|
 1994
December
Vol 13 No 12
Which Way toPlanet Zappa
By John V. Scially, M.D., 1 p
Most people know CompuServe as a way to get information about,
and to interact with, the world. I found a way to use it to create
new information about another world. I spent four months of
networking with people in 15 countries to have a celestial body
named as a memorial to the late American composer Frank Zappa, who
died in December 1993.
Americans think of Zappa as a bizarre, iconoclastic rock musician
who founded the Mothers of Invention and opposed Tipper Gore, the
wife of U.S. Vice President Al Gore, during U.S. Senate hearings on
"porn rock." The rest of the world has recognized Zappa as an
innovative composer who mastered every current compositional style.
He is considered a great 20thcentury classical composer. While under
Communist rule, people in Eastern Europe found him to be a symbol of
free speech. When secret police arrested dissidents in these
countries, they would say, "We're going to beat the Zappa music out
of you." Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, is a great
admirer of Zappa.
Dr. Brian Marsden, director of the International Astronomical
Union's Minor Planet Center, told me that, with enough support, he
would propose naming a Czech-discovered asteroid after Zappa. The
more endorsements he had, the more likely his committee would be to
approve this official naming.
I networked electronically, using CompuServe Mail and the Internet,
and posted messages in the RockNet and Music/Arts forums and on
alt.fan.frankzappa, a Usenet newsgroup. Dr. Marsden received
hundreds of endorsements by e-mail and fax – he said it was the
largest lobbying effort he had seen in the naming of more than 3,000
minor planets.
There was no problem getting approval for my memorial. In late July,
Dr. Marsden made the announcement at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts: An asteroid, a
five-mile-long boulder orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, was now
named Zappafrank. (The names were reversed for technical reasons.)
Since then, my life has changed because of the media's interest in
the story. For weeks after the announcement, news stories were
written and I was interviewed by major radio networks and the
international press, including CNN and MTV.
Most important, the Zappa family was very grateful.
Dr. John V Scialli, 41, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and
family therapist in Phoenix, Arizona. Scialli notes that Zappa was
very interested in astronomy and had some pet theories about the
nature of matter-"Stephen Hawking-type stuff" Scialli says. His
CompuServe User ID number is 73614,360.
|
