Old Hat from 2000
Winter
December 27 2000: Music has died / And no one cried!
Khansaheb Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, last of the illustruous Dagar
brothers, passed away in a Kolkata hospital, at the age of 78. He
sang dhrupad, an older form of Indian classical music, less
ornamental than the modern forms, which has been kept alive in a
few family traditions and has since the '60s gained a bit of a
cult following abroad (thanks not least to him and his late
brother Nasir Mohinuddin). He represented the 19th generation of
dhrupad singers in the Dagar family, and word from India is that
the future of the lineage looks uncertain indeed, resting outside
the family in the hands of the Gundecha
brothers. Readers interested in good singing can listen to Khansaheb and his
brother on one of the three available records that I know of: Dhrupad
& Khyal (Unesco/Auvidis D 8076), in the Unesco Collection
of Traditional Music series; Rag Todi in Concert, Calcutta 1957
(Raga Records
220) and Calcutta 1955 (Raga
Records 221 - a double CD). Their
younger brothers, Nasirs Zahiruddin and Faiyazuddin,
also recorded under the name "the Dagar Brothers",
but ...
- I'll just get the records, said rocker Frank
Zappa in an interview; he was afraid of needles and couldn't
stand getting the vaccination shots necessary to travel to the concerts
in India. He now has ample opportunity to listen in Heaven, where
the brothers are re-united and once again perform
their fabled duets. The staff at the Zappa Patio remembered Khansaheb by playing his
records in a modest three-and-a-half-disc marathon
Christmas 2000: Browse your ass over to zappa.com, for the ZAPPA FAMILY TRUST RELEASES THE ROXY VIDEO TRAILER and steals the internet Zappa community's attention away from Warren Cucurrullo's nude spread in G Magazine. (I was working on getting my own nude spread done by Christmas, but it didn't pan out.) On another note, my news server (nntpserver.swip.net) had a "configuration error" thing going and my alt.fan.frank-zappa posts appeared in very multiple copies - 37 of each or so - just when I was replying "that's the difference between you and me :)" to Lewis Saul's "we don't post binaries here", attaching a little binary (a picture of me)! Major loss of face. Link of the month: Arthur Mee (1860-1926). On a serious note, this fall has not been a time of great activity on the patio, and it hasn't been as up-to-date as you've been used to. It's because I've got a full-time job. I'm going to buy a better computer to make the webbing a little easier - you wouldn't believe the tin can I've been doing this on for a couple of years now.
November 28 2000: Webmaster straights out a malicious rumour! Someone posted to alt.fan.frank-zappa that they had heard from 818-PUMPKIN that there would be no more Zappa albums, so I called 818-PUMPKIN and asked. "That is incorrect", the very nice American woman told me; "in fact, there will be several". Hooray!
November 2000: Blümchen retires from showbiz.
Autumn
October 2000: I'm back from my vacation and the alt.fan.frank-zappa
CD is released! (I'm representing myself with my pop hit
"Conditioner".) Yes, this is a CD made by alt.fan.frank-zappa people
performing their own music, and it has gotten rave reviews ... from the
people who are on it, that is. It's a double CD, and Cal Schenkel has done the
cover. I may
have some kind of raffle here where I give away one or more free copies,
including global postage. Watch this space for details.
Septemer 20 2000: The webmaster goes on vacation again! See you soon!
September 2000: Concert Bootlegs 1981-1988 renamed to "1981-1991". Quotes of the month, from Ravi Shankar's autobiography: "artificial boobs" (page 22) and "wet, limp dick" (page 114). Additional, from Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (pages 29-30 - about as far as I got into the book): "'Quack, is it?' he fumed, swishing his bat. 'I'll soon give them quack, but what is this Donald?' As he asked the question, however, he remembered a recent visit to the cinema with the twins to see Chaplin's Modern Times ... In the supporting programme they had seen a cartoon short, 'Orphans' Benefit', featuring a new, anarchically violent, web-footed and incredibly noisy anti-hero. Sir Darius brightened. 'Donald, is it?' he roared. 'Ha! Ha! Ha! I'll quickly make those bounders Duck.'"
September 12 2000: Webmaster Freaks Out! and takes to the streets with the "Sinister Footwear" score on an old bicycle, with a lampshade on his head, at four o'clock in the morning. On the other hand, later in the day, I find an old CBS LP recording of surbahar player Chandrashekar Naringrekar, from 1969, with a boobalicious Lakshmi on the cover, in a second-hand store. Even the plastic bag is a hip transparent blue!
Summer
August 25 2000: Swedish national television, channel 2, re-runs a show with Peter Carlsson and the band Blå grodorna ("blue frogs"), playing a Swedish translation of "Cosmik Debris" (what-the-fuck factor: 7.5/10) with the new ager replaced by a local evangelist, and the shaving kit by a tube of toothpaste. The next day, the webmaster, ears sharpened, discovers that the Apostrophe (') version - contrary to lyric sheet - has "rocket watch", not "pocket watch" as live versions have. Amazing that so few people seem to have picked up on this after 25 years! :) Meanwhile, in Germany, Kristian Kier discovers that the article on the cover of the German version of Mothermania was edited! Read all about it!
August 2000: My ISP has been having some problems with FTP, so I haven't been able to update the web site at all for a couple of weeks (This same ISP also has mail-server problems later in August, delaying communication with the Bossk Office). They're sorry about that! But the updates have begun to "trickle down" now. Among other things, a picture of me with the conductor's score for the "Sinister Footwear" ballet! Quote of the month, from an Abominable-Snowman article by the abominable Ivan Sanderson, published in the appropriotly named True Magazine some time in the moldy '50s:
However, there are two other... [theories]. The first suggests that, as in Norway [my emphasis - hello, Geir], certain individuals with chronic and pronounced vitamin-D deficiency develop into what used to be called werewolves, their faces becoming deformed and prognathous, their hair growing in profusion over head and shoulders. These individuals often have a craving for raw meat and fresh blood that reaches a point of insanity. Such freaks may occur in areas of constant cloudiness and other peculiarities of environment ...
July
25 2000: Fantastic new report from the Duke of
Prunes about the quadraphonic Apostrophe (') and Over-Nite Sensation
versions! Read all about it!
July 2000: Back from my vacation - on the vacation, I saw [my front page] in a Netscape window and discovered that it rendered it all wrong; the "hornbill" photo [now below] appeared over the ZAPPA PATIO logo, not in the upper-right corner, as it should. I apologize for that. Actually, the phenomenon seemed quite random - if you clicked "reload" again and again, the picture would sometimes appear in the right place, sometimes in the wrong place. Great browser, guys. Quote of the month, from alt.fan.frank-zappa - posted by Paul Gamble, under the appropriot heading of "Good Stuff":
Remember the Monolith in 2001?
Remember the Monolith in 200 MOTELS?
I think you think an Obelisk
Is a Monolith?
So where is the Asterix?
Or even the Apostrophe (')?
June 2000: Summer is rampant and it is high time for my vacation. For the next few weeks, I can be reached by snail-mail only, at this address:
Don Juan's House
Central Mexico -
I guarantee it! Don Juan's house is on-line these days, though,
so I might be answering my e-mail and updating the page from there, if
non-ordinary activities permit. In the meantime, I leave you with some amazing
e-mail from HanZ Bohlmeijer in
Holland: "The unrevealed world of the Zappa archives will always
be a tantalizing story of mystery and hope of treasures to find, knowing there
must be so much out (in) there, so much in the hands of
collectors. The holy quest for finding his secret, never published works
remains a lifetime duty, especially those early Mothers years. Enjoying
the musical happening, the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, I was reading
your Patio pages. I read the part
of the Lumpy Gravy album and was interested in the part about the Capitol sessions. Well, I do not know if some mysteries should
be revealed and published for the public, or if they should be a mystery
forever ..." Read the rest in the
Unreleased Lumpy Gravy entry in the Weirdo Discography! I came out as a "hard
androgyne" - "the 'tomboy' type ranking" - on the Butch-vs-Femme
100 Test.
May 12-18 2000: It is discovered by DK de la Mar! That Ryko's got a corrected You Are What You Is master! The CD version they're currently selling is rather back to full length again ("Dumb All Over"), and without all the audio problems that have plagued CD versions of this album since the '80s. Spence Chrislu comes forward with some details; he remastered it along with Tinsel-Town Rebellion, also out now on Ryko. Read more on the You Are What You Is and Tinsel-Town Rebellion pages in the vinyl-vs-CDs FAQ.
May 5 2000: As was well known in advance, no end of the world caused by planetary alignment. (I actually knew a guy who believed in this!)
May 2000: David Goodwin is back with a copy of the EMI CD of Tinsel-Town Rebellion, forcing the internet Zappa community to rethink fossilised beliefs. Maybe this version was the best! The blaze of summer is celebrated with a new, Stockholm-trendy colour scheme in white, pastel and lime. New overall stylesheet for IE users, loosely modelled on the (paper edition of the) Swedish Metro paper. However, I didn't test this very much with Netscape, and it didn't work (couldn't find a CSS - so it didn't load the page at all!) so this page was inaccessible for some readers for a couple of days. (This is not an apology.) (There are also some other problems: 1) My ISP's mail server was down off and on during the first week of may; I don't know how reliable it is right now. So your mail to me may have bounced - send it again! 2) It's summer, so your updates may not exactly be performed at breakneck speed.) The mysterious new site, zappaworld.com, has disappeared and the address been re-routed to zappa.com. Let's hope it's a "temporary condition only"!
Spring
April 2000: It is discovered that the Zappa bootleg Safe Muffinz is archived in the United States Library of Congress! It's true: search for it in their on-line catalogue, they have it! :D (I don't know if there's such a thing as an item being removed from the Library of Congress, but as of this month, it's there. Control number 5672537.) Also: new front-page facelift - damn, this page looks good in IE4/5! Damn, this page looks ugly in Netscape! ;) This month is also a testing period for new style sheets. Have bearing. "The latest rumour" from alt.fan.frank-zappa:
The latest rumour is that Ryko will release Trance-Fusion this summer, and Zappa Records will release Dance Me This later this year. Of course, it is not unlikely that this will not happen, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. [Note: Trance-Fusion is an unreleased guitar-solo album, and Dance Me This an unreleased synclavier album.]
AND THE NORTHERN LITES COMMENCED T'GLOW
Winter
Late March 2000: a mysterious new site appears on the web: www.zappaworld.com. Mikael Agardsson informs the Patio staff that the Japanese CD line got new VACK numbers in 1999. These numbers are listed now on the vinyl-vs-CD pages. The Persuasions release their Zappa cover album, Frankly A Capella.
(March 17 2000: Ben Kwok in the South China Morning Post reports that Shaw Brothers have "agreed" to sell their entire film library to "Malaysian tycoon T Ananda Krishnan" for $600 million. "The deal also includes the $120 million cost to remaster original film negatives and soundtracks into a digital format." Yet another Shaw Brothers rumour?)
March 2000: New front-page look for you, and new ZAPA
shirt for the webmaster. Javascript enhancements to the front page (big surprise: they only work
in Internet Explorer, versions four and up). And I finally (think I)
solved the problem of tables that don't look the same in Netscape and
Internet Explorer - the plain black two-pixel table borders that you
are in all likelyhood seeing in your recent version of a major browser
have always been there in Internet Explorer, but never before in Netscape:
first, they consisted of "cell-spacing" in a table with black
background color, and then they became HTML table borders - black in
Internet Explorer, ugly in Netscape. Well, now they're back to cell spacing
again - but this time, the tables have no set background colour, and
each is placed inside another table, with black background colour, which
works in both main browsers. (Floating tables still look ugly in Netscape,
though, because it ignores the "margin-right" style element and
ends up with no space between the table and the page text. And the text
doesn't flow around the table, either.) Apologies to everyone who has sent me updates that I haven't processed yet
because I've been doing this kind of unnecessary design work instead. I've
also made a new banner for the EIHN album
(above!) - please use it on your own
web site, too! Quotes of the month:
-
"The trumpet story was not true" - John Lawley, oboe, the London Symphony Orchestra (interviewed by AJ Wilkes, posted on alt.fan.frank-zappa)
-
"Every morning I go into my living room and the first thing I look at is the picture of Frank sitting on the toilet" - Jimmy Carl Black, interviewed by Steve Moore
February 11 2000: Zappa Fans United in Righteousness declare James Brown a "con man" in black American music. (Massive protests from three or four people on alt.fan.frank-zappa; Michael Pierry requests disclaimer on every page, so as not to be associated with this opinion, and gets it.)
February 2000: Super collector Isamu Shimizu's World's Greatest Sinner page shocks the world with pictures of what can only be a vinyl pressing of the supposedly unreleased original, orchestral-only version of Lumpy Gravy!
-
picture 1 (with previously unknown short story written by Zappa!)
-
picture 2 (with track list!)
-
read up on this semi-unreleased version in the Weirdo Discography
GREG RUSSO: Isamu is posting the album slick from the unreleased Capitol Lumpy Gravy album. I checked Capitol's files a few years ago and found out that someone had stolen [!] the original artwork. If I had found a copy, I would have included it in my book [Cosmik Debris]. The album's original 4-track tape is still in Capitol's tape library in California. In any event, it's a fascinating discovery.
RON SPIEGELHALTER: I think we need to find whoever stole the original artwork and send them on another raid to get those tapes!!!
New confus'ment on alt.fan.frank-zappa, over the EMI promo CD Specialized Digital Audio Gratification from 1988. And rumours begin to circulate anew that the Roxy 1973 video is ready for release this summer - perhaps on DVD. Link of the month: Frank Zappa on Hungarian phone card, and quote of the month - from Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, page 486:
"Aye, some of us have never seen him, only heard his steps on the nights when there is no Moon, or his voice, speaking from above the only words he knows,- 'Eye asher Eye' " - in on which, in Tones hush'd, the others now join.
"That is, 'I am that which I am' ", helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.
Frank Zappa in Indonesia: The Very Best of Frank Zappa, exciting new entry in the Weirdo Discography.
Tibetan New Year 2127: Zappy new year of the Iron Dragon!
Chinese New Year 4698: Zappa Fans United in Righteousness celebrate a zappy Chinese New Year - the year of the dragon.
January 30 2000: The webmaster and Johan Lif have a
get-together and form Zappa Fans United in Righteousness.
January 2000: I actually spent a couple of hours changing every HTML table with black borders from the infamous "cell spacing" variety, which doesn't manifest at all in Netscape, to the more mainstream "table border" variety, which manifests slightly ugly in Netscape. No change at all for Internet Explorer users, except if you print a page, in which case the table borders actually show up on the paper now. Hey, it's winter! I even took the rest of the night to do a real CSS facelift on the whole site - minor differences for Netscape users, but to our Internet Explorer users, we now proudly present an extremely readable web site. This is also the first time ever that I actually sat down and confirmed that each and every page really works in Netscape - about 10% didn't - and fixed the ones that came out garbled. Netscape users, this is your lucky day, if such a thing exists for you :) After some campaigning, Mikael Agardsson persuades me to list the CD-shaped choccolate candy called "Happy Mother's Day", from Rykodisc, in the Weirdo Discography.
HOT OFF THE PRESS: Dining with his source "U" in Stockholm, the webmaster spots Beck (the superstar) in the little restaurant (ingen åtgärd).
SPECIAL NOTE: We're back after being hacked on January 2 by "NH", who deleted every HTML file and put up an index.html titled "FUCKED!" saying "This FZ website has been HACKED by NH" and "Ha ha ha!". Thanks to everyone who expressed their concern and offered their help with restoring the site - flattering that people should keep local copies of it - but fortunately for everyone, we're back in business already and the PERP will be dealt with one of these days, and you will be kept posted. [April update: the perp has been dealt with, and you weren't kept posted.] New page: bootleg chronology. Links of the month/whatever, from Charles Ulrich and Kristian Kier, respectively: sound clips from THE RAGE & THE FURY on zappa.com, and Dr Dot - Masseuse to the Stars (Zappa, of course, included).
January 28 2000: And Now the World Is Rahman's Stage!
January 2000: Everything is Healing Nicely, the new mail-order Zappa CD, arrives to the webmaster on January 7. If you haven't even ordered it - what are you waiting for? The quote of the month is from Wayne Woo in Singapore, on the perils of video games:
There are many fighting games produced by many different companies, but the most damaging ones are those that model their characters & skills after actual martial arts, like the 3D Virtua Fighter & Tekken series. Those 2D fighting games, like the Street Fighter series, are at least not pretentious, with fireballs, tornado kicks & dragon punches. Nobody will be lead to think this has anything to do with the real world, except young impressionable children. But for Virtua Fighter, which features characters using countless real techniques of famous martial arts like bajíquán
, jeet6 kune4 do6
, tánglángquán
, Daito-ryu aiki-jujutsu
etc, with their exaggerated effects, the impression formed on every player's mind is far-reaching indeed. The advertisement these games do for those arts featured cannot be denied, but even more significant is the damage they inflict on their integrity - truly a double-edged sword, sharper on one side than the other. Why do I say that? Imagine, after spending years of sweat perfecting an exceptional technique, you go to the video arcade one day only to see teenagers perform it effortlessly, even better than you, with a simple twist of the joystick & hitting a few buttons. They even add in insightful comments for good measure. No doubt it's just a kid's game, but how would you feel? NOT WELL, SURELY.
The secret word for tonight is "gummiboss" (rubber boss), used by Magnus Uggla in "Rumpnissar" on Den Döende Dandyn (CBS 450117 1), 1986. :) All right, I know it's still just early morning on December 31, but I'm publishing this anyway, so you'll have a fair chance to see it in case Everything Breaks Down (TM) at midnight [added in retrospect: nothing did, except for a few EKG machines and a water pump in New Zeeland]. In any case, ZAPPY 2000!
PS: Have you ever listened to the last two tracks on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore Volume 1?
AND THE NORTHERN LITES COMMENCED T'GLOW