Thing-Fish Update

Thing-Fish Update:

Betcha thought I'd forgotten all about the presumable raison d'eteat of our recent excursions.

I would still maintain that a record of my trip to Hawaii will be useful, if not essential, to these questions about Thing-Fish and my relationship to it. Thing-Fish aside, I'd like to get my memories of the trip down anyway, before they fade. But I don't mean to give up on my consideration of Thing-Fish. I still can't reconcile my enjoyment of the thing to my misgivings about some of its content.

The happy scenario would have me dispelling these misgivings by showing that they're based on a misunderstanding of them. I mean, as I said before, if I could be sure that Zappa's apparently gratuitous ridicule of African Americans, gay men, feminists and HIV/AIDS wasn't really gratuitous-- well, that'd topple all my feelings of complicity in something that's, for want of a better word, "irresponsible."

Maybe you're laughing at my remorse. I've quoted this before, but Lester Bangs: "If there's nothing more poisonous than bigotry, there's nothing more pathetic than white liberal guilt." And maybe my need to justify my reaction to Thing-Fish is just that. Maybe as I've said before, I'm just taking things too seriously.

Maybe. Still, I can't help wondering how funny Thing-Fish would be to someone who's, say, been personally threatened or ridiculed by a buncha white assholes. Wonder how it'd play to somebody who lost someone they cared about to AIDS.


But I've already gone over all this shit about how far can you go w/ a joke or satire or whatever till you've crossed The Line. I'm also aware of the childlike absurdity of the idea that anyone could locate The Line, and of the arbitrariness of myself as the guy who can lead you to it.

See, I'm embarrassed to even put this shit out there. But I guess that's what blogs are for, right? Personal hand-wringing-- not to mention whining & jerking off.

I am having this problem lately w/ authorial intent and responsibility, not to mention the responsibility, if any, of the audience. I finished Infinite Jest earlier this year and have ever since been reading all kindsa shit about the book-- most of it laughably inept-- to try and figure out if David Foster Wallace is challenging his audience, as everyone sez, or if he's just cynical, sloppy and filled with contempt for a readership that, if it criticizes him, he can claim is too stupid to understand his work.

I've fumbled around w/ my recent discovery that reggae is, in fact, cool, and that all of it's American fans aren't laughable hippies... (Unless I've become 1 myself, which given the way this is going, may be the case...) I've tried to reconcile my new enthusiasm to the virulent strain of homophobia that runs through a lot of the music.

And then I've had this problem w/ Thing-Fish.

So have I somehow become a pathetic wuss? Ida know.


I still see the evolution of my feelings about Thing-Fish to be linked to my experience of Hawaii, which is why I wanted to work through the 2 things together, chronologically. Problem is, it was a day or two into the trip when I really began dealing w/ Thing-Fish, and it's taking me forever to get to that point. Hawaii's necessary tho.

(And grotesque phantasmagoria is a personal addiction. Maybe it's just a phase, because it hasn't always been this way, but try as I might, I just can't seem to write anything these days w/o, uh, inserting that sorta stuff.)

So, I'm sorry to say that I still think this chronological cross-referencing is the way to go. For those of you who read this-- mostly a handful of lameass friends, as far as I know—I’ll get to all of it in time. But mostly I'm gonna proceed the way I have been. And as I may not get to Thing-Fish's role in the Hawaii trip soon, I thought I'd at least offer an update on where I'm at w/ the "musical" at the moment.

I've been reading Zappa's quasi-auto-bio The Real Frank Zappa Book, which unfortunately plays toward a lot of the annoying hypotheses you mighta about Zappa, e.g. that he was self-involved and a little too concerned w/ making you think he was sooooo much weirder and therefore more interesting than you could possibly hope to be.

But so OK, that's only so important. "Artists" (or whatever you want to call 'em) being human, tend to have human flaws. In fact, their flaws are often more profound than average. You can extrapolate some shit about their flaws being part of what makes 'em so creative, if you wanna, but again, I'm not sure that matters here.

What matters here is that when you have questions like I do about Thing-Fish, it's usually a good idea to go to the source, if you can. So I did. And it sucks, and not just because Zappa doesn't mention Thing-Fish at all, which given the size of his body of work, is not surprising. It sucks because the book doesn't do much of anything to reveal Zappa's attitudes re: race, sex, sexuality, etc.

I did get something about that artistic responsibility claptrap outta it. Here's a quote:

"Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums... In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance, along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos, (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the 'collection.'"

Doesn't make a good case for the idea that Thing-Fish is saying anything, does he? But then the book is obnoxiously sketchy about anything that Zappa doesn't wanna talk about. What he tends to want to talk about is how cool he is—and occasionally, to offer some insights into musical composition, politics, etc.

(One of Thing-Fish's conceits does come up in the book: the possibility that the HIV virus was introduced into an unsuspecting populace either intentionally or through incompetence. In this case, the culprits are missionaries working in Africa and Haiti. It appears that he's serious. Seems a little sci-fi to me, but maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.)

This is always the problem w/ going to the source: the source is usually committed to mythologizing him or herself. Try pairing up Miles Davis' auto-bio w/ any other bio on the man, and you tend to find that he's exaggerating a lotta shit and leaving other very significant shit out.

So I guess my next stop will be one of the dozens of Zappa bio's out there. (Not sure which one.) If I find anything in 'em, I'll post it, but in the meantime, it's business as usual: more stuff about Hawaii, which eventually will lead to Thing-Fish anyway, as I said. Forceman out...