Learning to Love Frank Zappa

I couldn’t bear Frank Zappa. There was nothing about his implacably over-complicated music I enjoyed, and I deplored his apparent belief that if something were difficult to play, it must be good. I read about how he would require musicians auditioning to be in his band to play in 17/12 or something, and think, “What a ponce!” Nor did I find him funny. I thought what he marketed as satire was actually just cruel mockery of the sort one might expect from a precocious fifth-grader. 

But fair's fair. I loved how he pointed out on Crossfire in 1986 that the USA even then was on its way to becoming a fascist theocracy (Mr. Pence, please pick up the white courtesy telephone), and his observation that things were much more interesting in the days when the titans of the record business admitted they neither liked nor understood rock than after they started acting on the recommendations of cokespoon-necklace-wearing A&R hotshots in satin tour jackets. 

Record companies had some really wacky beliefs back in the day. Following the lead of the movie business, they were forever throwing huge parties at their artists’ (deferred) expense, imagining that those invited would write favourably about the feted recording artist. This might have worked when the feted artist was some glistening-haired crooner in white patent loafers, but boy, did it not work from around 1968 onward, after which faux revolutionaries who scorned personal hygiene and The Man (that is, corporations and capitalism and the other usual suspects) in equal measure displaced the docile 31-year-olds in neckties who’d been covering popular music for the big daily newspapers. 

Appalling graphic design, I believe.
The  layout of the headline! 

The new breed of music writer felt it his or her moral mandate to manifest scorn for the record companies, even while living off the sale of promotional copies of their records. At the parties to which the record companies kept inviting them, they would stuff themselves on lobster canapes, guzzle gratis corporate alcohol, and then, by peeing or throwing up in the punchbowl, demonstrate how deeply offended they were by the notion of The Man trying to secure their blessing (via a favourable review) with delicious free food and drink. Take that, running dog lackeys of The Man! 

In the most ludicrous print advertisement in the history of popular entertainment, Columbia Records tried to co-opt the presumably lucrative faux revolutionary market with its famous But the Man Can’t Bust Our Music ad, which depicted a holding cell full of imprisoned young long-haired music lovers and the placards (Grab Hold, Music Is Love) they’d been allowed to bring with them, and several recent Columbia Records releases that would apparently set free the spirits of even the unjustly incarcerated. 

At parties for artists deemed uncool, the young revolutionaries would pretend the artists weren’t even there. I recall one for an insufficiently hip duo whose name I won’t reveal at which a woman publicist in immoderate false eyelashes virtually begged rock critics at least to say hello to one of our heroes, and was told by one of those to whom she appealed that he’d do it for a blow job. Rumour had it that he got it. Grab hold! 

What the record companies were missing then, and continued to miss, was that the real power wasn’t that of the slovenly young revolutionaries throwing up in their punchbowls, but the programming directors at key radio stations. Over and over, some little twerp who wrote for Circus, say, or even Rolling Stone, would declare So-and-So the next Beatles or Dylan, and So-and-So’s album would sell 128 more copies nationwide. (This happened with my rapturous Rolling Stone piece on the glorious Move.) But let Johnny Cokespoon from WCKE order his DJs to spin a track from the album every 90 minutes, and the next thing you knew, So-and-So, flanked by a gaggle of sniffling combover boys invariably named Artie, would be seen in Billboard or Cashbox holding up his or her gold record and looking mortified with embarrassment, as tradition dictated. 

Fun times, those, unless you found yourself downwind of one of the new breed of writer, or between him (the really obnoxious ones were all male) as he staggered toward the punchbowl with an emphatic refutation of corporate greed in mind. 

The Private Dick

She was one of those dames who’s actually sexier for being imperfect. Her nose was a little too big, her eyes were too close together, and you could have put three of her mouths into Julia Roberts’. But in many cases, a dame with an imperfect face will pay a lot more attention to detail. Her makeup will be more artfully applied, her attire chicquer, and the seams of her stockings straighter. Some men go for that sort of thing, and I’m not going to apologise for being one of them. 

Estelle hadn’t come to seduce me, though, but to talk to me about her teenage son, who she said was mildly autistic. I told her I too had been artistic as a teenager. She didn’t think that was funny. On reflection, I didn’t either. 

Her son was also not stereotypically masculine, and when he’d signed up for Home Economics rather than Auto Shop, he’d begun being bullied at his middle school, mostly by a big classmate called Yoshi, even though he wasn’t Japanese, but Korean, the son of a certified Hyundai mechanic. Yoshi would walk behind him, stepping on his heels. If he stopped, Yoshi would give him a hard shove right in the backpack. Estelle's son suffered in silence until the day his Home Ec class learned to fold bed linen, and he had the idea of stealing a pillowcase, to put in which he bought himself a couple of cans of sugar-free soda pop out of one of the vending machines the school’s principal had allowed to be installed in hope of making money to buy the football team new helmets. That afternoon, when Yoshi hassled him between 5th and 6th periods, Estelle's son whupped him upside the head with his makeshift weapon. Yoshi had been in a coma ever since, and Estelle's son was transferred to a school in a richer neighbourhood, with no vending machines, but a large budget for the football team.

Hearing that Estelle's son, whose actual name turned out to be Roland, like the electronic musical instruments manufacturer, had put a rival high school’s most notorious bully into a coma, two of the new school’s main psychopaths declared it their mission to make him wish his parents had never met. I was disappointed to learn that Estelle remained happily married to the boy’s dad, the assistant sales manager of a hosiery shop in the big mall, which explained the seams, if not their straightness. “Can you help me, or not?” she asked, her blue eyes shimmering like a huge puddle on a humid day in mid-August.

“The question, sister,” I said, firing up a vape, exhaling through my nose, and putting my feet on my desk, “is whether you can afford my help.” It's never a good idea to let a dame think she has the upper hand.

She sneered. “Judging from the squalidness of your office, and the fact you don’t even have a girl, I can’t imagine affording you being much of a problem.” I have always found a woman in a veiled hat sneering indescribably sexy, but my excitement was no match for my embarrassment about my little office and lack of a secretary. You come every day to a place, you lose sight of what a crudpit it might appear to others. I’d had a girl, of 53, until two months before, when I’d had to let her go because everybody’s hiring their private dicks on line these days, and she was spending all the office's petty cash on gin. 

I told Estelle I’’d protect Rollie for $129.95 plus expenses. My old man, who’d been in the discount appliances game, had told me that .95 prices had been shown to be much more attractive to prospective clients than those that didn’t specify a number of cents. Estelle said she could afford one day, filled out the state forms, and wrote me a cheque that would become cashable in 24 hours, provided I didn't have it framed.

We had lunch together at the Malaysian greasy spoon over on Chestnut. I paid. It was more than worth it getting to watch her apply fresh lipstick at meal’s end. We said so long and I drove over to Rollie’s new school. As luck would have it, his two tormentors were in the same classroom that period, Sophomore French. I shot them both, one in the shoulder, and the bigger one in the clavicle. There was some screaming, of course, not the least of it from the (male!) teacher, but like every other American middle school, it had become used to mass shootings, as which mine qualified because there were two victims. 

What We Didn't Know About Melania's New Squeeze

Through various sources who have requested anonymity, I have learned a little about Jorge Luis Mejía, the Honduran swimming pool cleaner who seemed to a great many observers to be Melania Trump’s date to the State of the Union after-party on Tuesday evening. 

He is 33 years old, and was born in the cutely named Tegulcigulpa suburb of El Chimbo. His father Refugio was a journalist and public intellectual, his mother Rosa the star of a popular afternoon television programme modelled on Oprah Winfrey’s, but in Spanish. His older brother Yasiel is a ineman for the county, and his teenaged sister Yasmina an assistant produce manager at Tegulcigulpa’s first Whole Foods store. At one point the siblings are thought to have conspired to open their own high-minded grocery retail chain, to be called Partial Foods, and to offer the same largely negligible health benefits at prices lower than Whole’s notoriously exorbitant ones. But most of their investors disappeared after the coup of June 2009, and Jorge decided instead to become a neurosurgeon. He got his certification in June 2015, from the prestigious, if unashamedly parochial, Universidad Católica de Honduras, and soon became one of his country’s most respected physicians, with a patient roster that at one point included both notable athletes and members of Honduras’s royal family.

He has not been able to practice medicine in the United States because he has thus far taken just the first of the three United States Medical Licensing Exams alien doctors must pass. While preparing for the next two, he is thought to have studied swimming pool maintenance because he has from childhood enjoyed the smell of chlorine, and enjoyed the idea of not having to wear a shirt. At least one of Mrs. Trump’s friends believes his musculature to have been the first things she noticed about him. “Donald is 284 pounds of gelatinous white flab, so Jorge’s having the sort of abdominal muscles men’s health magazines have fetishised the past 10 years got her very interested very quickly.”

We pause to consider that Rep. Paul Ryan adheres to a very rigorous exercise regimen, and probably has cute abs of his own, but is of course a loathsome dickhead, and Mrs. Trump apparently wanted a change. 

Because the region is less vigilantly patrolled than their own countries, many Colombian and Mexican cocaine smugglers have come to operate on the Honduran coast in recent years, and gang violence and political corruption have become commonplace. Jorge finally fled when the daily murder toll in San Pedro Sula, where he lived and practiced, came to average more than 20.  

Jorge’s hobbies include salsa dancing (he won a trophy before immigrating to Miami in February 2016), reading, and performing minor neurosurgical procedures in his Arlington studio apartment for neighbours unable to afford medical insurance. Indeed, another of Melania’s inner circle believes that Jorge’s altruism and compassion may have been an even greater attraction than his smouldering good looks. “Mel has had her fill of disgusting, gelatinously flabby men with ridiculous hair whose only interests in life are becoming richer and being admired for how rich they are.” 

It was apparently Jorge’s idea that Mrs. Trump wear a white pantsuit to her husband’s speech. “He regards Mrs. Clinton as the sexiest thing on two legs,” a friend of his tells us on Skype from El Chimo through a translator. “Where other boys had posters of Pamela Anderson or Stomi Daniels on their walls, or famous footballers, Jorge always had Hillary. What lace garter belts and fishnet stockings are to other men, pantsuits are to him.” 

Sarah Fuckabee (oops) Sanders urged Mrs. Trump and Jorge to stay only at the SOTU after-party, for fear the president, who hadn’t yet arrived, might order his Secret Service detail to assassinate Mr. Mejia, the couple apparently went skinny-dipping in the pool of Mrs. Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, in spite of its being only 34 degrees out at the time. 

Mrs. Trump's White Pantsuit Was By Muslim Dior

Tongues were wagging, and it was distracting the president from the important job of restoring America’s greatness. He wasn’t nearly as attentive at his daily briefings. Where normally he’d have filled three or four pages of a legal pad with notes at even the shortest briefing, sometimes he was now doing no more than writing the subject of the briefing at the top of the first page, underlining it, and then staring sadly into space as this or that aide imparted crucial intelligence.

Tongues were wagging because Melania hadn’t allowed herself to be seen with him since the middle of the month, when the Wall Street Journal reported that attorney Michael Cohen — earlier famous for repeatedly demanding, “Says who?” like a cornered 5th grader while being interviewed on television about chaos within the Trump presidential campaign — had paid the actress Stormi Daniels $130,000 not to tell anyone about having danced the dirty hula with the president. Mrs. Trump had shown up at the big State of the Uniom after-party with Jorge Luis Mejía, the handsome Honduran-American who cleaned the White House swimming pool. 

It was originally assumed that the Hillary Clinton-ish cream pantsuit she wore was by Christian Dior, but according to vogue.com, it was actually by Muslim Dior, and as such must be seen as a tacit fuck-you to Mr. Trump, whom Mrs. Trump had earlier declined to accompany to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, there’d been no trace of her at two dinners at Mar-a-Lago, even though the resort’s kitchen had made goveja, the Slovenian beef soup she is known to love more than life itself. 

Sen. McConnell, Rep. Ryan, and the Koch brothers agreed that something needed to be done. “The moment at which the American people cease to look to the Trumps’ as a perfect marriage, one characterised by mutual respect and encouragement, as much by admiration as by love,” Chuck, the less physically repulsive of the Kochs, fretted, “is that at which we as a nation will have irretrievably lost a part of its soul.” 

Chief of Staff John Kelly dispatched Mrs. Trump’s so-called communications director (that is, bestest girlfriend), Stephanie Grisham, to see if she couldn’t get Mrs. Trump back on-side, but she was unable to get the First Lady to stop crying and hysterically ripping up the Agent Provocateur lingerie lobbyists and foreign leaders had been sending her since Vanity Fair revealed how much the president enjoyed seeing her in it. Mrs. Trump wouldn’t even open her door to Sarah Fuckabee (oops!) Sanders or Kellyanne Conway, both of whom she was rumoured to regard as lying bitches

As has become commonplace in the Trump White House, it was young Steven Miller who stepped up to the plate and persuaded Gen. Kelly, Ret., to allow him to try to get Mrs. Trump to resume playing ball. 

Miller, or maybe Goebbels

Having cut his small, rodent-like teeth working for the skittish, inane Minnesota Congressperson Michele Bachmann, Miller knew not to arrive empty-handed, and presented Mrs. Trump with a jabolčni zavitek from TripAdvisor’s No. 1 DC-area Slovenian restaurant. She said, “My husband allows me only 600 calories today because he doesn’t want me to become a disgusting fat pig, but fuck him,” and devoured the pastry with a rapaciousness that left the ordinarily unflappable little Josef Goebbels lookalike soundly flapped. 

Their negotiation was derailed almost before it started as Mrs. Trump said she would continue their conversation in her native Slovenian, in defiance of Mr. Miller’s famous anit-cosmopolitanism, and we’re not talking about the magazine. “Če želi govoriti z mano, bo to v jeziku, ki ga izberem,” Mrs. Trump declared, and the president’s prematurely bald, but nonetheless fair-haired, boy had no choice but to capitulate. 

With the help of Google Translate, Miller was able to ascertain that Mrs. Trump was most irate about Ms. Daniels having received $130,000 not to talk about her and the future president’s game of hide-the-ferret, while she, as First Lady, had been getting only $87,500 to appear with the president, and hadn’t been paid since his inauguration. Miller of course knew that Mrs. Trump received regular payoffs from her husband — why would a beautiful young woman have married someone so repulsive in every way if not to become very rich herself? — but pretended otherwise, and mused that many women would consider it a great honour to be Mr. Trump’s trophy babe. 

“And let’s face it, girlfriend,” he continued, “at 47, you probably don’t have many years of being hot enough for him to even want you to appear with him.” Whereupon the First Lady rang a little bell that brought a pair of Secret Service thugs running, had them drown Mr. Miller in the White House koi pond, and resumed tearing her Agent Provocateur stuff to shreds even though, in a calmer state, she’d probably have allowed it to be auctioned off for, you know, charity. 

The Best Moment in His Career As an Amateur Musician

Chantelle and her BFF Suzannah, with a z, were going to chill with this fit DJ Suzannah had met the week before, but then he texted her to say that him and his mate were like running late. The girls, who’d already that evening had half the Chief Medical Officer’s recommended maximum weekly intake of alcohol, amuse themselves a while taking sultry selfies, but then decide it might be a giggle to go up the road to the well scuzzy old Queen’s Arms and give some of its downmarket clientele a taste of real glamour.

As they walk in, making every male head turn with their extremely short skirts and thigh-high stiletto boots and, in Chantelle’s case, eyebrows she’d spent 45 minutes getting just right (those stencils Boots were selling are well dodgy even for someone who hadn’t had a tall vodka and orange before she even started. 

The band, for which the Arms are a second home, notice the girls too. The youngest of them is 58. Three of the four of them have grey ponytails. Two of them have bald spots on top, and Mick, the drummer, has shaved his head because he’s mostly bald spot. They play the blues, for a lot of reasons. It would have been unseemly to play current pop hits, Taylor bloody Swift or the little girl whose concert in Manchester that mad Muslim cunt bombed. The blues are easy, and everyone in the band had been playing every song in their repertoire for decades, so they didn’t have to do a lot of tedious rehearsing before they started earning a bit of dosh. And people — or at least a certain sort of person — never seem to tire of Smokestack Lightnin’ and Hootchie Cootchie Man. None of the band has ever come even close to making a living as a muso. 

Derek, the singer and harmonica player, has been married from the age of 19. His wife Eugenie stopped coming to his gigs by the time he was 22. She likes Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour, but not Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters. Dez was terribly shy as a child and teenager, and married Genie largely because he couldn’t imagine getting anyone better. She’d never really got his jokes, and had no sense of humour of her own. Their sex wasn’t very good, though for the first couple of years she was willing to wear tnaughty attire Dez enjoyed buying her in sex shops. 

But that, of course, was decades ago. The couple barely even spoke anymore. They’d eat dinner in virtual silence, and then head in their separate directions for the balance of the evening, Dez to his little study in the attic to watch shemale porn (he was straight, but found the shemale stuff more exciting than standard porn) and Eugenie to the lounge, there to watch the soaps she’d recorded earlier in the day, or programmes about people even more obese than herself. 

Back at the Queen’s Arms, Chantelle has necked her fourth vodka and orange in the past two hours, and says to Suzannah, “Let’s pull the singer,” as Dez’s band waits for Jimmy, the guitar player, to change his A string. Suzannah’s like appalled at first, but then gets the joke, and the two girls move to a table right in front of the band. Chantelle bats her huge false eyelashes, which she has to order specially from ebay, at Dez, and makes sure he gets a good view of her cleavage. He doesn’t dare believe his eyes, but over the course of “Got My Mojo Workin'”, there ceases to be any doubt about this very hot…what’s that word?…hottie seeming to fancy him. After the song ends, Tommy, the extremely self-confident bass player, whispers in Dez’s ear, “If you’re not having that, mate, you can be bloody sure I am.” Dez spends the next song, the last of the group’s second set, wishing he had some brandy in him.

But he worries needlessly, for Chantelle pops up the moment he announces the band will return in 15 minutes, and asks if her and her mate can buy him a drink. She sends her mate to fetch the pint of Carling he requests and they sit down, Chantelle taking a very long time to get her pretty legs crossed, and causing some stirring in a part of Dez’s anatomy he hasn’t used for anything more glamorous than peeing the last nine-plus years. “Your band is mega,” she says. He’s pretty sure that means she likes it. This might be the best moment in his career as an amateur musician. 

But then her mate returns, talking on her phone. She excitedly tells Chantelle, “They’ve finally got there. They’re waiting for us at the Le Radis. Come on.” As quickly as it began, Dez’s dream is over.  Twelve minutes later, his band begin their final set of the evening, to an audience of four, not counting bar staff. 

A Certain Kind of Feminist

Last week in Lansing, Michigan, Dr. Larry Nassar was convicted of having sexually abused seven young women. Around 140 additional young women told the court he’d molested them over the years. I have no doubt that Dr. Nassar is a monster, and deserves to spend the rest of his days imprisoned. But I further believe that, in showboating outrageously when she sentenced him — in telling him how she considered it a privilege to condemn him to die behind bars, and “wouldn’t send [her] dogs” to him for medical care, and how she wished she were able to condemn him to cruel and unusual punishment — Judge Annemarie Aquilina stepped over some very important lines. 

Was I alone in seeing her as as a cross between Judge Judy and Jeanine Pirro, the former judge whose truculent admiration of the unspeakable Donald J. Trump might represent Fox News as its worst, which I think we can agree is saying something, given that Fox is also Sean Hannity’s conduit? Aquilina clearly wished to be seen as the personification of outrage at male sexual predation. I wouldn’t bet against her savouring the idea of a TV career of her own. 

I found her performance deeply sickening, and upsetting. As the personification of the law, a judge must be dispassionate. I wasn’t alone in thinking this. Writing on vox.com, Rachel Marshall, an Oakland public defender, observed, “By aligning herself so closely with the victims and so clearly rooting against Nassar, Aquilina…reinforced the dangerous idea that judges can and should be in sync with public sentiment. In some ways, this is an easy case for such an alignment, given the horror of Nassar’s acts. But easy cases get us in trouble; they lead us down a slippery slope. What happens the next time, when the evidence is less clear? What happens when there is doubt as to guilt but a judge allows empathy for victims to drive decisions?” 

In Time, Anne E. Gowen, presumably Ms. Marshall's fellow misogynist (sarcasm!), wrote, “…{A]ll of us who depend on the criminal justice system’s being fair — and in the end, that really is all of us — need to be able to rely on the judiciary’s administering justice consistently and predictably, based on laws, rather than on judges’ emotional reactions to particular sets of facts. What if the girls and women here had not been the archetype of the innocent, admirable victim, but instead, say, drug addicts or prostitutes?”

One day I may learn my lesson, but I haven’t learned it yet. When I expressed my revulsion for Aquilina’s grandstanding on the social media, can you guess what A Certain Kind of Feminist — the kind who believes all men are inherently brutish, and whose favourite recreation is detecting traces of misogyny absolutely everywhere — accused me of? That’s right: siding with Dr. Nassar. For ACKOF, it is impossible both to regard sexual abuse of women in general and Larry Nassar in particular as utterly ghastly, and to believe that judges need to keep their personal feelings to themselves. I was reminded, of course, of the many electronic shouting matches in which I became embroiled after Charlottesville — with people who didn’t think it possible to simultaneously loathe white supremacists but also beiieve that, in a civil society, no one should fear physical violence for having expressed an opinion, however odious those on the side of the angels may find that opinion. 

For ACKOF, there is exactly one permissible point of view in every disagreement — theirs. Fail to embrace it and get labelled, as I was, by Ms. Stacia Schmidt, “a misogynist bully”. Try to elucidate why you continue to fail to embrace the One Permissible Point of View, and you are accused of “mansplaining”. (I do not, by the way, believe that feminists have a monopoly on this brand of low-grade fascism. As a Jew, for instance, I recognise the Jewish variety favoured by the Israel, Right or Wrong! type.)

I’ve now had multiple ACKOFs inform me that I find Acquilina’s grandstanding objectionable because I secretly think Larry Nassar pretty terrific, and that if a male judge had behaved as Aquilina did, I’d be shouting, “Right on, bro!” between big manly gulps of Bud. A Ms. London Schertzer, for instance, demands, “Do you want her to be nice and have all the girls smile for him?” 

I see clearly that I have as much chance of changing these women’s minds as the mind of those who say things like, “I support Mr. Trump because he’s a wise, honourable, decent Christian man, and on the side of us common working people.” 

Intractable stupidity's ugly wherever it rears its head.