Like many tech-savvy folks, I quit Instagram over the terms of service fiasco. It was the last straw after recent updates had left the app unstable, often crashing after merely taking a photo— the main feature of the thing. After Instagram sold out out by Facebook, I mused on the price of free apps, but opted to keep with the service, with a wait and see attitude. Thankfully, Flickr was there to catch the fall, having been Frankensteined back to life with a new, non-sucky iPhone app. I quickly paid for a year of Flickr Pro to cement our rekindled relationship.

I’m a bit behind, but I recently read Ryan Block’s reasons for quitting Instagram, and it reminded me of the Faustian pact we make, when we sign up for any free service. The diabolical favors we get from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any of an (un)holy host of services is that we get to connect with people, often people we want to connect with, for the price of giving up our soul privacy. Some of us have a harder time turning this deal down than others.

Ryan Block’s willingness to just up and shut down his Facebook and Instagram accounts with little regret has me envious, and his story of old, zombified social networks harassing him from beyond the grave is familiar. But, Ryan’s not the only one turning things off. Thomas Brand dropped a lot of social networks, recently, and a bunch of other services as well, opting to stick, exclusively, with App.Net. [1] Patrick Rhone isn’t leading the charge, but predicts 2013 will be the “year of opt-out.” I sort of hope he’s right, but as it stands now, I can’t opt-out of a lot of this crap.

All my friends, and all the technology-savvy members of my family are on Facebook. My job requires a LinkedIn profile. I paid for an account on App.Net, but most everyone I want to communicate with or hear from is on Twitter. When all of your friends and co-workers are completely up-and-up, tech-savvy people with the sort of money to blow on paid social networks, it’s easy to uproot yourself, draw the line in the sand, and say “I’m going to live here now” without worrying about all the people you left behind. Chances are, most of them are where you are too.

It’s probably no coincidence that in an industry as fairly monocultural as technology journalism (From The Magazine, subscription required) that the services tech journalists use are generally monocultural in makeup. Please don’t assuming I’m making the same case as those who say App.Net is a symptom of “white flight”. The case I’m making is that when your circles consist more of technology oriented people, you can afford to be a bit more cavalier about how you associate with them.

Back here, on terra firma, we have to go to where the action is. When the people you care about exist only in those places that you have to give up a part of yourself to join, the choices are either to give up that pound of flesh, or snub them. I don’t say this lightly. I already quit Facebook once, and they dragged me back, kicking and screaming, for more. Right now, I’m getting far more out of Twitter and Facebook than it feels like they’re getting out of me. App.Net is still waiting to be worth the $36 I paid for it.

The party won’t come to me. I don’t have that kind of sway over the people I care about. Instead, I have to go to the party. I’ve made the deal with the devil, and I’m okay with that, but it’s the devil I know. It’s also the devil all my friends know. That makes a lot of difference. For me, price of disconnection is worse than the price of connection.

And yes, that is how they get you.

The stage name Crocus Behemoth suggests a figure larger than life, a being of strength, power and size, but David Thomas is no longer Crocus Behemoth in many ways. He ditched the moniker not long after the band he took it for split in twain. Now, he looks more like a grizzled prospector from the late 19th Century, greatly slimmed with a bald pate, salty stubble on his face, and wearing a long, well worn black duster coat. Yet, once the music started, and Thomas began to sing, Crocus Behemoth returned, a unique voice unchanged by the ravages of time. In a way, he is a metaphor for Rocket From the Tombs itself, these days—deceptive looks hiding a power and energy that defy all expectation.

One could be rather snide about age and Rocket From the Tombs. They formed in 1974, and were defunct inside of a year with only demo tapes and two concert recordings to their name. This name was then spoken of in hushed and reverent tones by smart-asses who probably were never there in the first place, author included. They reunited in 2003, released a debut album in 2004, and only added a second disc to their name in 2011. It would be shamelessly easy to dismiss the endeavor as old men trying to recapture their rock and roll youth. Never mind Thomas’s career with Pere Ubu and his status as an elder statesman of outsider rock music. His legacy is written. Cheetah Chrome, partner in crime, also has his legacy established, as guitarist for the Dead Boys, and his own solo career.

When I saw Rocket From the Tombs perform on a warm December night in 2011, it was clear DavidThomas wasn’t trying to recapture anything. The way he performs with RFTT eschews all rock and roll glamour, Thomas checks lyrics on a music stand, sits down on a folding chair and sucks cans of Carling Black Label during songs where he passes vocal duties to Cheetah Chrome or Craig Bell, and sarcastically tosses aside the whole “encore” ritual—not that he could have left the stage with the crowd packed so tight around it. Meanwhile, the band plays protopunk riffs and rhythms with a practiced deftness that bands have tried to emulate for decades.

Not many bands with a nearly 40 year history can create new works that stand on par with the old. To anyone in the crowd unfamiliar with RFTT, songs like “Good Times Never Roll” and “I Sell Soul” off Barfly could easily pass for vintage numbers. However, it’s the old material that most of the crowd was there for: “Sonic Reducer,” “30 Seconds over Tokyo,” and “Ain’t it Fun,” and they reacted appropriately. The only thing missing was “Final Solution,” despite cries for it from the crowd. These were songs we all knew, standards of the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu repertoire. At the time, Thomas had recently finished a tour with the current incarnation of Pere Ubu, performing “The Annotated Modern Dance”—their first LP along side attendant singles, including “Final Solution.” This may be why RFTT skipped it.

Though we all knew the songs, they transformed in the hands of their originating band. “30 Seconds” was all the more menacing, though somewhat less atmospheric than Ubu’s take. “Sonic Reducer” was delivered more as a formality, though not robbed of its impact. As it started, an older, grizzled hipster type with the beard of a homeless drifter threw himself at the stage, and was tossed about a bit—the middle-aged version of a mosh pit, or slam dancing, or whatever they really did back in the day. The opening band certainly didn’t get half as warm a reception, proving that the old guard still can teach a thing, or two, I suppose.

Perhaps the only true nod to any sort of crassness to the event was Thomas’s sneering comment about his favorite part of the show—selling the merchandise from the stage. Thomas offered up their new CD, their old CDs, CDs they’d been given by other bands… I handed over $10 for a copy of Barfly, in a cardboard case not unlike a vinyl record of yore. As I passed the money over, I looked in David’s eyes, and told him I hoped to see him perform again. “Me too,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. All theatrics and irony were gone in that moment, but it was fleeting, and he was exchanging pleasantries and plastic for dollars with the fans again. Maybe someone else got that same experience from it.

Perfection doesn’t come the first time around. It’s a process, and it’s a paradox.

One achieves perfection through iteration and refactoring. The more you do a thing, the better you will be. Whether this is playing a musical instrument, writing code, painting landscapes, or writing novels, doing it more makes you better at it. The process is just doing the work. That’s easy(ish). You do it over and over, improving each time, even just a little bit. That complex piece of music becomes easier to play. The next app is done in half the time with less bugs. The next landscape looks more realistic. The next novel gets a personalized rejection slip, instead of a form letter. We can see ourselves improve with each iteration of the work.

The paradox is harder. We all have a frame of reference for what we want our work to be. The piano player wants to be on par with Thelonious Monk. The coder wants to write software on par with Apple. The landscape painter wants to be on par with Peter Paul Rubens [1]. The novelist wants to be on par with Vladimir Nabokov. Each work only gets you part of the way there. It’s like walking a distance of a mile by walking half of it, then half the remaining distance, and half again, and so on. You never get there. Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Zeno’s Paradox. This sounds awfully depressing. Try as we might, we’ll never get to where we want to be.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. First of all, it’s not just you. When you realize this, it’s liberating. Everyone has their idea of perfection that they’re trying to reach. Without that driving, compelling force, there’s no need for them to try, after all. We’re all chasing each other’s unreachable ideals, and though we may get infinitesimally close, we may never get there. But that’s fine too. If we got there, we’d either find another unreachable ideal to chase, or we’d stagnate and die. When you accept that, life becomes much easier.

Give yourself over to the failure inside of you, and let it envelop your soul.

Failure is not out to get you. Failure wants to be your friend, the one you can count on when success, that is ever elusive, eludes you.

King Missile III – “Failure”

Before you read this piece, take a few minutes, and listen to this song.

Done?

Good.

My father always told me that you only own two things in life: your failures, and your word. You can’t even take credit for your successes, because someone else will try to hog the spotlight. Nobody wants to claim someone else’s failures. You’re stuck with them. That’s what us so terrified to fail. As for your word, you own that too, because if you fail to keep your word, well…

Problem is, being afraid of failure keeps us from doing pretty much anything. We only manage to do those things that we’re confident of our ability to not fail. I can be reasonably sure that if I walked to the kitchen and got a cookie, I could eat that cookie successfully. If I went into the kitchen and tried to make a batch of cookies, that I’m not sure about. I don’t know if I have the ingredients, the tools, and the time. I don’t know if I can remember a good cookie recipe. So, if I were to go into the kitchen, blind, and try to make cookies, I would almost certainly fail.

This is a slightly absurd comic example, but the same could be applied to almost anything. Failure is a permanent state, only in the sense that you can’t change the past, and that you have to deal with the consequences. Consequences may last a long time, or they may not. Dirty dishes, and carbonized “cookie” on a baking sheet are temporary. Unless you’ve done something particularly terrible or outright criminal, however, there’s no “Permanent Record” to dog you. Only yourself.

Failure wants you to get over your fear of failure—and what better way to do that than to fail and fail again?

If at first you don’t succeed…

How many times have you tried to do something and failed? Anything. Small things. Big things.

It’s probably a very big number, unless you don’t do anything.

But, what do you take away from those failures?

First, you know what not to do next time, which will reduce your chances of future failures. After all, as Merlin Mann says, “The beginning of expertise is going ‘Oh! I’ve dealt with this problem before!’” Often this means “I’ve tried to do this before, and I know what doesn’t work.”

You have to own your failure, because only by doing so will you recognize those chances that come up where you can fail in exactly the same way you failed before. You can still fail in an entirely different way, but that’s okay. Pick yourself up, wipe yourself off, and fail again in another way.

Or, perhaps, succeed.

But most likely not. And that’s okay.

So befriend it. Make love to it. And believe in it with all your might. Because failure is all there is for you.

(With apologies to John S. Hall.)

I’ve been a Frank Zappa fan for a decade, and I’m incredibly glad to find his music is being given a comprehensive remastering and re-release job for a current generation. Like any artist with a long discography, and various remasters, there’s debates over the “superior version” of various albums. We’re talking stuff that puts the Beatles’s “Mono versus Stereo” debates to shame. [1] This is especially difficult in the world of Zappa recordings. Not only are there multiple remasters, but Zappa also developed an odd fetish for re-recording parts of various old recordings with modern technology such the bass and drums as on Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, his pastiche of 50s Doo-Wop music. [2]

Hot Rats, Zappa’s 1969 album of mostly instrumental Jazz-Rock fusion, is considered by many as his most accessible album, and regularly touted as a good entry point for Zappa neophytes. I, respectfully, disagree. I think 1974’s Apostrophe(’) is a better introduction. Still, I love Hot Rats, and I’ve listened to it countless times over the years. The drum fill at the start of “Peaches en Regalia” never fails to get my heart racing. As part of the reissue campaign, The Zappa Family Trust has released on CD and digital download, the original vinyl mix of the album. All previous CD versions come from a 1987 remastering job by Zappa, which added a huge layer of reverb and other crap on the top—while also adding four extra minutes to “The Gumbo Variations”

Putting the new remaster on, I didn’t know what to expect. What happened was almost like a religious experience. There were melodies that I never knew were playing. There were instruments I heard that I never knew were playing. This is a revelation, as Hot Rats was as much a study in the power of multi-track recording as it was in combining Jazz and Rock music. The ’87 remaster muddied everything so much that whole melody lines got lost in the mix. The worst part is that, since every official version of the album that’s come out since 1987 is based on Zappa’s own remastering job, I had no clue what I was missing. It’s a testament to Zappa’s skills as a composer and the musicianship of his band at the time that even with the remixing, reverb and brickwalling of the previous, canonical version, that Hot Rats stands up as a classic album.

I didn’t even finish listening to the 2012 remaster before tossing my previous version of Hot Rats aside, permanently. I’ll give up an extra four minutes of “The Gumbo Variations” for hearing all of Ian Underwood’s keyboard parts, [3] cleanly, and having all the panning percussion. In recent years, the Zappa Family Trust has put out a few original mixes, such as the mono version of Freak Out! and the original mix of Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (as Greasy Love Songs). Hearing those versions changed my impression of the records, but neither was as transformative an experience as listening to the original vinyl mix of Hot Rats. It was truly like listening for the first time all over again.

If you want to hear me wax on further about Frank Zappa, check out Episode 26 of Crush On Radio, titled “Undergraduate Studies in Frank Zappa”. You can get Hot Rats on Amazon MP3 as well.