entertainment

The Zappa Family

Posted 2024/08/09

There is a gap between being edgy and being mean, between caring for someone as best you can and as much as that person truly needs. But how you measure these things depends on how you were brought up — standards and expectations imprinted upon you early, even if you spend the rest of your years making sense of them — and guides how you treat the other people in your life.

For the Zappa children, raised with one foot in the counterculture and one foot in show business, it’s an emotional calculus that became ever more complex after the 2015 death of their mother, the keeper of her late husband’s challenging legacy.

A rainy evening in Tacoma

Posted 2022/01/17

It’s crazy how hearing a song can trigger a memory. Earlier today I was listening to a random playlist from my music collection, and a track from Chris Cornell’s Euphoria Morning played.

Instantly, I was back to the time and place I first heard the album. I was a sophomore in college and was running some errands around a rainy Tacoma. My radio (as usual) was tuned to KISW, and they were doing a one-hour interview with Chris as he introduced and played most of the tracks on the new album.

Euphoria Morning wasn’t his most critically acclaimed work, but it has always been one of my favorites. Dark and moody, sort of like that rainy evening in Tacoma in 1999.

I took the long way home so that I could listen to the entire set.