Frank Zappa Lives! (And so does Frodo...)

Frank Zappa ponders the future, in 1976.


But now let's hear what he was pondering...



Inca Roads


And


City of Tiny Lights



News of the the Project/Object Tour has recently prompted some enthusiasts to proclaim


"Frank Zappa Lives!"

The slogan "Frodo Lives!" has been appearing on subway walls since the '60's. So Frank Zappa lives, does he? I think Frank resides in much the same place, not the subway, but in the hearts and minds of people who either remember a time when we thought, just wait, as soon as our generation comes into its own the war pigs will finally be sent packing. Everything will be legal, everyone will be cool (in the old meaning of the word, as in not hassling other people, appreciative of interesting, enlightening ideals, etc.) Who would have guessed, back in, say 1976, that things would actually get worse? That we would look back on those days, when we did our thing with only a nominal degree of having to avoid the authorities, as a kind of golden age?





That the goddamned Young Republicans we used to laugh at would grow up to plant bombs in tall buildings, wrap themselves in the flag, and announce the dawn of the Fourth Reich/Crusade?






(Reichssicherheitsamt, the office of the Gestapo, translates neatly to Homeland Security.)

"There's no question in my mind -- the beer, the balloons and the bunting all start with 'B' for some cosmic reason."
(Words that start with B and remind Frank Zappa of the Republican party.)

As usual, Frank was way ahead of his time--he only left out "bombs" from his list of Republican B-words (okay, maybe bastards and...okay, I'll stop...)

Not sharing Frank's vision and foresight, the apparent abysmal failure of our most certain certainties in 1976 still seem as inconceivable to me now as it was then, if only because what Jim Morrison said was true then and must still be true now:

The old get old And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're takin' over
Come on!

But then, and I had forgotten this, after the interlude of the chorus in the song (and 30-40 years in our lives) Jim comes back in, and the revolution has not yet taken place and we are old:

Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening crawl across the years
Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful dimes
Gonna' make it, baby, in our prime

And it still hasn’t taken place when our “ballroom days are over”! But then, when all hope has faded (and remember, Frodo was in this position, too) the long-awaited but no longer believed-in blessed event does occur after all:

Come together one more time
Get together one more time (music rises, we do take over after all)

Now did you notice the pattern that emerges in Morrison’s liberation rant? We start out thinking we’re going to change all the bullshit we see growing up—Watergate can’t happen again because there are no more Tricky Dicks…except the next dicks are even trickier and we’re left in our hippie hobbit holes wondering what the fuck happened. But then, many more years later, when we’re trying to explain our hopes and dreams to our kids, who at first glance seem somehow different from us, the things we’re saying unexpectedly start to resonate and, Christ, maybe it’ll happen after all.

There is an actual scientific explanation for this phenomenon: Morphic Resonance, second cousin to Synchronicity. The basic idea is that it takes some repetition (generations?) for an emergent pattern to form and build resonance, but once it does, the whole thing crystallizes and voila! “We're takin' over… Come on!" It is going to happen; it’s just that it’ll be our kids’ generation that’s young and strong when it does. I know it’s hard to believe this, since everywhere we look it’s a prison planet that we see, but if you pay attention you will see cracks in the façade. In Europe the young and old are talking about the expansion and evolution of consciousness (remember when we were having such conversations?) and fuck the stupid Americans…except, and I remind them of this, we’re not all fascist robots. And we do have the numbers, even if they still have the guns…we don’t want or need the guns—when the universal mind, the collective consciousness (finally) asserts itself, the reptilian fucks will train their guns on themselves or just plain fade away. Want proof?

The doubling of information is accelerating, exponentially. It took 4 million years from the first stone tool in Africa to the state of knowledge in the Roman Empire in 1 AD. The sum total of available information doubled again in 1500, and again in 1750, and again in 1900, 1950, 1973…by 1991, when Robert Anton Wilson wrote The Cosmic Trigger (Vol. II) it was doubling every 18 months. By 2012, when we reach the critical mass for the event known as the Singularity, the “other face” of which is Mass Enlightenment, the sum of knowledge/information will be doubling a million times a second…

About now you might be asking yourself why we don't see the results of this acceleration in the growth of knowledge/information--the answer is two-fold. First, a great deal of the advancement of information accessibility is in computer science and nanotechnology. Yeah, we can see computers getting faster, cheaper, more powerful, but what about the real quantum leaps in applicable technology? This is an easy one. Is it in the interest of our "leaders" (those who plant the bombs, create phantom enemies and then use the fear they've induced in the populace to control them) to make things like free energy, anti-gravitation devices, etc. readily available to the public? Look, we wouldn't even need the free energy technology (about which there is so much speculation) in order to loosen the grip of the corporations which control us by controlling the government. There was a plan afoot in the 1980's to connect the world's electrical power systems into a world grid (one of Bucky Fuller's many big ideas). If the power infrastructure of every nation on the earth were thusly connected, two things would happen:

1.) Massive energy conservation would occur, as night-and daytime regions of the spinning globe traded off production and consumption, and

2.) No one in their right minds would think about bombing or invading other countries, since this would interrupt their own supply.

By 1990, everyone had signed off on this plan (G.E.N.I., or Global Energry Network International) except, and this will come as a shock, the U.S.

Shortly thereafter, Gulf War I commenced and the bombing and invading have gone on in one conflict or another ever since. As to what technological wonders are being kept under wraps, who could know, since secrecy is noe so deeply imbedded in government that it's now a crime to inguire about things that are classified. And since you can't know what's classified without asking, asking itself has been effectively outlawed. Despite all the gag-rules and dismantling of whistle-blower protections, scientists on the "outside" are making some interesting speculations about what's being kept from us on the inside. Try to remember Frank Zappa's attitude toward censorship and secrecy, about the inept agents creeping around Laurel Canyon trying to keep an eye on him--if Uncle Frank was suspicious, why wouldn't we be?

It’s a bit more difficult to see evidence of the evolution of consciousness (after all, those HAARP and ELF transmitters are trying to jam “something”) but just remember what Steve Hillage sang in Radio, from Motivation Radio: “…and when they beam and program noise pollution, the love and light will neutralize their rays…”



Spectroscopic analysis is discovering strange changes in the structure of our DNA, our blood, and our great blooming brains...



So, of course Uncle Frank lives! You see, if the Nazis never really went away but instead just infiltrated first the CIA, then the Republican Party, then the White House, etc, etc, then by the same Morphic Field Propogation, we are keeping Frank Zappa just as much alive, if not more so, since we've got the numbers...And, as it seems to turn out, we're discovering (at the very weird intersection of physics and consciousness) that we can deliberately create reality through the mechanism of Morphic Resonance by directing our mutating, expanding consciousness...Pretty trippy, eh? So celebrate this. And, as long as you’re celebrating, call it Christmas, the way Frank did: http://www.zappa.com/whatsnew.html
(Just remember the thing with the yellow snow...)