Word: zappa
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Bisgeier suggested stopping by the puppet showheld in memory of Frank Zappa, where shoppers canadopt an orphan from any country in the world.Also, magicians and Christmas carolers attractedflocks of onlookers...
...Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...
...composer. "The only reason I went into rock 'n' roll," he explained, "is because I couldn't get anybody to play the classical music that I wrote." During a career that spanned three decades, Zappa never pretended or wanted to be anything else. On the first Mothers' album, 1966's Freak Out!, he quoted the maxim of his hero, the '20s avant-gardist Edgard Varese: "The present-day composer refuses to die." They were words he lived...
...addition to his 12 albums with the Mothers and his numerous other rock recordings, Zappa collaborated with the likes of composer Pierre Boulez and conductor Zubin Mehta on such pieces as The Perfect Stranger, a collection of chamber music, and 200 Motels, an "opera for television." The self-taught Zappa was as prickly and puckish about his "serious" music as he was about rock. "I write," he declared, "because I am personally amused by what I do, and if other people are amused by it, then it's fine. If they're not, then that's also fine...
Born in Baltimore, Zappa was the son of a Sicilian-born meteorologist and metallurgist who worked for a poison-gas manufacturer -- the inspiration, perhaps, for his later Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask. The family moved to California when he was 10, and young Frank grew up in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles. "I developed an affinity to creeps," he recalled, "and I've surrounded myself with them ever since." At 15 he read a magazine article that referred to Varese's audacious compositions as "the ugliest music in the world," and he knew...