The Genius of Weirdness for Kickstarter Magazine

During my time directing Kickstarter's Curation & Engagement team, infamous Bill and Ted actor Alex Winter—also a devout Frank Zappa fan—brought a project to Kickstarter to produce a new film about the life and work of Frank Zappa, and to save the Zappa archives from deterioration. A long-time Zappa fan myself, Winter's project encouraged me to reflect on how the musician and activist affected my sense of self from a young age. I ended up writing an impassioned piece about Zappa's influence on me, which struck a chord on Medium. Here's an excerpt:

"In my teen days, Zappa’s music opened up a door through which I found a miraculously flexible and powerful duo: a curious mind, paired with an appreciation of art as a form for communicating ideas. At some point, I discovered that listening to Zappa was like taking a trip into another dimension where sounds and stories coalesced to form an alternate world—a world where the eccentric and absurd ruled all, and the oddities of being a human person on this grimy, grotesque planet were articulated in some cosmically profound way. Zappa didn’t spell it all out—rather, he gave me odd, cathartic ideas from which to catapult my own ideas and opinions."

Read The Genius of Weirdness on Medium →