dfan says

I promised a couple of weeks ago to investigate Frank Zappa. Being the completist I am, I started at the beginning, and holy crap. Freak Out! and Absolutely Free are both complete masterpieces, and everything else so far is at least super interesting. Here, very briefly, are my initial impressions of Zappa’s early oeuvre.

Freak Out! (1966): I can’t believe this came out two months before Revolver. It completely deconstructs rock music at a time that most people were still trying to construct it. It’s a 2-LP set (one CD). The first two sides are filled with mostly conventional (but still twisted) pop songs. Then things start falling apart. Side 3 starts with “Trouble Every Day”, a 6-minute electric-Dylan-ish rant, then eventually devolves completely into an assemblage of noise that makes “Revolution 9” look tame. I don’t know if I’d enjoy the end of the album by itself much, but as the culmination of the whole record it’s stunning.

Absolutely Free (1967) has already shot into my short list of best albums of all time. Two suites full of complex yet gloriously sloppy music that ping-pongs back and forth between hard rock, faux-Broadway, faux-Pierrot Lunaire, faux-Vaudeville, you name it. There’s a giddy energy to the whole thing, as if they can hardly believe they’re getting away with recording it, that’s totally infectious. Amazing.

We’re Only In It for the Money (1968) is often recommended as the place to start with Zappa, and that seems reasonable. The cut-and-paste tactics of the previous album continue, made into a coherent whole by the album’s theme of contempt for hippies and fake counterculture in general. I’ve had this album for a long time, as opposed to the others, so maybe I’m too used to it by now, but it certainly is another masterpiece.

Lumpy Gravy (1968) is a total mess that is only really worth procuring if you are interested in Zappa’s history. It’s a bunch of orchestral pieces, largely atonal, that have been cut up and interspersed with old pop recordings and excerpts of seemingly high people rambling about random topics. Save it until you know you’re hooked.

Cruising With Ruben and the Jets (1968) is an album of nothing but doo-wop, including reworks of songs from earlier albums, which I have not gotten yet because apparently Zappa totally ruined it 20 years later during its CD release by overdubbing new bass and drum parts, and I’m holding out hope for a remaster of the old version.

Uncle Meat (1969) starts a new phase with lots of composed instrumental pieces in a modern classical vein mixed with jams, live outtakes, and random conversations. There are some really nice pieces here but you are pretty much guaranteed not to like all of it equally.

Hot Rats (1969) was Zappa’s first solo record (not with the Mothers of Invention) and stands apart from the rest of these; it’s mostly jazz-rock fusion (and one of the first examples of it). I can take or leave the long jams, but the shorter fully composed pieces on it are great.

Zappa then disbanded the Mothers of Invention and released a couple of archival recordings mixing lots of old studio and live performances, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh (both 1970). I need to let these soak in a little more. There’s some great stuff but also some jams and live improv wackiness that don’t grab me yet. Still, the high points are really high.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten. So far I am mostly enthralled; a lot of this music completely surpasses my expectations after hearing a smattering of Zappa’s work. The guy was obviously a total genius, which helps me give him the benefit of the doubt when something doesn’t appeal to me at first. It seems I am about to enter a period of his career (the Flo and Eddie years) that is largely regarded as a relative low point, so it will be interesting to see if I agree.

If any of this sounds interesting, check out We’re Only In It for the Money or Freak Out! first. Absolutely Free is actually my favorite of all of these records, but I have a feeling the other two early records are better for dipping a toe in the water.

One recommendation I do have in general is to listen to these albums one side at a time. They were written to be listened to that way, of course, and they’re dense enough that listening to more than 20 minutes at a time is a good way to tire out your ears and your brain.

To recap, Spewers are artists who are

• incredibly prolific
• awesome at their best
• but with a nonexistent quality filter
• largely intuitive in approach, as far as I can tell
• even the best works are big messes (in a great way) rather than tightly constructed jewels
• apparently wide-ranging in genre
• but with enough tics that their work is instantly recognizable

So far the category has consisted of Jack Vance, Robert Pollard, and William Vollmann, and I just thought of another: Frank Zappa.

I’m very ambivalent about Zappa. He’s clearly a genius, but the juvenile humor and lack of quality control (e.g., long annoying spoken word interludes) are real strikes against him for me. I think We’re Only in It for the Money is 90% absolutely incredible and 10% repellent. Lumpy Gravy didn’t make much sense to me when I first heard it, but I tried again today and it held together better than I expected. The only other albums I have of his are a two-fer of Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation, which I recall finding okay but nothing special, although a bit more research today indicates that those records, while relative hits, aren’t really regarded as very high up in his creative output.

I’m going to explore Zappa a little more, starting with the early Mothers of Invention records, which seem most likely to be up my alley. Further findings will be posted here.

(By the way, this Crossfire episode with Zappa about music censorship is awesome. If you have 20 minutes to spare they will not be wasted if you spend them on this.)

There are many things that appeal to me about chess, and perhaps in some future post I’ll list them all, but one of the most important is the way that it creates a whole new sophisticated language, with inflection and shades of meaning, that doesn’t map to English (or whatever human language you care to choose) at all.

Music is the most obvious other abstract system like this. Music has a whole theory of meaning and communication, of what the composer is “saying” to the listener over the course of a piece, whether that is setting up expectations and fulfilling or dashing them, or getting a reaction out of a unexpectedly piquant chord or melodic leap or rhythmic displacement or what have you. There are a few obvious correlations to “actual” semantic meaning (major is happy! minor is sad! fast is exciting!) but largely music remains an abstract closed system. It mostly doesn’t refer to anything outside of itself (tone poems aside), and although it can be analyzed and frequently is, it has to be analyzed on its own terms, and not by “translating” it; it has some sort of “meaning” in the same way that English sentences have meaning, but there’s no mapping between the two spheres. (If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music.)

Anyway, this post is supposedly about chess, not music. My point is that chess games and positions also carry some sort of untranslatable-to-language abstract semantic content, and that the richness of this content and the fact that it has no linguistic analog is one of the things that makes chess so aesthetically appealing to its devotees.

It’s so abstract it’s hard for me to put into words, but a chess enthusiast gets a certain feeling when he or she glances at a board and sees an open position as opposed to a closed or semi-closed one; or looks at possible pawn breaks; or notices that one player has sacked material for the initiative; or sees a fianchettoed bishop, or the possibility of a standard Bxh7+ sac, or a “bone-in-the-throat” pawn on e6, or Alekhine’s gun lined up, or a good vs bad bishop, or… I could name dozens of these, but the point is that they are supremely meaningful to me (in that they literally have meaning) and probably mean nothing to you. Not everything about chess always appeals to me — the competitive aspects, the need to calculate extremely accurately and to memorize openings and endgame techniques — but I will never tire of this aesthetic aspect of it.

(As I was writing this, I found an interesting attempt to make connections between two of these “languages”: Haskell Small’s “A Game of Go”, a musical accompaniment to a classic game of Go (about which I could say many of the same things). It’s a really cool idea, although it doesn’t get much past some basic correspondences (ko fights are tense! things wind down in the endgame!). I suppose that if it had been easier to make one-to-one correspondences between Go and music, my whole point that they are interesting and unique complex systems would have been undermined.)

I didn’t really discover pulp fantasy until a couple of years ago. Fantasy fiction these days tends to be epic fantasy or urban fantasy. Epic fantasy is where heroes save the world from Great Evil, preferably over the course of three or more books; as you might have guessed, Tolkien is the unwitting root of it. Urban fantasy is magical realism that gets shelved in the genre section instead of the literature section. Pulp fantasy, on the other hand, is what most fantasy was until the 70’s or so. The archetypal pulp fantasy hero is Conan – the Conan of Robert E. Howard’s books of the 1930’s, not the movie. He isn’t saving the world; he’s just looking after his own hide, spending most of his time in search of loot or wenches.

Paizo Publishing, best known for formerly publishing the Dungeons & Dragons magazines Dungeon and – wait for it – Dragon, has started publishing old pulp fantasy and science fiction books under their Planet Stories imprint. C. L. Moore looked like an interesting place to start exploring, given her status as the first woman pulp fantasist of note.

Black God’s Kiss collects her six Jirel of Joiry stories, featuring an impetuous, passionate, ass-kicking heroine in medieval France. They were plenty of fun in a pulp fantasy way. Were they special because of the gender of the author? I dunno. Jirel is definitely a woman; she goes around kicking butt, but she also has men issues. If these stories were written by a man about a woman hero, would I be rolling my eyes at how clichéd she was? Maybe. I’ve read romance novels written by women and had the same reaction, but if they keep writing characters like that then I guess there’s something to it. I have to admit that nothing jumped out at me as being something I would never see from a male author, but my reaction might have been different in the 1930’s, when the alternatives to Jirel were Conan and Cthulhu.

The writing was enjoyable – as usual with pulp, it’s long on description and atmosphere and action and kind of short on character development – but didn’t really grab me beyond that, not that I expected it to; I read pulp for the description and atmosphere and action. I have to admit that my interest perked up the most when I got to the last story and Moore’s regular science-fiction hero, Northwest Smith, time-traveled back to 16th century France from his usual haunt on Mars where he had been passing the time knocking back Martian cocktails with his Venusian sidekick. But maybe that’s just because I’m a guy.

I already have far too many books like How Chess Games Are Won and Lost, holistic tomes that attempt to somehow improve your chess game across the board by dispensing a couple hundred pages of advice. But this one has gotten a bunch of great reviews, so I gave in.

It’s actually a very good book, although the title is misleading. It’s not so much a manual as it is a collection of stuff Hansen has learned over the course of his career, supplemented with examples from his games (and some other games that he learned from). So don’t go in expecting to see a theory of chess improvement presented and supported, as you might with Silman or Rowson.

That said, this is a very entertaining book. I hesitate to grade the instructional value of any book, since I have read dozens of books in the last 15 years but my 1800-ish rating has not budged, so clearly they’re all useless. But Hansen does say a lot of interesting things, and his annotations are excellent, at exactly the right level of detail for my class A brain. (For the non-chess-players, that’s class A as in “one level below expert, which is one level below master, which is still way below grandmaster”, not class A as in top-notch.) I think it would be useful for players down to the 1600 level or so, with the caveat that some of the things he’s saying are really aimed at a higher level of player than you or me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even a 2200 learned something, although what do I know.

I read the whole thing (and if you read chess books, you know that actually reading a book cover to cover is high praise indeed), and was sufficiently impressed by his writing and analysis to consider reading his other two books as well.