Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

Write on!

~ Patrick O'Grady

In The New Republic, Mark Pinsky calls for the resurrection of the Federal Writers Project as a bailout for laid-off journalists, a less-than-exclusive club to which he belongs:

Gifted FWP alumni who went on to distinguished literary careers in literature include John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and African-Americans Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. The recent death of Studs Terkel — a FWP veteran who went on to use the skills he developed in the program to chronicle the working- and middle-classes on his long-running radio show and in his Pulitzer Prize-winning books — is a reminder of how valuable this kind of experience can be. Ellison used his FWP research in “Invisible Man,” and Steinbeck and John Gunther relied on the FWP state guides for “Travels With Charley: In Search of America” and “Inside U.S.A.,” respectively.

Count me in. I haven’t been laid off — yet — but I feel that should worse come to worst, I’m ready, willing and able to contribute to some compilation of cheap jokes at other people’s expense. It’s either that or move to Montana to become a dental-floss tycoon.

Memoirs of a Zappatista (cont.)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
Funny, yeah? Not to Frank Zappa it wasn't.
Funny, yeah? Not to Frank Zappa it wasn't.

Another encounter with FZ, this time as a Sears-poncho faux hippie slouching down Tejon Street in scenic downtown Bibleburg. Head shops were everywhere in the Seventies, even here. Tejon also served as home to an office of the John Birch Society, two or three dirty bookstores and a clean one, Dick and Judy Noyes’ Chinook, felled some years back by Amazon.com. One dirty bookstore survives, which tells you much of what you need to know about this place.

But as I said, I was slouching down Tejon and in the window of this head shop I saw a poster that stopped me in my tracks — the now-legendary Phi Zappa Krappa poster, depicting FZ squatting on a toilet. I was eagerly doing my lame-o best to offend as many people as possible through cartoons like “For Sure God Gets High” and “The Adventures of Loadedman,” and so found it delightful.

But FZ apparently found it less so, according to Kill Ugly Radio. The picture was originally intended to illustrate a British magazine article and promote The Mothers’ first concert in 1967, but took on a life of its own as a widely bootlegged poster from which FZ derived no royalties, though he did authorize at least one version, according to a 1975 story written by Steve Weitzman:

“Well, I don’t see anything wrong about sitting on a toilet and having your picture taken, but when somebody takes that picture and uses it to make money on your name. … Then you compound that with the public’s attitude toward excretory processes pictured in a poster like that … more people knew me for that poster than for my music. I said, ‘Well, that’s not fair.’ So I said, ‘I’m either going to do something drastic about it or just let it go’ and I figured, ‘Well, kiss it off.’ You can’t really change the public’s attitude about that.”

Ironic that FZ himself was probably the person most offended by that poster, no?

Watch out where the huskies go

~ Patrick O'Grady
And don't you eat that yellow snow.
And don't you eat that yellow snow.

Dreamed I was an Eskimo

Frozen wind began to blow

Under my boots ‘n’ around my toe

Frost had bit the ground below

Was a hundred degrees below zero

And my momma cried: Boo-a-hoo hoo-ooo.

Well, OK, it’s not a hundred below. I’m not an Eskimo. And my momma’s dead. But it is chilly, and the white stuff is coming down, and by morning I’ll bet you a pancake breakfast at St. Alphonzo’s that the deadly yellow snow will be lying about the joint in abundance come morning.

What kind of a guru are you, anyway?

~ Patrick O'Grady

http://www.youtube.com/v/Mm9RqatOby0

Back to college, 1974, and this time it was “Apostrophe” on the turntable (“Now is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?”). We were the Sears-poncho type, I fear. But it was fun, anyway, even without the crystal ball and the oil of Aphrodite, because we had more than enough of the dust of the Grand Wazoo.

Meanwhile, if you want to know who’s wearing the Real Poncho, check out these folks, a bunch of Chicago workers who got laid off, but refused to fade away. Too bad The Newspaper Guild never had the stones these folks do. A couple thousand Gannett folks might still be on the job.