Why Zappa still matters

There was a period in my life when I spent large amounts of time listening to Zappa's music - a peculiar concatenation of circumstances: irregular employment, the release of his back catalogue on CD, loneliness, many hours to fill, a room in an empty house ... The music entered the blood stream via the ears and pores. It is no exaggeration to say Zappa's music provided the rhythm to my days.

These days it is different. I listen to less music. What I do listen to tends to be snatched during solo car journeys or else through headphones between 9-11pm. Zappa's CDs stand on the shelf but don't draw me in quite the same way. New releases are no longer a major event: tired compilations in a desperate effort to pique the curiosity of iTune-dependent teens.

Which is why I avoided 'Trance Fusion' up until now. In fact it is much, much better than I had assumed.

However, I'm not going to do a Wire-style review. Instead, suggest two issues concerning Zappa's music.

First, that it is 'pure product' and yet 'not-product'. Second, that there is no 'one' album.

By which I mean, no one thought more clearly and thoroughly about the conditions (internal & external) of the record or CD than Zappa. The very title of an early issue - 'We're Only In It For The Money' - made it abundantly obvious that Zappa knew what rock music meant in terms of audience, marketing and sales figures. Yet, at the very moment Zappa worked within the given consumer logic of recording-packaging-distribution he found ways to 'skew' the system. Thus, his own labels, mail order business, ironic strategies in cover art, cover statements, dialogue and insinuations ("we've gotta come up with some new shit!").

And then, to take the second point, there is no 'one' album or - more stupid still - Best Of or Greatest Hits. The Project Object - Zappa's ongoing work-in-progress (aka 'Conceptual Continuity') denied any such submission to commodification. Any one song might be mutated across albums, live vs studio takes and then further re-assembled and 'tweezed'. Since I've been reading Spicer recently - another West Coast 'Voice' - it's hard not to make the jump from his poetics to Zappa's rock aesthetics. Just as there is no single poem, so there is no single song. (And I'm not so sure but there are other very interesting affinities between the two figures - let's take the radio for a start).

Which is a roundabout way to explain why I bother to post a review on Amazon about this new CD. It's irrelevant whether it is/is not one of Zappa's best CDs. What matters is to get within the Project Object. Be carried (away) by the music. Hear one glorious chord and search for the 'original' track - which is probably a composite of drum/bass/guitar/vocal parts from different occasions with further meddling - and delight in discovering it occurs on this and this and this album which in turn turns you on to the tracks segued just before and after ... and so on. And before you know it, you'll be devoting every waking hour (and your dreams) to this fabulous music.

Who was it that said the present day composer refused to die?

Today

A single glass of water illuminates the world

"In other words, instead of the poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself - almost a perpetual motion machine of emotion until the poet's heart broke or it was burned on the beach like Shelley's - instead there was something coming from the Outside coming in. ... That essentially you are something which is being transmitted into ... "
(Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lecture 1)

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"The poem is not this word itself, for the poem is a beginning, whereas the word never begins, but always speaks anew and is always starting over. However, the poet is the one who has heard this word, who has made himself into an ear attuned to it, its mediator, and who has silenced it by pronouncing it."
(Maurice Blanchot 'The Space of Literature')

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"And I would think that we probably always will be crystal sets, at best." (Spicer)

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Spicer. Cocteau. Blanchot. Radio.

Serendipity

This book arrived in the post yesterday. Times coincide.

"Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void."

Today

Windows

... a place from which to wait ...

Today the inside of my head has felt like this.

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"That the word "poem" means "to make" is an overstated fact—poetry is, I think, most interesting (and most vital) when it dismantles. Not that a poem should concern itself with laying waste to what is made—though that might be of some help at certain times—but maybe poems can show us how to take objects, places, one another and ourselves apart. Might we agree that a clock’s innards can be more compelling than the time of day?

I like to think of poetry as kind of anxious patience. We wait for the poem to arrive; we wait for the poem to mean. But to wait is also, in some way, to set out. Waiting, we are pitched toward coming climates, bodies, times. A poem is a place from which to wait.

In order to "interpret" a poem, readers need space in it. Too much and they’re lost; not enough and there’s nothing for them to do. But unlike, say, a luxury hotel, an incredibly comfortable poem will insure that readers won’t return—there needs to be some sort of serration along which we can drag their minds and tongues. Otherwise, the poem is just a consumable object best eaten and forgotten. I suspect that there are endless ways to make the proper spaces in poems—blank space is only one of them."
(Graham Foust)

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Also worth checking out: Coolidge talking about bebop prosody at http://www.archive.org/details/Clark_Coolidge__Robert_Creeley_and_Steve_91P067

Clark's Cool Edge

So where have you been?

Here. There.

What have you been doing?

Reading. Work stuff. Not getting down to it.

Oh.

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A trajectory (of sorts):

Eva Hesse.

Sol Lewitt & Carl Andre at Tate Modern. Thinking in terms of Minimalism and its influence upon L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

Barrett Watten ‘The Constructivist Moment’.

Peter Gizzi’s new one – ‘The Outernationale’ – sends me back into the earlier volumes.

J.G. Ballard & Borges short stories. Ballard's landscapes.

Miles Davis ‘Complete Jack Johnson Sessions’. Teo Macero & editing. ‘Love’ by The Beatles. George Martin & editing.

Gizzi’s interview with Michael Palmer in Exact Change Yearbook.

Emilie Simon. Waif vocals & glockenspieling. (same cabinet as Lisa Ekdahl, Stina Nordensten).

Michael Palmer – poems from ‘Blake’s Newton’ and the early pages of ‘Notes from Echo Lake’.

“my poetry ... tends to concentrate on primary functions and qualities of language such as naming and the arbitrary structuring of code – its fragility – the ease with which it empties (nullifies?) itself or contradicts what might simplistically qualify as intention. (And I might add conversely, its tyranny – how it resists amendment.” (Palmer p164, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book). McCaffery’s text, too.

Bill Evans ‘Live at the Village Vanguard’ & ‘Everyone Digs’

‘Don’t Start Me Talking’ eds. Allen & Duncan - especially Out To Lunch spilling his Mr Ben baked beans and Harry Gilonis and Sean Bonney.

Lisa Jarnot’s ‘Black Dog Songs’ on the day I went to the zoo with Lara. Inspired. Inspiring.

Robert Creeley ‘Pieces’ and ‘Words’ and essays and interviews.

And, above all, Clark Coolidge and ‘The Crystal Text’. Ten pages a day.

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“Quartz is the original untampered word.
When I propose a live reading of poem I think of
going up there to cut some fine edges”

...

“What do you see when you look out with your language?”

...

“One could divide it all up into
those who know how the work should be
and those who never know before the work.
But then those who did not know began to know
the materials, an intimate action ... “

...

"For whatever you can’t know you do write”

...

“A phrase is also a wave”

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“Everything that surrounds
it and is not
part of it”

...

(from ‘The Crystal Text’)

New recipe?

We're big fans of Masterchef Goes Large (but why the "large"?) in this house. Once 7.30 pm comes around (Belgian time) the Waffle family are to be found crowded around the television set to see who goes through. If it's not Masterchef it's Ballroom dancing and if it's not that it was the Sound of Music nonsense.

Emma has discovered a new recipe - she's adamant Greg told the competitors to "cook their socks".

What would Elizabeth David say?

Q: Who was Frankenstein's sister?

Watching 'The Yellow Submarine' this evening with the girls - part of their IB A2 Media Option homework - I notice that John Lennon metamorphoses from the Frankenstein monster after drinking a potion. So, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein plus Stevenson's Dr Jekyll - I really should look into conceptual continuities in my teaching syllabus.

Lara goes for George Harrison. Emma likes Ringo Starr ("he's funny"). Not bad.

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Album reviews:

Jarvis Cocker's new one - disappointing (sadly). We really & truly wanted to like it.
Virgil Thomson's 3rd Symphony - Charles Ives plus seasonings of Varese & Stravinsky. Worth a second listen.
'Grotesque' by The Fall - puts Jarvis into perspective. Ear rinse material.

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Idly thinking about The New York poets as coffee selections. Who would be a cappucino? A macchiato? A latte?

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This morning lying in bed with a sense of perfect equilibrium: the light through the curtains, bird song outside in the street, the girls chattering upstairs, synchronic movement of the interior and exterior planets.

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BBC4's re-run of Nigel Finch's documentary on the Chelsea Hotel - a particular favourite ever since we saw it back in Bristol in the flat on Redland Road. It's that last sequence of the roller skater disappearing into the night wearing a cloak of coloured stars which seems to bring it all together.

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(* A: Phylis Stein - who else?)

Get this!

Just spent the past 27 minutes listening to 'Right Off' from Miles' 'A Tribute to Jack Johnson' album. It is utterly - but u-t-t-e-r-l-y - stunning. So, no matter where you are, get your shoes 'n socks on people and run down to your nearest mediatheque or CD outlet and climb through the letterbox if necessary and purloin yourself a copy.

Granite, gypsum, felspar and marble - you got it, this ROCKS!

Sunday afternoon

... spent reading about Eva Hesse's drawings.

It is raining.