“My humble curse: May your shit come to life and kiss you.” — Frank Zappa, “The Real Frank Zappa Book” (1990)

In death, Frank Zappa lives.

You don’t have to know his work. Such is the digital afterlife: it’s there if you care to listen. We venerate his intellect and humor, his Nostradaman talent to foretell the direction of the culture-at-large. His mustachioed smirk invades my feed weekly, wryly destroying some long-dead jowl-bot on CNN’s “Crossfire,” a chatterbox cabler that passed for bipartisan ’til the Limbaugh-Gingrich GOP swaggerfest and was mercy-chloroformed in its Tucker Carlson bowtie with an assist from Jon Stewart.

I remember Frank . He’s always been “Frank” to me. That journalistic convention of references by surname has somehow never applied. Frank I discovered in myr

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