It’s a foggy day in Palo Alto town, on the anniversary of my return home from a Palo Alto rehab center on 12/5/20, after having given up drinking several weeks before, a decision that impelled me into Stanford hospital with alcohol withdrawal syndrome on 11/11; I was moved to the rehab center on 11/17, and then discharged into the world on 12/5, as a recovering alcoholic beginning a new life. So 12/5 is a kind of rebirth day for me.
12/5 comes in between the death days of two remarkable musicians: Frank Zappa on 12/4 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 12/6. This year Zappa’s death day was anticipated by Kyle Wohlmut’s posting, on Facebook on 12/3, this inspired digital creation honoring FZ:
(#1) Seeing nothing like this on the (delicatessen food company) Dietz & Watson site, I assume that the Zappa Franks billboard is the work of ingenious bots.
It occurred to me that FZ might have composed the thing himself, that would have been so FZ, but I can find no evidence that he did. So this will be our “Eat Me” homage to him now.
D&W. The company offers “deli meats, cheeses, and sausages”, including these franks:
(#2) Dietz & Watson Black Forest wieners (beef and pork, seasoned with garlic powder), natural casing
Frank Zappa. A multiform genius who resolutely marched to the beat of his own drummer.
(#3) FZ and his guitar, in a Tom Richmond caricature
The author of the plaint:
“What do you make of a society that is so primitive that it clings to the belief that certain words in its language are so powerful that they could corrupt you the moment you hear them?”
The death of Mozart. From Wikipedia on the subject:
(#4) An 1857 lithograph by Franz Schramm, titled Ein Moment aus den letzten Tagen Mozarts (“A Moment from the Last Days of Mozart”). Mozart, with the score of the Requiem on his lap, gives Süssmayr last-minute instructions. Constanze is to the side and the messenger is leaving through the main doorOn 5 December 1791, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died at his home in Vienna, Austria at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death [most likely from an acute infectious disease] have attracted much research and speculation.
The entry catalogues the research and speculation.
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