A late interview -- 1990; a few years before Zappa died. In this bit the interviewer asks him about early influences; Frank tells the oft-repeated story about phoning up Edgard Varèse on his fifteenth birthday. Then he moves on up through World War II, Eisenhower, and "that naughty old Joe McCarthy." Uploaded by TheNilesLeshProject.
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Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Well, I did end up making it to Phoenix Comicon this past Saturday. I'm still not feeling top of my game but I'm improving.
The whole thing was pretty overwhelming and uncomfortable but I managed to meet and get autographs from most of the creators I wanted: Mike and Laura Allred signed my X-Force #116 and commented proudly that it was the book that signaled an end of the Comics Code; I also got autographs from Ben Templesmith (Fell #1), Mike Mignola (the first Hellboy trade), Terry Moore (Echo #1), and John Layman (Chew #5). I brought a TMNT #50 in case I got a chance to meet Kevin Eastman, but he was one of the few creators who had a long line.
Really I think that's the best thing about Phoenix Comicon: so many creators, so few lines.
Case in point: the legendary Don Rosa.
The only piece of merchandise I wound up buying at the convention was a signed print of Uncle Scrooge diving into his money bin. I chatted with Mr. Rosa a bit and told him how much I appreciated his work and his recent Epilogue essay, where, among other things, he discussed how poorly he's been treated by Disney. Disney refused to allow the essay to be printed in The Don Rosa Collection; Rosa commented to me that that resulted in far more people reading it than would have if they had just printed it. I told him that there's a name for that on the Internet: the Streisand Effect.
Don Rosa is one of the most popular cartoonists in the world. In the few minutes I got to speak with him, I also found him to be a sharp, funny, genuinely nice man.
He's an inspiration -- and I think one of the things he should inspire people to do is to get mad. Mad that a man of his talent, a man who has made the Disney corporation millions, only ever got a page rate for the work he did.
Shame on Disney. And all my gratitude to Mr. Rosa. I'll be putting this print in a frame and keeping it forever -- and remembering that I put some money in the artist's pocket, which, sadly, he doesn't get when you buy a copy of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
For shits and giggles, here's a Zappa article you won't be able to read -- even if you speak German, the scan is tiny. Still, some purty pictures.
Frank Zappa und die kosmischen Truemmer (Frank Zappa and the Cosmik Debris), Good News, September 1973. Via afka.net.
Man, have I really not done Zoot Allures yet?
Here it is. Osaka, 1976; uploaded by wazoo17.
Will make it light this evening as I've got company.
Slowly starting to feel better; might make it out to Comicon tomorrow. Meanwhile, asthma feels worse and I'm pretty hoarse. You win some, you lose some.
That bit about slow erosions of the First Amendment put me in mind of the Central Scrutinizer monologue from the beginning of Joe's Garage. Searching for that, I found a bunch of music by a tribute band called Central Scrutinizer. Here they are doing a couple other tunes from Joe's Garage:
Uploaded by Drum Channel Brasil.
I think Ruben Bolling pretty much nailed my opinion on the misplaced priorities of the latest raft of Obama Administration scandals.
You know what? If an organization has the words "Tea Party" in its name, it's probably a partisan political organization that shouldn't be given tax-exempt status!
So why did the IRS go after groups with "Tea Party" in their names, and not, oh, I don't know, ...
...
...
...actually, I really don't know. Finish that sentence for me, everyone who is morally outraged that the IRS looked for "Tea Party" as convenient shorthand for "partisan political organization". What word or phrase should they have been looking for to nail partisan Democratic organizations to the wall in 2010? Name a ubiquitous catchphrase from the 2010 election season that was synonymous with the Democratic Party.
The Tea Party orgs weren't victims of a partisan witch hunt, they were victims of their own success. Democrats weren't targeted because they didn't have their shit together. They didn't have an easy, two-word phrase that was endlessly repeated in the media or associated with nationwide rallies.
The most upsetting thing about the IRS scandal is the prospect that the IRS will now be gun-shy about questioning partisan political organizations about whether they should really be tax-exempt. That's something they really should be doing -- and yes, they should be doing it to both parties. I'm just noting that, in the election cycle in question, one party made it a lot easier on them than the other.
As for Benghazi -- Benghazi was a tragedy. And the Obama Administration gave pretty mixed messages in the days after about whether it was a planned terrorist attack or a spontaneous outburst.
It's entirely possible that the Obama Administration deliberately delayed making a connection to Al Qaeda because it was right before the election. I wouldn't put it past them. And if that happened, then yeah, that's pretty fucking distasteful.
But when the same sons-of-bitches who praised Bush for what great leadership he showed in failing to stop a certain other terrorist attack on a certain other 11th of September, and who praised him for lying about Iraqi WMD's to drag us into war, rant about how the Benghazi talking points are worse than Watergate, well, Darrell Issa can go sit on a rusty rake.
Spying on the AP, on the other hand? Yeah, I can see room for some Watergate comparisons there. Which I suppose is why it's a distant third on the Fox News Obama Scandal Talking Points.
Course, it's kinda hard to act outraged at a governmental war on whistleblowers when you've spent the past three years crying for Julian Assange's head on a platter, but it's not like Fox News has ever let ideological consistency get in the way of cheering for Republicans and deriding Democrats. Trevor Timm at the Freedom of the Press Foundation recently penned an article titled Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being Done to Mainstream US Reporters; this of course is precisely what Wikileaks' defenders were warning everybody about when this mess started. That's the thing about the First Amendment -- you start carving out tiny exceptions, sooner or later you're going to find out they're not so tiny after all.
So yeah, I'd say the only legitimate scandal here is the one that the Republicans are spending the least amount of time on -- and the only one where nobody's been fired and Obama's said everything went exactly the way it was supposed to.
It would be great if we had a real opposition party; Lord knows we need one. We need politicians who are really willing to stand up to the President's excesses, for the right reasons instead of just to get attention and campaign contributions.
Sometimes I worry that the closest thing we've got in Congress to someone who's really willing to stand up to the President when it matters is Rand Paul. And that thought depresses me so goddamn much I think I'm going to go grab another beer.
For some reason posting about wandering around my kitchen half-coherent made me think of this song.
Fort Collins, 1980, audience recording uploaded by YourArf.
As my wife gets home from the latest barrage of tests to try and determine just what exactly sent her to the ER those past couple times, I find myself once again experiencing symptoms from my own trip to the ER, some years back. I've got this sense of dizziness, loss of balance, difficulty with depth perception. Sometimes it's just kind of a dull distraction; sometimes it's so intense I find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. At any rate it hasn't been bad enough to prevent me from going to work, so I'll call that a win. Especially inasmuch as Monday I get a mandatory unpaid vacation day. Ahhh, the life of a temp.
Monday night as I was getting into bed, I knocked my glass of water off the end table. After I cleaned it up and put my sheet back on the bed (at a 90-degree rotation from how it's supposed to go) I realized I'd gone to bed with my contacts in. So I went and took them out, and on the way back to bed I managed to walk into both the doorway and the bedframe.
I feel like I'm barely functional, and I'm the more functional partner in the household. As you might expect, this results in things like dishes stacking up and floors going uncleaned (short of having water knocked all over them, I suppose).
Hoping to get my shit sorted out by Comicon this weekend. I went last year and it was a little overwhelming, but I'd still love a chance to get the Allreds' autographs. But I'm a pragmatist -- if I feel this lousy on Saturday, I'm not going the fuck anywhere.
Taking a Zappa break for this, from the late, great Ray Manzarek. Yeah, you've probably already heard Light My Fire a couple of times today, but dammit, there's a reason it's what pops into everyone's head when they hear his name.
Uploaded by MrBluesoundz.