by stoneonstone » Wed Aug 30, 2006 3:25 pm
What an amusing twenty-odd minutes.<br><br>Had a handful of Zappa album in the 70s...'borrowed' by friends and never saw them again. The only thing I still have is a 12" of his early Reagan years song 'I don't wanna get drafted.'<br><br>I smiled at how Zappa looked a bit like a young Groucho Marx, with a bit of Louis XIII musketeer thrown in.<br><br>The most surprising thing about the video was how civil the show Crossfire was when still in the cable ghetto...more like a dinner party discussion rather than the camp theatre (hello Tucker Carlson et al) of the last terminal five or six years of the show's run. Actually, thinking back to Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan...make that a decade.<br><br>No shouting...usually plenty of time for the person talking to expand and support and idea, before being prodded to the next outrageous statement and counter-statement.<br><br>I'd point out the coming change was properly blurted out by the toad-like John Lofton of The Washington Times, Zappa's opposition, in trying to get Zappa to look or act amused:<br>"well you can fake it...".<br><br>Maybe the right picked up a thing or two from Zappa's sticking to the "...just words" line to bat away stupid points and questions. It was effective and sparse, and I'd say misinterpretted as "Let's stick to talking points like he did"; the problem was he didn't. Zappa jettisoned it when appropriately moving onto other seriously offered queries or statments. The talking point meat puppets just bray and verbally circle back, skulking again to the talking point, avoiding and closing down debate.<br><br>A Zappa laid low with cancer certainly made the world a little easier for those can't stand being questioned.<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
