. Also brings up some interesting things to do with academia's relation to Zappa's type of music, and causes me to think about the true relationship between maturity and music and education.

idolization of stars

As I was writing my discussion essay on the groupie phenomenon, it became difficult to escape the question of why we need celebrity status anyway. It's been said for years and I still think it as I pluck wet laundry from the machine, why do we push the most necessary components of our society to the bottom of the social strata and lift up those whose contribution to society is little or none? Why do we ostracize those who are making the truest, hardest working art and the most basic, necessary everyday items? Little kids are making our shoes and getting paid nothing and middle-aged actresses are raking in a fortune designing perfumes. We need shoes. We don't need perfume and Dockers and reality TV and tee-shirts and imitation hair and crab meat. So how come we give the people that make those things not only all our money but also all of our respect and most of our dignity too? And how come these same middle-aged actresses are also making a bundle off of "novels" about self-discovery and nose jobs while writers trying to make statements about humanity or sex or something that matters to them are rotting in cold-water apartments eating two-dollar cans of pasta?

I guess you could argue that it doesn't matter. Society, though it must suffer art, is completely divorced from it in terms of economy and sometimes common sense. And those people aren't really doing it for the money anyway. That would be selling out. So the people who want to make money make it, and the people who want to make art make that. Everyone's happy, right?

Except I guess what I'm trying to get at is the relationship between the population and celebrities. It goes deeper than just making money. It's about taking a step back and being truly baffled. Why do we idolize stars, or anybody for that matter? Because we, perhaps, would like to be more like them, we want to improve ourselves so we use others as role models. What I'm curious about is that true divide between common sense and art-making, something I've been trying to attack from various different angles for a long time. Treated delicately that tenuous divide/relationship can be pleasant beyond compare, but when exploited without thought it leads to terrible things. We rip young women with beautiful voices from their showers and throw them in front of an audience. We no longer value her talent. We have forgotten the girl who made us shiver with her vibrato by the time she's been cast in her first play.

We no longer want her talent or even her body. I talked in my discussion essay about how sex has become an entity outside of itself with no real definition but a kind of hovering sense of evil. Fame has become like that especially so. We don't want to look good in a floor-length evening gown, we don't want to look good in a bikini, we don't even want to look good naked, we just want to look good: but we would look horrible in rhinestone t-shirts, g-strings and extensions. We would be less happy getting drunk on a couch and getting fake tans in front of a TV camera than we are just being who we are.

entry one

I guess I'd like to start out with a little something about how this might work, like a mission statement. I'm planning on using this blog as a kind of repository for all that which might not make sense but which is hopefully relevant. I'll pin down stray Zappa thoughts here when I get the chance, with little regard for entry length or cohesiveness of subjects and opinions. I'll write this blog kind of like I write notes - sort of just using snippets of information and ideas from various sources to make connections and reach conclusions. Important words, phrases, pictures. I'll use this blog to contribute to my search for meaning in art the qualities that make good art. What makes people react. What makes me react, and what my version of good art is. Welcome to my Zappa (FFAR 389C) diary.