We will be emailing all seven winners shortly requesting their snail mail addy. Congrats to those who won, apologies to those who didn’t get picked… Regardless: thanks all for participating. It’s been a fun ride!
Category: In Writing
The Tom Waits Book Has Materialized
You’ll remember my going on and on about the Tom Waits book Sharl and I illustrated. Ah, well a couple of days ago we finally got our copy:
The front- and back-cover with some of the postcards.
Some more postcards.
It really turned out to be a wonderful book — great attention to detail, typography, paper choice as well as an excellent print job. More, larger pictures are available here. Call me biassed but Sharleena and I are really proud to have been part of this project.
As of now, the book is available for purchase at the publisher’s site for a mere 15 euro. Place your order fast enough, and you’ll get all twelve chapter illustrations in postcard form shipped along for free!
On/Off
A mix of things that you may or may not already know…
- New ZPZ tourdates are announced.
- Gail and Dweez talk about an upcoming Ruben & The Jets release (mp3 link), akin to, or so it seems, the MOFO project.
- No more Zappa beers to be issued.
- A nice set of pictures taken at Project/Object’s Feb 6 ’09 gig, courtesy of our pal SOFA.
- Paul Green’s School of Rock obtains the approval stamp from the ZFT (sort of odd, since they had been sent a Cease & Desist letter previously.) We actually called a PR representative of “School of Rock” who confirmed to us that “matters have been settled” — upon which he couldn’t get off the phone with us fast enough. Hi Alex!
- Your Three Month Old – Week One — oh wait, wrong weblog…
- From Inkanish Records comes news of a compilation CD entitled “Pay The Indian”. All funds are to go to Jimmy Carl Black’s family. The album has contributions from Don Preston and Bunk Gardner, The Wrong Object, Zappatika and Ed Mann — among others.
- Take a deep breath: A Brief History of Developments in 20th Century Classical Music, related to the compositional style of Frank Zappa.
- Relevant perhaps to some recent discussions here: a profile of “moot”, creator of 4chan, as well as Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling. Long story short: don’t be an ass.
- Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes — or Sinister Footwear if you prefer…
Conceptual Continuity, Anyone?
A while ago, I was sent a link to a course on the music of Frank Zappa, given between 2001 and 2007 by one Jason Klein of the University of North Texas. Browsing around, I stumbled across this PDF (caution: 23MB download), in which one page meticulously visualizes Zappa’s notion of Conceptual Continuity:
The above is just a thumbnail. To study the graph in all its glory, download the big version here (3MB jpg). If bandwidth is no issue, I’ve also uploaded the chart to Flickr for online viewing. Fascinating stuff — someone make a poster out of this!
Tom Waits: Musik & Mythos
It took our pal Tommi Brem and his associate Daniel Knapp two years to translate Jay S. Jacob’s Tom Waits biography, “Wild Years: the Music and Myth of Tom Waits”, into German — Tommi at one point likened it to birthing a baby elephant.
Now, finally, the book is about to be published and ready for pre-ordering.
You may remember that Sharl and I were approached to create chapter illustrations for this book, as well as a cover. Given the subject, that turned out to be great fun, despite a near fatal computer crash.
For those interested: if you pre-order the book, you get a free set of high-quality postcards with all 12 illustrations printed on them.
As for Sharl and I: we’re chuffed to have been part of this project! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go camp near the mailbox and await the arrival of my copy 🙂
On Twitter
As you all know I’m a…
…recent father of a newborn child [who] behaves like an old man.
— bernard
Whatever.
Just wanted to announce I’ve had a Twitter account for some time now, where I post tweets: tiny messages with a 140 characters limit. Provided you signed up for a Twitter account, this service enables you to subscribe (“follow” is the term they use) and reply to these updates via most mobile devices as well as various desktop or web-based applications. Give it a go, it’s a lot easier than my explanation is making it out to be here.
I plan to use this Twitter gizmo for fast little updates on anything FZ related, announcements of new blog posts and such — but do expect the odd completely non-FZ-related banter every so often though.
Oh, and for my next “tweet”, I had this in mind:
@bernard: I twit, you twat.
Unfortunately, Bernard doesn’t have a Twitter account.
Zappa Autographs
Says SOFA in a thread that kind of morphed into a discussion on FZ autographs:
TBN had a nice page of sigs, at one point in time (hint).
Now, I know a hint when I see one and yes, TBN did have some nice sigs (two, three). Since we’re on the topic, here’s my coveted little FZ sig, a birthday gift from a distinguished English gentleman who goes by the name of Magic Fingers, I hasten to add.
How about yourself? I would be interested to see any autographs (FZ or other!) you boys ‘n girls may have collected in the past. If you have any, drop me a note at killuglyradio [at] gmail [dot] com with a pic attached and perhaps a little blurb on how you obtained it, and I’ll see if I can post them here.
Persona Non Grata: Adrian Belew Weighs In
With regard to this, here’s what Adrian Belew has to say:
I told dweezil I would try my best to insure he would not see andre. but I put it off and put it off and I want to make this clear: I did not say anything to andre. andre had no idea that he should keep out of dweezil’s sight.
why did I not keep my word to dweezil? andre is a valued member of my crew and a friend. I know how much he loves frank’s music. I could not bring myself to hurt andre’s feeling.
Be sure to read the whole post. Thanks to Joe Crawford for the head’s up.
GZ: “No matter what I do/release you hate it.”
Last Saturday, in a topic related to Joe’s Menage, Gail Zappa posted the following in this zappa.com forum thread:
Ok. So the simple truth is that I have been trying to figure out how to respond to the meanies that infest this Forum. But I am at a loss. No matter what I do/release you hate it. Go hate somewhere else please. And kindly do it usefully – without messing up your neighbor’s thrill. The way you “use” your brains is just another fine example of the reason why democracy is being stifled by things called choices like Sarah Palin. Ahhh, but yes, there is something I do want to say: 1. I will NEVER make a Frank Zappa record. You will not see any continuation of YCDTOSA or anything approximating any other Master Recording by FZ – as though it is something he would have made – as if you have any right to think I would respect you for being anywhere near having that opinion. I do not dream through the night of holding anything near you near me. 2. To suggest you read liner notes is redundant. 3. Much as I might – no, nevermind – FZ told me long ago to NOT waste any energy on people who don’t get it so, you don’t get to know anything more about what I might want to say here. I love my tongue so much I am going to be the only one who gets to hold it.
Well I for one never said I hated everything she’s released in the last years. There’s no Zappa music one can “hate” as far as I’m concerned. There are merely variable degrees of “excellent” to “good” to “not so good” — which are relative terms to begin with, when speaking about Zappa music.
As for the overall tone of the above comment, I dunno: is she saying that to criticize an FZ release is proof that one is prone to voting for Sarah Palin?
What say ye?
Interview With Jimmy Carl Black
A few months back Just a week ago, Andrew Greenaway did an interview with Jimmy Carl Black. Despite health problems, Jimmy’s in good spirits, performing with The Muffin Men and recording with various other artists across Europe. Just one project he’s worked on:
The CD is called The Jimmy Carl Black Story. It is due out anytime. I basically went into the studio one night and told my life story. It took me about one and a half hours to do it. He [Jon Larsen – ed.] then used some blues players from Oslo and also some of the guys from the Strange News CD for the background music.
Jimmy won’t make it to Zappanale this year, but has already set his mind on next year’s edition. Which is cool, since Sharl and I won’t be able to make it there either this year, for reasons that we may well expound upon at a later date. Read the whole article here.