Old Hat from 2002

December 9 2002: I missed the December update by a full week! In compensation, I'll recommend some records ... later. Anyway, I got an e-mail from Christopher Warner, forwarding a pulp card (left) found by Jim Volkman, of a cover with Zappa on it: Turn on with Trippie, a Sex-Happy Hippie by RN Ellison.

November 26 2002: Webmaster's birthday. Birthday gift: conservatism at its best!

Billboard has an article on Vaulternative Records, the label FZ:OZ is on. These days, it feels almost unreal to see Zappa's name and likeness in mainstream media. Also, from Ommadawn:

There's a great new [bootleg] CD out called We're Only In It for the Mothers that has demo versions of the Money stuff. Highly recommended, if you can find it. There is supposed to be another part that has the Capitol demos also.

I'm trying to add one bootleg a day, starting November 10. November 10: Ship Arriving Too Late for Stevie's Spanking in Berlin.

October 28 2002: Swedish public radio P2 just broadcast bits from a tape of a press conference with Zappa in Stockholm in 1968. It seems the tape had been in someone's basement and never before made public. Most of the questions had been edited out, and most of the programme was two guys talking about Zappa's comments - they acknowledged the questions seem bland, but, as they said, in those days rock journalists were inexperienced and there was also no PR machinery around most rock stars, you couldn't even get a tour schedule, or even a publicity photo, even of a superstar like Jimi Hendrix. Consequently, Zappa's answers were less than sensational. However, I hadn't heard of his idea for a "Motor Pool" before, though perhaps that's just an "and you call yourself a fan" thing. Here's a transcript! I'll be away over the weekend.

October 2 2002: The latest Zappa album, FZ:OZ, arrives on the Patio! AOL blocks incoming traffic from my ISP, after some "bulk e-mail", so you'll no longer get a reply (meet the new Bossk / same as the old Bossk) if you write me from an AOL account. (This is the same service that has sent me thousands of mail bombs, some with death threats, over the years. :) [November update: everything's back to normal.]

September 12 2002: Mallikarjun Mansur died ten years ago.

August 20 2002: zappa.com overhauled and the new Zappa album, FZ:OZ, ships!

August 2002: Squid overtakes humans in terms of total biomass - decades of fishing has reduced the squids' competition for food. It is brought to alt.fan.frank-zappa's attention that the Ensemble Modern are producing a CD based their "Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions" concert programme, where "other" included "Moggio", "The Black Page #1", "Beltway Bandits", "Revised Music" and "Dental Hygiene Dilemma". Links of the month, from Stereophile Magazine:

I hadn't read these before, which may mean some of you haven't either - Mike Lerch e-mailed me the links.

July 23 2002: Woke up at 7 (didn't sleep at all last night) with a cold and an eye infection. Went into the bathroom, passed out, hit my head and shoulder blade on the bath tub.

June 2 2002: Back from the world of cheap rosé, Itama 56-footers, medieval ramparts and Mediterranean blue! Oh, fragrant nights in the maquis! But it's WORLD CUP MONTH, during which no work may under any circumstances be done :)

May 2002: To avoid hysteria, I rarely publicise updates here on the front page. But this one is so interesting that I'm publicising it, to cause hysteria. "Bognor Regis" revealed. Going to Corsica on business in late May. Will be back in June.

April 2002: Webmaster is back from New York, where he stayed at the Plaza on 5th Avenue and Central Park South. A quote of the month - from Bruce Sterling's July 1998 piece for Wired, not normally figuring on my reading list:

The Shanghai center is sleek, bleak, and reasonable for about eighty-eight stories or so. Then it turns into a tall gleaming chisel with a giant hole in its head. This huge funny-hat hole is mellifluously known as the "Moon Gate", and in any stateside downtown it would be a freakish architectural advent to be talked about for decades.
But in China it's hardly making waves. Postmodern Shanghai basically is a giant steel chisel with a hole in its head. By native Pudong standards, the world's tallest building is stodgy, conventional, and remote.
It's those 68 other high-rises in Pudong - pink, bulging, turquoise - that define the Shanghai Pudong experience. Shanghai's skyscrapers could pass for Christmas ornaments. They may not be up to the niggling health and safety standards of the basic international-style mirrorglass box, but they don't belong to featureless Western-style corporate empires. These are genuine crony-capitalist skyscrapers - flaunting, gaudy things, true and unashamed Shanghai showpieces. The Shanghainese have skyscrapers with saucers, geodomes, cupolas, balconies, and big weird wings. They've got vast fretted acreages of mirrorglass in astonishing shades of peach and aqua. There are buildings crowned with monster Statue of Liberty hats and with Flash Gordon ray-gun emplacements. Shanghai's new art museum is built like a giant bronze pot, including the handles. The new stadium has a U-shaped roof - an upright U, that is.
You gasp in awe, and then you giggle. But the awe is very genuine, and the giggling is a Yankee personality problem. These megabuildings are raised with a genuinely Chinese skyscraper aesthetic. It's not for nothing that Shanghai was called both the Pearl of the Orient and the Whore of Asia. Compared with Shanghai's strutting darlings of the Pudong boulevards, everyone else's skyscrapers are like crabbed old women wearing Muslim hijabs.
And this isn't Stalinist gingerbread, either - not oppressive totalitarian showiness, but real exuberance, the prettiest and most imaginative skyscrapers that anyone has ever built. PS: They are taller than anything in New York.

Easter 2002: high fever.

March 2002: Zappa Family Trust finally spit it out: www.zappa.com/FZ-Live-in-Australia. Quote of the Month, from Pierre Boulez's Orientations: "Can it really be that the 'Angel of the Strange' is just one of these gaudy toys? In actual fact the Angel of the Strange is a much more disturbing character who makes his appearance only when genuine subversion is in the air. Perhaps we may be more fortunate with the Angel of the Droll? Why not, indeed, provided that the two are clearly distinguished (a distinguo, mind you, that is not at all scholastic)."

January 23 2002 - from jcronin1@rochester.rr.com:

I called 818-Pumpkin and asked them what the new release was going to be. I was surprised that when the guy answered the phone he didn't just give me a non-answer. He told me that the release was going to be called Zappa in Oz and that it was a show from Australia in '74. After I got off the phone and checked and I see that Zappa didn't play in Australia in '74, so I must have mis-heard or he mis-spoke.

From Charles Ulrich:

Presumably it will be 1/21/76 Sydney, about which I've been hearing rumors for years. The whole show would fit on two CDs, but perhaps it has been edited in half.

January 16 2002: Copyright catches up with the Patio! I had to remove a little box about the Purveyor to the Royal Court label from the Florentine Cookies Page. It was a verbatim quote of a full text, and I admit I had published it in blatant disregard for copyright. I'm sorry!

January 2002: The year begins dramatically, with this alt.fan.frank-zappa post from Patrick Neve:

I called 818-PUMPKIN just now, and the guy who answered was very friendly. He had very few specifics, but some intriguing generalities. My first question was obviously "What happened to the videos?" His general answer was that it ran into some difficulties, but they should be coming out soon, although he didn't have a release date. I asked, "Legal difficulties, technical, or otherwise?" He wasn't positive but suggested that it could have been technical, but not legal.

Here's where it gets interesting ... he went on to say that they're all very busy right now, trying to time releases of a bunch of different things at once. One of the things is a CD release of a live concert from Australia in 1974. This has come up before, and we all know Frank wasn't in Australia in '74, and that this is most likely from the '73 tour, but hey, it was encouraging to hear about this project once again. [It's actually a 1976 concert, and it's been ready for release for years. I hope they've included the full show, which contain many interesting things - Jon Naurin]

The guy on the phone also said that the vaultmeister recently discovered some stuff that no one knew about ... he played it for the Zappas and asked if any of them knew about it, and no one had heard it, and that everyone is very excited about it. He said it's a little of everything, some rock, some classical, some other stuff. I asked if this was in any way related to the Trance-Fusion/Dance Me This/The Rage & Fury [external links - Ed] titles, and he said no, this is all stuff that Joe [Travers] found just last month, and that absolutely no one knows about. I also asked if this had anything to do with recovering old Synclavier files, and he said no, this is other stuff ... some of it mixed and ready to go, some of it not mixed, and they are looking at all of it for possible release.

And from Scott Morrison:

I just called 818-pumpkin and got a recorded message. It said that there will be a new release before the end of February.

Meanwhile, Jon Anderson has read an article by Daniel Felsenfeld ("Digging the Nuggets") where it is written that a company called Sozo Art "will function as agent, publicist, clearinghouse and distributor for Zappa's entire output (as well as that of other composers of note), but will keep Gail's admonition in mind." Alive on Patio: new bootleg listing: You Are Phoenix What You Is.

New Year's Eve 2001/2002: zappa.com has a new guestbook up, with two mutually contradicting messages from "Gail", at least one obviously by a faker. Every time something dynamic happens, no matter how insignificant, it is exciting to be a Zappa fan. ZAPPY NEW YEAR!

older hat

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