Victoria's top favorite Zappa albums

This isn't possible, but...
Albums most consistently in any general Zappa top five (excluding the first part):

1. Weasels Ripped My Flesh
2. Joe's Garage
3. One Size Fits All
4. Waka/Jawaka
5. Absolutely Free
6. Apostrophe (')
7. Freak Out!
8. We're Only In It For The Money
9. Sleep Dirt (non-vocal version)
10. Lather

Top five 60's:
1. Hot Rats
2. We're Only In It For The Money
3. Burnt Weeny Sandwich
4. Uncle Meat
5. Lumpy Gravy

Top five 70's:
1. Grand Wazoo
2. Roxy and Elsewhere
3. 200 Motels
4. Bongo Fury
5. YCDTOSA #2, before the drum overdubs

Top five 80's:
1. Them or Us
2. YCDTOSA #5 disc 2
3. You Are What You Is
4. Tinseltown Rebellion
5. Make a Jazz Noise Here

Top five overrated but still good:
1. Apostrophe (')
2. Sheik Yerbouti
3. Zoot Allures
4. Over-nite Sensation
5. Zappa in New York

Most fraudulent top five:
1. Old Masters box 1
2. Old Masters box 2
3. Old Masters box 3
4. You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore
5. Lather (original)

Top five post mortem:
1. CPIII
2. Lost Episodes
3. Imaginary Diseases
4. Buffalo
5. Wazoo
6. I'm listening to OSD now... very good.

Top five future/potential releases:
1. Dance Me This/The Rage and the Fury--put em out already!
2. The entire collection of stuff hiding on the Synclavier
3. The Making of Joe's Garage
4. The Hot Rats band--the complete recordings
5. 1967 Garrick Theatre--the complete recordings

[dot] [dot] [dot]

So he started a war. That's what people do in free societies. Get people killed and blame others.

So what if I threw a a poison dart at my mother. That's what people do in free societies. That and create financially unstable debt instruments.

Victoria's TOP!... albums.

Finally, for you, Vikki's top IN GENERAL "heavy" albums. Consisting of all albums worthy to he of being top! As always, it's personal preference not so much essential listening

ENJOY THIS OCD FUELLED LIST!

1		Electric Wizard Come My Fantatics... (1997) In as much as it touches misanthropy and apocalyptic themes, so it does uplift and inspire! The production is crisp and refreshing, every instrument's role is felt and every song carries one another into the other and sees the album flow beautifully. Not a single song leave you wanting more and niether do they have you wanting less. Haunting, massive, anthemic and inviting you into the void better than any other album could, this is my all time favourite record!
2		Boris Amplifier Worship (2003) Amplifier Worship is pure evil. After eerily drawing into the opening track the band puke tone and vomit a barage of phasing at you, doing just about everything else there after. Ganbou-ki is an aural acid ceromony that you can only barely embrace, Hama's opening baring over you until it throws itself into a psychedelic heavy metal tornado ebbing and flowing, grinding and droning until it sees its peak in kuruimizu and gently builds up to a chiming, dissonant bastardized post-rock. The album's experience sealed justly with the chugged riff ritual of Vomitself, textured with Atsuo's solemn calls, distant in the rumbling amplifier worship.
3		Sun City Girls Horse Cock Phepner (1987) Horse cock phepner is a truely original creation of the Sun City Girls, taking childish vulgarity and applying it to the bitter idiosyncracy of the occult, the 'girls have made an album that confuses, alienates and swears a hell of a lot. All three members see their roles, talents and creative pursuits fulfilled, all variety of genre, style, song and form are touched not just masterfully but with a pantomime sinister that the Sun City Girls do only too well. There's political themes a plenty but never so involved that it detracts from the music, only adds to the mood, adding a string of vague familiarity through an otherwise hostile and very surreal listen.
4		Jesu Jesu (2005) An album I'd struggle to recommend. The self-entitled enormity of jesu's first full length release is just so magnanimous in all possible aspects; tone, texture, melody all the while central to a strong theme of tender melancholy that slowly veers toward morbid chastisement in its final moments. Like free-associative hymns for a very head-strong 21st century, they welcome your vulnerability and engulf you in sound. With its brute-like yet ominous force, Jesu’s self-titled is a spiritual experience at the very least.
5		Harvey Milk Courtezy and Good Will Toward Men (1997) The greatest Melvins album the Melvins never made! It’s plodding, dopey, mopey fun with heart wrenching tales backed by gut wrenching wails from the get go but all along the way there’s musical ingenuity to put the most conscious of iconoclastic notorieties to deep shame. Imagine Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore with an alcohol problem, further overweight and generally unwashed. I’m not making any analogies here I just wanted to put that mental image in your head. THAT’S THE KIND OF ALBUM THIS IS!!
6		James Plotkin's Phantomsmasher Phantomsmasher (2002) Phantomsmasher’s Phantomsmasher is the child porn star of Atomsmasher leaping free in a celestial zaniness. Screaming ever content serenity, ever thrashing - sometimes bouncing - with a rock and roll spirited finesse. The splatters of digital zips and squirms littler the fold in uniform chaos waiting for the steel-strong melodies and bass drills to claw the listener further into a state of Buddhist lunacy, tugging frustrated at every emotion, heart-string and bodily rhythm to keep you mindful of the furious aural ecstasy. GOOD ALBUM!
7		James Plotkin's Phantomsmasher AtomsAtomsmasher (2001) The Rules get fucked heavy in what was once Atomsmasher but is now Phantomsmasher’s exhilarating debut attempt at smashing atoms. There’s drumming drilled into a digitally altered frenzy, guitar chimes, riffs and grinds that play keys so jolly Disney’s getting nauseous, a vocalist with a break-neck, reverb heavy agenda and electronic samplings done in such poor taste that breakcore itself is pacing the corridors manically looking for the parties responsible. Yes, Atomsmasher is a hilariously musical abomination to music as all these aural atrocities form a texture so self-sufficient and unheard of that the skeptics can only sigh in immense frustration as the drug fuelled idiocy have their fun.
8		Sunn O))) White1 (2003) Breathing deep two major hallmarks of the occult; Sabbath tinged heavy metal chord works on the one end and apocalyptic spoken word invocations the other, the Sunn o))) collective bring about their most maturely formed, brilliantly engineered and musically satisfying record to date. Julian Cope provides a stunning exert of original prose over a soaring analogue-fuelled landscape carved by a single, ominous riff. Runhild Gammelsæter performing what almost seems like a spontaneous norse incantation before an almost primal ceremony of palm muted guitar play and intricately formed, intimately placed drum machine loops. The final movement sees Gammelsæter’s soothing sighs amidst a texture of crooning bass and awry guitar twangs. A true homage to the occult!
9		Exhaust Exhaust(1998) This Montreal collective have forged a truly original sound and style of their own. The twisted manipulations of tape and rhythm, drums and bass all address the listener as though these are the natural flourishing of any typical, sullen, lifeless recording studio, or perhaps the soundtrack of a late Soviet landscape, a hangover warped baleful with a lasting acid trip the night before. It’s dark as all hell and twice as enigmatic, it brushes over a variety of styles with the same dank gaze, never letting you detract from the fact that no matter how playful, infectious or solemn it become, the Exhaust machine is an entity purely of its own nature.
10		Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine Rampton (2002) The cornerstone of any lethargy soaked existence and a milestone in the doom metal genre. The production is SO perfect for this style of music, all four members; Greaves, Anderson, O’Malley and Dorrian clearly have an appreciation of the style that allows them to forge something a true fan of doom can appreciate. All applications of the term “mudbath” to any style of music have been made redundant by this insistently dirty release, even in it’s seldom moments of reticence the musicality and sound are all too suffocating. Perhaps the finest moment, between two 20 minute tone-caked processions of misanthropy is a cover of Killdozer’s New Pants and Shirt, which puts the catchy mud-pop classic to a welcome home in the eyes of the glazed eyed world-weary; slowing it right down, tuning guitars right down and laying on endless messy fuzz without ever leaving behind its true virtues as a song.

My case on science and the Big Questions

Hah. I know, right, I feel that some people are already sick of it.

First of all, before anything else though, realize that it's important to be clear about the distinction between "meaning" as it is used in connections with questions about the meaning of life and "meaning" as scientists use it. You can also use this before having to learn the secrets of the initiates and their strange beliefs about history -- I would recommend you people to read about that, it's truly fascinating.

A boy arranges to meet his girlfriend for a date, but she stands him up. He's hurt and angry. He wants to understand the painful thing that's happened to him. When he tracks her down, he interrogates her. His repeated question is WHY?
... because I missed my bus, she says,
... because I was late leaving work
... because I was distracted and didn't notice the time
... because I'm unhappy about something.
And so he presses and presses until he gets what he's after for (sort of):
... because I don't want to see you anymore.

When we ask WHY, it can be taken in two ways: either as in the girl's first, evasive answers, as meaning the same as HOW, that is to say requiring answers which give an account of a sequence of cause and effect, of atom knocking against atom; -- or, alternatively, WHY can be taken in the way the boy wanted to be answered, which is a matter of trying to winkle out INTENTION.

Similarly when we ask about the meaning of life and the universe we're not really asking HOW it came about in the cause-and-effect sense of how the right elements and conditions came together to form matters, stars, planets, organic matter and so on. We're asking about the intention behind it all.

So the big WHY questions -- WHY life? WHY the universe? -- as a matter of quite elementary philosophical distinction, cannot be answered by scientists, or more accurately not by scientists acting in their capacity as scientists. If we ask "WHY are we here?" we may be fobbed off with answers which -- like the girl's early answers -- are perfectly valid, int he sense of being grammatically correct answers to the question, but which leave a twist of disappointment in the pit of the stomach, because they don't answer the quetsion in the way that deep down we want it answered. The fact is that we all have a deep-seated, perhaps ineradicable longing for such questions to be answered at the level of INTENTION. The scientists who don't grasp this distinction, however brilliant they are as scientists, are philosophical morons.

Obviously we can choose to give parts of our lives purpose and meaning. If I choose to play football, then kicking the ball into the back of the net means goal. But our lives as a whole, from birth to death, cannot have meaning without a mind that existed beforehand to give it meaning.

The same is true of the universe.

So when we hear scientists talk about the universe as "meaningful", "wonderful" or "mysterious", we should bear in mind that they may be using these words with a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty. An atheistic universe can only be meaningful, wonderful or mysterious in a secondary and rather disappointing sense -- in the same sense that a stage conjuror is said to be "magic". And, really, when it comes to considering the great questionsof life and death, all the equations of science are little more than difficult and long-winded ways of saying "We don't know."

Fourteen to One

Merry Halloween. I may post some pictures up, but I don't want to right now.
Anyway, this is an English assignment:

Fourteen lines I have to say what I think
About these thirteen lines that now are not
But only twelve lines to describe the blink
It takes to line eleven which has fought
But lost to the tenth line in a cold war
Which led line nine to bare the sacred crown
That was stolen by line eight who would soar
Straight into the seventh line with a frown
And the line of six would waste all its time
Until five, the line would snatch up the right
To be king of four, a line to which I'm
Unsure if he married line three on sight
For her icy soul bore a child, line two
Who would love his line one, as fathers do

14
13
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

My concise thoughts on Science.

I haven't posted in a long while. Fucking pathetic, innit?
Today. Was fucking hysterical.

It's weird how life always pursues its evolution despite all occurrences and I'm very aware and conscious of it.

Drama, hallucinogenic drugs, breathing exercises were techniques intended to induce altered states of consciousness in the course of which initiates were able to see the new world in new ways. Thebes, Eleusis, and Ephesus were the ones who exceptionally utilized those back in the days. I believe everything has a conscious, that's right . "OH NOES, VICKKI'S A PANPYSYCHIST?" You know what? Shut your fucking constipated mouth, you stupid bitch. I hate how modern science tries to enforce a narrow, reductive view of our consciousness. It tries to convince us the unreality of elements that cannot explain. Science in this reductive view denies the universal experience that life has meaning. It tries to convince us of the unreality of elements, even quite persistent elements in experience, that it cannot explain.

Sure, Science may point out great facts: "Oh we are made of stardust and millions of atoms! We all have similar genes that have been PROVEN to be about 99.9% alike!" However, they deck it out with rhetoric mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force. Science doesn't really know as much as it claims to. I am suggesting that if we look at the basics of human condition from a different angle, we may appreciate that science doesn't really know as much as it claims to know, that it fails to address what is deepest and highest in human experience. Put aside the big questions of "Why are we here? What is the meaning of life?". It's strictly fucking meaningless.

Now stfu.

Pens

Consider the pen: a pen's life is either short or long, but which is worse? If he (for the sake of convenience, this pen is male) is used often, his life is short but rich and full. If his life is long, it means that he wasn't used, didn't have many experience. This type of pen is the one that lays in the bottom drawer, only to be used for the random post-it note. So the question is... which is worse?

And another thing. I often wonder if pens have aspirations, goals in life. I imagine a new package of pens, sitting on the shelf, wonder what is to become of them. I imagine each pen hoping with all his might that he would end up in the brilliant hand of this generation's Ibsen or Miller. I imagine the dread that his package might be purchased by the mother of a sloppy, lazy teenager-- for this would result in nothing but doodles and a lot of chewing (which can't possibly be pleasant... well maybe). I can hardly fathom the disappointment of such a pen. After all, it's not the pen's fault.

it all makes me wonder: are pens upset that they're becoming obsolete?