Zappa’s anti-authoritarianism has much more in common with the free-wheeling founding fathers than they do with the vile dragon-form establishment figures who profess to represent them. Frank was pretty horrible to the faces surrounding him and the frothing lips were prey to his virulent wit. Like Byron, he takes aim at bodily orifices, the brute side of the erotic, romantic heart. The politicians’ mouths revel in social order, whereas the poet and musician have a physical attachment to the body and its various symmetries. There is an enfeebling, a weakness that denies Man’s base lusts in the game of politics that Zappa got hold of with his retorts on The Hellfire Club, slavery (and bodily proximity, familiarity), Satanism (Voodoo, the deep South) and the froth belching forth from protesting lips.

Y’all may have previously felt it was a tall order to bring in arch-demon Thoth Amon to represent the world-devouring modern order (CH 3) yet, in the above encounter, we see these very same ram’s horns of inflamed ego-lust and hidden psychosis. America was founded as a non-political order, meaning the human body in all its reality and corruptibility.

What you expect to get out of that is something akin to a Greek tragedy. Blood, close-knit families, ties of kith, kin, land, a type of very physical and palpable, close and corruptible physique and psyche. Almost the apogee of Southern idealism. Zappa, with his hatred of the political and executive order, likely had that in mind as the type of free-wheeling idealism that was early America – not forgetting ties with Indian tribes, Pocahontas and the early pilgrims. The Thoth Amon-types do not see this bodily reality atall; their hidden psychosis laid bare by Frank, to their frothing fury.

The human physique has a power and a natural force that is born of fortune and a psyche born of faith in a universal destiny. Now, Deuce will say that’s vague-sounding, but America was founded for the individual with his own powers, not for a placid, smug flatulent elite who serve only the monster of linguistic ritual and misrule called Washington. The one thing I know is that political words support a megaton of fantastic lies born of pure order – which doesn’t exist. Order only exists in the minds of those demons of the modern labyrinth who themselves infest a latent psychosis of depraved ego-lust(Weird 9).

Were one to apply such abuse to pillar of the establishment James Dyson of the nuclear-hoover and projected electric-car, you’d say it was barmy crackpottery. But Dyson is just one of a breed who are constructing a future of pseudo-humans obsessed with sterility who do not recognize the “clean dirt” that wide open exposure to natural forces generates in Man the fortunate. The shrines of yore (Weird 11).

As a thought-experiment, what would be the use of a Dyson-hoover in a Roman Baths? It goes completely against the grain because the place is wide open to the elements and a construct of natural forces. Even the enclosed spaces are rugged and utilitarian. Man the fortunate looks out to the universe.

The inward-turning, insipidly aseptic future “they” are fashioning out of robot-keepers (sex & housekeeping a la Zappa) and proxy-sex machines (DNA-clippers) is born of ego-lust and is therefore unclean. It is born of pleasure and reason and not of the unconscious lusts that are the pride of Man and his rhythmic being.

“They” don’t fool us (?) They are proud of their achievements. The Chinese have just clipped a single embryonic base-pair to fix a faulty gene, part of an inward-turning future that fixes things as you would a machine. Every part of your future will be pseudo-human and composed of reason spliced with pleasure, ego-lust and the death of hope. Like the Ultimate Nullifier (Weird 8), pure order will kill abandon which is psychological fortitude, as well as simply the physical rigor and restless urge of a free body.

The Mother Earth, the swaying boughs, the lustrous paths of abandon are the hope of Man. Dionysus cannot be denied and the bloodlust is up. With scythe or with blade we will cut our way clear, if not through blood then through foliage. We, the men and women of action, shall forge our own destiny in the land that is at times morbid, at times gay and at all times a harbinger of faith.

Fortune and destiny are not precise terms and in that sense they are a truth that is universal. The lies of the false Apollo are just words, like the code they represent, the hopeless tomorrow. For they do not represent reality as it is experienced by Man the fortunate; the men and women of physique and power, of a universal psyche.

It was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”, but in order to examine life it has to exist. If you’ve read Nietzsche you’re reading music and that is the ingredient – the physical power, the tension of psychic reality – that the egotastic slimeball of modernday fact-mongers have no time for.

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” (Zarathustra)

That could well be a romantic expression of fortune. The wanderlust overtakes the man or woman of fortune, and they enter the great darkness of star-strewn sky that gives rise to spirit. If you take the encounter between Zappa and the three establishment guys, he is the spiritual one, the one that grasps the darkness, scary though it may be.

Music of a poetic order is sad or scary as well as uplifting and melodic. Under the gaunt unknown sky fortune is our guiding light

THE DESERTER

Confession time; that song makes me well up and I honestly think it’s due to the subtle cadences of old folk-tunes. What that could mean is that at least half the content of what you hear is quite subtle, not notes on a page, interpretation. Obviously interpretation is not fact so you could say the more interpretive music is the less factual it is. There is an urge, an instinctive sense of rightness (Dionysus). Liza Minnelli has that (see her quote in CH5, “this is life!” on the New York of yore).

What is fortune? It’s something to do with the accurate playing of old cadences that feed your head, not just your knowledge (Zappa used to segue live playing with studio in a rough-and-ready mix). It’s not that detectable, almost the opposite of an atomic clock. You know when “they” say we live in a free market? It’s not, it’s a temporally-locked market. Freedom and power is the cyclical market of water, air, fire, earth. Howard, in one of his poems, has the line, “We count not time” (?) Those who count time are locked in time. We gotta be free to experience the sensation of delectable rhythms that accentuate nature.

Why, you ask, am I obsessed with fortune? For the simple reason that without fortune the transformative maze of reason will be the de facto future (11). Instead of physique, psyche and figures in a landscape (ontology – see 11) we will be DNA and its associated algorithms. The best way to approach it might be to go back to a pre-net civilization to appreciate the difference. Joanna Lumley (of Avengers and Ab Fab)who comes from that generation recently opined on how she might like to live out her twilight years on a multi-generational commune, chatting and saying, “What a nice day” and suchlike. More or less like figures in a landscape.

Old-school class. I was thinking maybe add several fields, timber-built huts and barns, goats, a chicken-run, tractor and cart and you have a sort of hippy-ideal of self-sufficiency. Humans in that setting would be rugged, dirty, outdoorsy, sun-blenched or wind-bitten. You can imagine some might sit-down with an easel and do watercolours as a pleasant pastime.

In such a setting there would be a certain feeling; quite communal and happy-go-luck. There would be the idea of aging, but it would be offset by kids’ yells. The people existing in that setting would have a feeling of general bonhomie, not too isolated or withdrawn into the organs of multi-media.

Now, the basic point is a “type” would emerge, somewhat artsy and somewhat carefree or casual. Regardless of any personality differences, there would be a type. That is fortune, and is entirely dependent on figures, placings in landscape, the scenery of the day, the night –borne stars. It is completely imprecise and independent of DNA.

Do you see where this is heading? Just because DNA is precise doesn’t mean anything beyond it’s a part of the maze of egotistical blandishments “they” hand out. It has nothing to do with the feeling of power in yourself (being, ontology) or with the meaning of figurative placements in a landscape (epistemology). We are of the universe, its subtle symmetries, and have to take it back.

Basically, the mantra “everything is DNA” is just a line springing out of the mouths of dragon-forms with slide-rules for brains. Everything would be DNA if we existed in a maze of meaninglessness, the very place we are being enticed to enter with the likes of Musk-Mars rockets to Timbuktu and Dysonian car-transplants, travelling from nowhere much to nowhere special.

That world doesn’t seem to have any sense of the simple symmetries that rhythmically intertwine the way we relate to landscape, to eachother, to town-and-country, to night-and-day since all that is to do with being and meaning. Not an interest of our technical-executive kind of guys, misquoting Zappa’s “Outside Now” from Broadway. These executive-idealists don’t care to think their reasoned pleasure and pure pig-greed have anything to do with the bodily-fixated arch of triumphant banality that is out there that Zappa seemed to foreshadow (The dark web). Oh for the early days of the Playboy Club and Hefner’s rosy-cheeked Bunnies. Do people still recall how informative the magazine was about everything from Harlan Ellison to Michael Moorcock, with illos by Woodroffe and Kurtzman?



”Behold the Man” illo for Moorcock article

This is Renaissance Man. To quote Hefner, “If you don’t encourage healthy sexual expression in public you get unhealthy sexual expression in private.” What is “public”? It is the open spaces, the places that Man is heir to, that are his birthright, that we have to take back.