Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

Unfinished Business In The ALP

Gillard Wanted To Handball The PM Chair To Combet

I like Greg Combet. He's the only politician I know of who has admitted to being a fan of Frank Zappa. He's done now, but while he was around, I had hopes for the man. Perhaps these hopes were misplaced, given that the sort of man who likes Frank Zappa might look at Australian Politics and choose to walk away. I have to respect that as a voter, but it's still sad. Maybe it got too hard to work in Parliament all week and go home and put on a Frank Zappa record and there is Frank singing "Keep it greasy so it goes down easy". I'd imagine the cognitive dissonance might become unbearable. And so it is that he left Parliament at the end of his term at the 2013 election.

The news today - more like a non-news really - is that Julia Gillard offered to hand him the Prime Minster's chair, just to fend off Kevin Rudd. This is pretty bleak material.

An embattled Julia Gillard secretly offered to stand down as Prime Minister in June 2013 and secure the leadership for then Climate Change and Industry minister Greg Combet in order to fend off Kevin Rudd, Mr Combet has revealed.

But dogged by months of ill-health, and unsure that a switch to a third leadership contender so close to an election would improve Labor’s position, Mr Combet declined the chance to be prime minister.

‘‘I was struggling a good deal personally by the time June [2013] came around’’ Mr Combet told Fairfax Media in an interview this week. ‘‘I was in constant pain with the problems that I was having, and the thought of taking on additional responsibility and not being 100 per cent fit to do it, in that febrile environment, it didn’t look easy.’’

This ALP factional infighting is pretty awful stuff. It partly goes with the terrain of the Westminster system, and over the years we've been made to be inured to its odd outcomes. The ins and outs of these machinations are way beyond the purview of the electorate, and are subject to influences from such things as the Unions and lobby groups. It's just difficult to understand how they could have cocked up so many decisions along the way.

He says he remains convinced that former Opposition Leader Kim Beazley would have won the 2007 federal election and become a highly successful Labor Prime Minister if Mr Rudd had not dislodged him.

ACTU polling as part of the Your Rights At Work Campaign in the run up to the 2007 election left him ‘‘completely convinced Beazley would have won’’, which would have resulted in a ‘‘vastly more experienced, mature person as Prime Minister presiding over, for want of a better description, a really grown up government, avoiding all the mistakes’’.

‘‘Neither Julia nor Kevin had had a lot of experience in leadership roles and I think that impacted on their capacity to do the job’’ Mr Combet told Fairfax Media.

So at least we were right all along in 2007, that the Rudd-Gillard leadership was a balls-up waiting to happen. It's a shame I can't point to neither Kevin Rudd nor Julia Gillard as the same kinds of leaders as Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam before them. The tumultuous six years in government exposed all the problems of the ALP that went unsolved since Keating lost in 1996. The problem is compounded by the fact that neither Kim Beazley nor Simon Crean were able to restructure the party in the way it needed to be restructured, and Mark Latham's turn was certainly hobbled by the same influences that replaced Beazley twice, that put in Rudd, removed Rudd, removed Gillard and essentially burnt the metaphorical house down.

Oh, and Ms. Gillard, I will never forget the slight you made when you said you were not a social democrat.

Here's Mark Latham being particularly frank about it.

Faulkner’s reform plan, to be put to State Conference this weekend, is to allow ALP branch members to select the party’s upper house tickets. Having given rank-and-file members a say in the selection of Labor’s federal and state leaders, why shouldn’t they be empowered to preselect upper house candidates? Why doesn’t Clements trust the True Believers who staff the polling booths, who keep their local branches alive, who fight so passionately for the cause of Labor?

Far from restricting rank-and-file union involvement, democratisation encourages it. It says to union members: don’t allow union secretaries doubling up as factional bosses to make all the big decisions. Join your local ALP branch and have a direct say in how the party is run: in picking federal and state leaders, in selecting Labor’s lower and upper house candidates.

This is what Faulkner is trying to achieve: Labor as a membership-based party, rather than a narrow factional-based clique.

Mark Latham's been made out to be a crazy person by the media which must be galling because he commentates in the media; and once upon a decade ago, he was the guy trying to put together a way back to office, when the party machine had run through both Beazley and Crean and found them wanting. It's hard to forget those terrible years either, together with the terrible campaign and defeat that followed. And all that time, the likes of Mark Arbib and Paul Howes were fucking shit up from behind the scenes.

It's really hard to forgive the ALP. Especially if you don't want to vote for the right.

The Zero Year Of Your Coordinates

Your Mother Should Know

I recently did a bunch of covers of side 3 of the Beatles' 'White Album'. What prompted it was a combination of coming off a 12 song set of fairly difficult and challenging tracks which exhausted me and the desire to just play a bunch of stuff I liked as a teen. After I posted them up, it occurred to me that the 'White Album' was recorded in 1968, placing it 45 years ago.

Now, I don't know about you, but that is actually an interminably long time in the timescale of pop music. Paul McCartney is about to come out with a new album (called 'New') so he's still going strong after the morbidly death-obsessed 'Memory Almost Full' album, but I sat and tried to figure out how music that old - 45years! - must look like to say, an 18year old today.

If I subtract 45 from the year I was 18, it goes firmly into the late 1930s. Now, I had no shot of owning any music from the late 1930s, let alone being more than passingly familiar with it. Quite frankly I - or my other music listening, record-buying friends- would have been extremely unlikely to be familiar with anything that old.

And yet, Walk-Off HBP went to see Ringo Starr earlier this year because his daughter wanted to see Ringo, so clearly the charms of music that's 45-50 years old is not entirely lost on kids of today. Obviously it's going to vary from person to person, household to household, family to family. Even so, you wonder about the distance of this time that separates one from the moment of recording.

Bono was saying in some interview someplace that each time U2 go into a studio there's a challenge of doing better than before but also an equally large battle to be relevant. So it can't be easy for anybody to be doing any recording 10years, 20years and 30years in. You sure don't see Led Zeppelin heading for the studio with Jason Bonham, you don't see a new album from the Rolling Stone every 2years, it just doesn't happen.

That being said recorded music has one advantage over literature and movies and it is the ability music has to be consumed over and over again. Even your most favourite movie can only be sat through a handful f times unless you want to make a total study of it. Your favourite albums will be by our side in decades to come, surviving multiple listens upon listens. I think the reason why music drags me back is that in the end I can control my output in a ay that is closed off to me in the cinema. I'm doing more and more recordings because I am able to complete thoughts, ideas, concepts; then execute and finish; and in finishing, I am able to move on to the next thing.

This is in stark contrast to the horrors of being a screenwriter and waiting for people to get back to you about your script; and in most instances, nothing gets made even if people tell you how much they like your writing. Frank Zappa certainly wasn't wrong when he said "music is best".  There's certainly a lot of wisdom in that observation.

Movie Doubles - 'Human Centipede' & 'Unthinkable'

The Horror, The Horror

I don't know what's more frightening; knowing you're going to be hit with something and being hit with it, or not suspecting what you're about to be hit with and being hit with it. That's exactly what we had here with these two films and really, moral repugnance of the subject matter in both these films is quite extraordinary.

I knew what was going to happen in 'Human Centipede' and when it hit, it was as gruesome as I had been told. But I was totally blindsided by just what 'Unthinkable' was going towards and in many ways I found the latter a lot more challenging to digest. What separates the two might be scale of the depravity in one and the consequences of the depravity in the other.

So here's the spoiler alert. I will have to talk about pretty specific things to make this movie double entry work. There's just no choice.

Both films are horrifying but one goes in a very transgressive personal way while the other commits to pushing the logic to the point of absolute horror. How do we in the civilised world countenance torture, let alone conceive of a methodology and a system for torture? Both these films shed immense light on just what it is that takes us to torture

The Sadean Vision

First, 'Human Centipede' is not as bad as the reviewers say it is. It actually has quite a bit of artistic ambition and pretension. In many ways it lives up to its ambitions as it goes inexorably to its central image, the human centipede. The human centipede is the surgical combining of 3 human beings, anus to mouth so that one long alimentary tract is created.

The logical ramification of this is that the second party is forced to eat the shit of the first party, and the third party is forced to digest the shit of the shit coming out of the first party through the second party. Why exactly a mad scientist wants to do this is not really well explained except for his one line, "I hate humans."

As gruesome as it is, there is a great deal of black humour in the conception. The director Tom Six is reported to have said that the film started a s a joke in a pub where he argued that child molesters should have their mouths sewn to the anus of fat truckies and forced to eat their shit. Well, this is that film all right in all its loving rendering.

It is a horror worthy of something straight out of the Marquis de Sade's collection. Indeed, even the story of how 2 tourists end up in the dungeon of despair (as Frank Zappa would have sung it) is similar to de Sade's 'Justine' where a girl wanders through the forest and wanders into an inn full of evil people. It's even in line with Hansel and Gretel, except the genders are reversed and the horror is coprophagy instead of cannibalism.

The Orwellian Vision

Compared to 'Human Centipede', 'Unthinkable' is flat out Orwellian. The film is about a desperate interrogation that entails significant amounts of torture. We don't quite know where the film is going until well into the second act when Samuel Jackson's character 'H' starts hoe-ing into Michael Sheen's Yusuf. This film is what happens in Room 101, extended out to its logical extreme.

There are a few caveats on this point. In 1984, the state's motive is gratuitous or so arcane as to be indecipherable. In 'Unthinkable' the state's motive is clear as daylight - it seeks to stop a nuclear catastrophe from taking place.  There is a big reason for the torture to take place because the guy is holding some vital information, It has to be extracted or millions will die. To that end of extracting the information, 'H' pulls out all stops from his bag of torture tricks trying to break Yusuf. Representing our relatively civilian and thus cozy point of view is Carrie-Anne Moss' Agent Helen Brodie.

Agent Brodie's moral dilemma is thus, should she be willing to commit acts of evil in order to  save a great many lives? She recoils in horror, but gradually her duty to the state forces her to tacitly condone H's methods. H, has long ago made ethical choices to affirm torture as his means of extracting information. In H's view, it is a moral weakness not to embrace the full ramification of committing to interrogation and thus torture. It's a joyless sadism in stark contrast to the joyous sadism of Dr. Heiter in 'Human Centipede'.

The Point Of Cruelty

It's never explained why the evil character Dr. Heiter came to hate humanity so much that he could commit such atrocities as they are portrayed in 'Human Centipede'. We can't even begin to guess at his disgust and thus it is hard to understand the whys and wherefores of 'Human Centipede'. Dr. Heiter is not seeking to squeeze out the truth or information from his victims like 'H'. He just likes the look of three people daisy-chained through surgery, which is to say his choice is an aesthetic one.

The aestheticisation of violence and cruelty is the hallmark of Marquis de Sade's work, which in turn explains things like Nazisms and the curious pleasure its meanest bastards took in devising concentration camps. Many people ask "how could the Nazis have done such terrible things?"  The answer was already written down by the Marquis who at least lived to see the French Revolution's high ideals devolve into the ritual of the  guillotine.

What then is the point of cruelty but pleasure?

At least, that is the point put forward by de Sade, and when you plug that through Freud, you can see how pleasure and cruelty can be conjoined and suddenly you have Nazism and concentration camps and Josef Fritzl the Dungeon Dad. Josef Fritzl for instance would not be such news if his crimes didn't push upon a bunch of our taboos but also our self-understanding about cruelty and pleasure.

The Torture Never Stops (The Uncle Frank Vision)


What if you then found joy in your work as a torturer? Or found that you were good at it, and that the state had great need of your services? The addition of duty makes for heady mix. Perhaps this is the big difference between say Fritzl's essentially domestic and private atrocity and the humanitarian catastrophe that was the Extermination Camps?

The character of 'H' is possibly the most honest representation of the ugliest face of American Imperialism. It is the face of all imperialism that has taken place in history. Here are the lyrics to Frank Zappa's 'The Torture Never Stops'. Check out this verse:

Flies all green 'n buzzin' in his dungeon of despair
An evil prince eats a steamin' pig in a chamber right near there
He eats the snouts 'n the trotters first
The loin's 'n the groin's is soon dispersed
His carvin' style is well rehearsed
He stands and shouts
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
And disagree, well no-one durst
He's the best of course of all the worst
Some wrong been done, he done it first

That is how the character of 'H''s handler works. 'H' is the very instrument of torture of the state.

Talk about misanthropy. 'H' has done so much torture in his life, he no longer feels any joy in it any more. He is jaded by his one talent, that used to give him so much joy. What he doesn't understand is that the duty allowed him to do all those tortures, but it is duty that slowly killed the joy in him. If it isn't perverse enough that our most important character is a Sadist, he is a sated Sadist.

Dr. Heiter can't restrain his joy as he yells, "Feed Her!" as the first person in the centipede defecates into the mouth of the second character. There's none of that with 'H', because he's just done it once too often. This is more frightening than Dr. Heiter, though that may be hard to believe. 'Human Centipede' is a black comedy next to the ethical direness of 'Unthinkable'.

The Utilitarian Ethos As Challenge

The direness of 'Unthinkable actually stems from a philosophical challenge that is being laid down to us. It's the re-imagining of the 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan' and 'Star Trek: The Search for Spock' problematic of "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" versus "The Needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many", but applied to the present day problem of terrorism.

Let's imagine for a moment we take the irrationalist Kirk position of the latter "needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many". Just how many of the 'many' are we willing to sacrifice or ignore before we come back to the rationalist "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" position of Spock? In 'Unthinkable', it is made very clear that the rational view has to prevail when there is a nuclear threat to 3 cities - enough to compromise high principles of the society not to commit torture. Is this good? Morally speaking, absolutely not. But if you want to save those millions of people, then it becomes incumbent upon the interrogators to use any and all means necessary to squeeze the answer out of the one person.

And this is the horrible little secret of our society with all its wealth and privilege over other parts of the planet. It is exactly the truth we cannot handle, as per what Colonel Jessup says in 'A Few Good Men'. All our high principles and morals and ethics are luxuries upheld by the willingness of certain parties - the armed forces and black ops - to undertake unspeakable brutality in order to preserve the lifestyle of the many.  Every day we in the so-called civilised world are the beneficiaries and the many whose needs are outweighing the needs of the tortured.

If 'A Few Good Men' took us to the portal of understanding this problem, then 'Unthinkable marches right in and shows us how the house of horrors is furnished. Compared to that very real house of horror, the house of horrors created by Dr. Heiter is very tame. 'Unthinkable' grabs our moral sensibility by the scruff of the neck, and shoves its snout into the shit that comes from the hypocrisy we practice by preaching our moral sensibilities. For some this would be a surprise. If you've been reading politics for a while, you will know that this is indeed the be all and end all of our pretty civilisation: that we live and die by our hypocrisy. Mostly, we thrive happily, oblivious.

Coprophagy And Other Taboos

Any time a film is made that transgresses a taboo, the critics line up to condemn the film for getting made. For instance, 'Pink Flamingoes' by John Waters has Divine eating dog shit and caused a furor. Incest in 'Chinatown' also disturbed critics. 'Happiness' which featured a family man who happened to be a child rapist could not get rated. 'Salo' continues to be a problem for the Australian censor board.

It's interesting that 'Human Centipede' gets this critique from Roger Ebert:

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.

It's funny that he thought it was that bad. It's not. Meanwhile there's hardly a review for 'Unthinkable'.

Between the two films, you'd think that 'Unthinkable' would be the film that might be the most threat to the decency of our society given what it says about who we are. What's perhaps even more disturbing is that critics and censor boards think that torture by the state is okay, but private torture is not.

Terry Bozzio & Punky Meadows

"I'm So Cute"

I was watching the Zppa Plays Zappa DVD and the special guest on the end of the first disc was Terry Bozzio. He looked a little stressed and unhappy to be there at that point in his life, re-living moments from his distant youth playing for Frank Zappa. Also notable was the amazing drum kit he had as he led the band through 'I'm So Cute' and 'Tryin' To Grow A Chin' and the all-time gender-bender song, 'Punky's Whips'.

Anyway, that led me to check up on what Terry Bozzio's been doing since the 70's Zappa band and Missing Persons.

Here's Terry Bozzio.

Like Hall of Fame drummer Gary Chester, Bozzio is noted for creating the melodic ostinato for the drum set.[citation needed] In most of Bozzio’s works, the ostinato is played using various bass drum and hi-hat permutations while he solos against these rhythms using his hands. Sometimes (often in the same composition) the opposite is true, where he will hold an ostinato pattern with his hands and solo with his feet. Like Chester, Bozzio developed the application for the melodic ostinato for drum set when he noticed how a pianist would solo or play counter rhythms against the ostinato or pedal point. He then applied this concept to the drum set.[citation needed]
Bozzio is also noted for creating orchestral compositions on the drum set by playing polyrhythms and metric modulations[citation needed] while utilizing his large custom kit (sometimes nicknamed "SS Bozzio"), in which the tom toms are tuned to specific notes to create the atmosphere that is Bozzio’s signature sound. Terry Bozzio’s influence has been seen in some of the most prominent drummers of today including Marco Minnemann, Thomas Lang, Mike Mangini and Chris Utter.
Terry Bozzio currently endorses Drum Workshop drums, Sabian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks and Attack drum heads, all of which have special custom lines designed for him. In fact, his cymbals were designed from the ground up by Bozzio himself, including a completely different kind of lathing method. Terry is known to use various white noise cymbal pairings, where he stacks multiple crashes and/or china cymbals to create atypical sounds. This idea may have arisen from Zappa's abhorrence of loud cymbals, so to satisfy his boss, he cut large chunks out of his cymbals, which created a "swooshy", and more trashy sound. This is seen in the Baby Snakes movie in prominence. The "SS Bozzio" is often just as amazing, to onlookers of his performances, as the drummer himself. His kit has evolved from a fairly standard large drum set, akin to that of Neil Peart, including various sound effects and the standard drum arrangements, to his current setup which includes more than 10 pedals to operate various percussion devices and dozens of drums to achieve his melodic drum parts.

This led me to a cool interview here and here. It's chock-a-block full of interesting insights.

"Punky, Punky, Your Albums Are Shit! - I Promise Not To Cum In Your Mouth"

For years this part of the song has made me laugh. To confess, I'd never seen a photo of Punky Meadows, so I'd never really understood what the hell Frank was writing about - but the above line sort of sums it all up nicely for even the unfamiliar to have a guess.

Anyway, here's the entry on Punky Meadows.

After Cherry People disbanded, Meadows and Mickie Jones formed Daddy Warbux, later Bux, which released one album.[2] Angel formed after the two met Gregg Giuffria and then Barry Brandt and Frank Dimino, choosing the name "Angel" after the song by Jimi Hendrix,[1] of whom Meadows was a fan.
Angel released studio albums from 1975 to 1979 and the live album Live Without a Net in 1980, and disbanded not long thereafter after not achieving mass critical or popular success. Meadows, however, both during his tenure with the band and thereafter was invited to join Kiss, Aerosmith, and the New York Dolls, all of which he turned down.[1]
The band possessed a strong glam image that was said to be the antithesis of Kiss's,[2] while Meadows himself became the most strongly associated with the glam persona, so much so that Frank Zappa ridiculed his trademark pout and hair in the song "Punky's Whips". Meadows, however, was "flattered" and eventually ended up onstage during a Zappa concert in his Angel costume.[1]
While the band had (and still has) a number of fan sites, a fan of Meadows has a site devoted exclusively to him called the "Punky Meadows Shrine".[3]

Whereupon we learn Punky is no longer in the music business. It sort of makes sense.

He seems like a pretty good sport about the song. The wikipedia page led me to this entry here.

One of those listeners was Frank Zappa, who went so far as to write a song about Meadows. "Punky's Whips," originally slated to appear on the 1978 album Zappa in New York, dismisses Angel as product ("In today's rapidly changing world/Rock groups appear every 15 minutes/Utilizing some new promotional device," the song begins. "Some of these devices have been known/To leave irreparable scars on the minds of foolish young consumers") before delivering a slightly blunter verdict: "Punky, Punky, your album's the shits!/It's all wrong!"

To his credit, Meadows readily agreed to let Zappa record his mock tribute to the "pooched-out succulence of his insolent pouting rictus," even if his less-than-flattered bandmates delayed the song's release for several years. "I thought it was cool," he says. "Frank is very satirical, so you can't have a thin skin. I found it kind of flattering. Around the time he wrote the song, he was playing in L.A. He asked if I'd be willing to come onstage in my Angel costume and play with him on the song. I went to the concert, the curtain goes up, and there's this giant publicity photograph of me doing this pucker kind of thing. It was like Dean Martin's roast or something. Afterwards, Frank asked me to his place to drink some beer and play some tunes."

Despite Zappa's efforts--not to mention the rise of punk, grunge, and nu metal--Angel continues to be popular. All of its albums are in print. The band is even touring again, white outfits and all. But Meadows has consistently declined to rejoin the resurrected Angel, saying that "rock is for kids." Besides, he says, just the thought of "a bunch of 50-year-olds in white spandex" is enough to make him shudder.

He seems like a really well-adjusted guy considering the ridicule associated with his stage name. He seems like he's actually quite a decent dude. I wouldn't mind picking up some albums by Angel just to see if he was really doing it all wrong. I think Frank might have been overstating his disdain.

Some New Sounds I Bought

Zappa Plays Zappa

This one's a bonus CD that comes with a Double DVD of Dweezil Zappa leading his band through the sonic adventures of his old man Frank. I saw them over a year ago and it was a revelation to hear the songs played live and it didn't hurt to have Napolen Murphy Brock and Steve Vai playing on stage with them. My review of that show is here.

Since seeing them I'd seen the DVD set in various J&B hi-Fi shops I've been trundling into, priced at anywhere between $30.00 and $45.00. Having seen them live, and not wishing to let the memory totally fade, I decided to buy the thing only to discover there was a bonus audio disc. (Hooray!)

The songs are culled from their stage shows that have slightly different interpretations of the songs. The more standard takes are on the DVDs. They songs are played immaculately, and lovingly. IF there's one complaint I have, it's that they seem to go just a little too slowly. I've been listening to the 'You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore' Series on my iPod in the car for months now, and I'm used to hearing these numbers zip by with gusto and over-rehearsed casual abandon. It's no biggie, but you can hear on these recordings at least that Dweezil's band is still climbing the heights Frank's band found.

One more thing: Dweezil censors his old man's lyrics a lot. 'St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast' was missing the word cock in the line "He stumbled over his cock."

Not sure if Frank would have approved of that.

Sting Plays Reneaissance Stuff

It's a real drag to find the most pretentious impulses are the ones that get Sting a record from the immensely revered, all-conquering, Von-Karajan-inflected  Deutsche Grammophon label. The album I speak of is the 'Songs from the Labyrinth' where he sings the songs of John Dowland accompanied by Lute. I guess the curiosity got the better of me an I shelled out the bucks for this album. I might have been better buying the deluxe edition of 'The Who For Sale', but I thought, "no, buy something you wouldn't know the content thereof!"

I dunno.

Maybe I should stick with stuff I know I like at this stage of my life. Sting makes a fine job of huksing and crooning his way through this album to the accompaniment of a gorgeous sounding lute, but I just feel this is as phony a classical recording as my Beastie Bach, if not worse in as much as he just seems to make his delivery as straight as possible to put across the point that this is somehow a 'serious recording. I mean, it's a fine enough album but Deutsche Grammophon? Come off it Gordon!

To be blunt, I would have preferred if he played updated rock versions of these songs rather than this pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual quest for some kind of authenticity that fails because he's Sting. He should leave this stuff to people who do this stuff because they can't do anything else. He does rock, well. This is just perverse.

And I bought it like the sucker punter that I am. :(

My Song Of The Week

Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy

At long last I've finished my version of Frank Zappa's song off 'Bongo Fury'. Yeah, yeah, who else but Kim Basinger putting on her best "Fuck-me-face".

Here is the song page.

It's taken *months* to get around to finishing this thing. I've been piecing it together bit by bit, but nonetheless it has been a difficult track to do. Consider this version a sort of etude of sorts.
I thought the song was relatively uncomplicated but when you get down to the brass tacks of this song you find so much detail, it's amazing. That might be the last time I lightly and blithely go, "I know, I'll try and do that Frank Zappa song!"
Frank's stuff ain't easy.

Even so, I am tempted to think about 'Broken Hearts Are For Assholes' and 'Bobby Brown Goes Down'. Maybe another year. :)

Sick In Bed

I Ought To Be
But I keep turning up to work, because I just have to. No 2 ways about it. Doesn't leave me with much energy at the end of the day to sit and think about something interesting to say about the world.

I'm slowly working on a cover of 'Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy'. It takes time to untangle the complex arrangements that Frank Zappa rendered on his songs. I don't know why I like this song so much, in as much as it's simply an ode to obscure sexual practices, yet somehow the song manages to spell out the miracle of lust. I guess I got really inspired to do it when I saw Dweezil Zappa's band work their ay through it and suddenly it didn't look as complicated as the other songs in the Zappa repertoire.

The other thing I'm working on is a version of 'How Many More Times' with Dave Millard in England. He'll do the vocals and I'll do the rest. Should be fun. Anyway, you can all expect that in iComp in the next few weeks. Until then, I'll try and get better.