A Mixed Meters tradition now in its third year. Read about 2007 & 2006. Remember, this is not about what was new in 2008, only about what was new TO ME.
1. The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. First time in my life I've ever finished a novel and immediately flipped back to page one to read it again, cover to cover. An elegantly written, noirish alternate-history murder mystery about a loser Jewish police detective named Meyer Landsman whose supervisor is his ex-wife. (I'd like to start the rumor that Meyer will be played by Mel Gibson in the projected Coen Brothers movie.)
2. The Zappa Album by Ensemble Ambrosius. Yes, a CD of music by Frank Zappa performed by an early music ensemble. Seven Finnish musicians who get the coveted "thinking outside the box" award for this one. Released in 2000 after Frank's death. Try to imagine him saying "The lute needs to be louder to balance the oboe da caccia."
3. Keybreeze. A free computer utility that will make Windows more friendly to 10-fingered users. If you're a good typist and are lumbered with a Bill Gates' OS, stop reading this post now and go install Keybreeze.
4. Bodum Double-Walled Insulated Glassware Delicate, yes. But they'll keep your cold drinks cold fantastically long, even sitting under hot desk lamps and near computer monitors, like mine do. They keep warm things warm longer too - just not as well.
5. Omron HJ-112 Pocket Pedometer I'll write more about this next month. But for now, suffice it to say, this pedometer actually works even while flopping around in my pocket. I didn't think that was possible.
8. The shrimp burrito at La Estrella, on Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena
9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay another novel by Michael Chabon which I wouldn't have read if #1 (above) hadn't been so good. Glad I did. You'll like it too, especially if you like comic books - which I don't.
10. Matter by Iain M. Banks. In my world, a new science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks is always cause for rejoicing. This one, about an artificial planet with concentric levels each home to a different species (just like in an apartment building), too. I wrote about another Banks' novel here.
The pictures in this post: shots I liked which aren't good enough for Mixed Messages. Still, I couldn't bring myself to toss them. They enlarge if you tickle them with your mouse.
The rain leaves, the wind comes. It gets clear. Leslie and I take Chowderhead walking in the Lower Arroyo Seco Natural Park (satellite picture). We pass under the Colorado Street Bridge and the 134 Freeway Bridge, designed with complimentary arches which are reflected in pools of water. Pictures are taken.
Click any picture to enlarge it, especially the last one.
Click here to read the first Stalking the Christmas Penguin. It discusses the geographic illiteracy of Americans and answers the question of why God invented wars.
All those posts will explain why my chain is yanked by Christmas penguins. This is especially true when they're shown with polar bears or igloos.
Over just 3 seasons of Christmas penguin watching they've rapidly ascended the ladder of seasonal success. Even Stats, a staid Pasadena holiday decoration store, where I could find no penguins last year, had a beautiful, almost antique penguin sculpture in its main window this year. The penguin has arrived.
Leslie has gotten on the Penguin bandwagon, eagerly pointing them out to me in stores and along residential streets. She seems disappointed if I don't want to bother taking another penguin photo, so I humor her. She wanted me to take this towel shot:
And we have Christmas penguins in our house for the first time. We created this one together. It's made out of refrigerator magnets. (Click here to see past magnet art.)
I also placed a sticker of three penguins next to the Viewsonic logo of three finches on my computer monitor.
Here are a couple more Christmas penguin stickers. Ivy the cat likes to chew on them.
Southern California is generally thought to be place with no weather - and many of us are quite happy about that. We see pictures of snowstorms in other parts of the country and we laugh. (Well, I do. But not in a mean way, of course.)
Still, it does occasionally snow on the mountains overlooking our little polluted piece of paradise. And the novelty of that prompts me to take pictures. The first picture, taken earlier this month, shows a distant snow-capped mountain and two palm trees. (I reckon the mountain is about 20 or 25 miles away; the two palms were across the street.)
The second picture is a panoramic shot of Mount Wilson, directly above Pasadena, taken after this week's storm. The snow level was about 2000 feet. The icicle-like things sticking up from the ridgeline are television and radio antennas which beam insidious advertising and popular culture directly into the brains of unsuspecting Californians. It's a really BIG picture. Click it to see just how big.
The last picture is as close-up a shot of the antennae as my pocket point-'n-shoot will allow. They look to be covered in ice. Actually, you can click any of the pictures.
Here's another Mount Wilson picture I took a while ago when there was no weather. Click it to go to my Flickr Picture Pages.
A 30 second spot based on a familiar holiday tune. The melody is reduced to bare bones or less, a small nubbin, smelly and harsh to the touch. It's disrespectful and not in the holiday spirit. In other words, what you expect from Mixed Meters about this time of year.
The last two titles are references to the song Winter Wonderland. Read a deconstruction of the lyrics in the post Winter Wonderland Diagnosis for Murder! at the blog Surrealpolitic for surreal times.
The picture (click for full size) STOCKING STUFFERS Left to right :
I can suggest two equally valid ways to enjoy this piece:
You can listen without paying attention.
You can pay attention without listening.
The second is probably more Zen, but then I know nothing about Zen.
Copyright (c) 2008 by David Ocker 113 seconds
I found the Dean Martin record cover via the picture website This Isn't Happiness. (highly recommended). They found it here. I found This Isn't Happiness via EricPeterson. You can hear and watch Marty Robbins sing My Woman, My Woman, My Wifehere. (his intro is the best part. No wait, his shirt is the best part.)
Music to Suffer By - the image came from here. Read about the singer here. Listen to it here. (Recommended for Florence Foster Jenkins fans.)
Who says Mixed Meters doesn't bring you fine music?
Don't understand this post? Remember, Mixed Meters puts non sequiturs in their correct order.
Tim Mangan, Orange County's music critc, posted this link to a performance of Ravel's Bolero by Orchestre de Paris under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach who uses the least amount of motion possible to conduct an orchestra. Almost none.
There's not much for a conductor to do in that piece. It's more like Eschenbach is supervising or maybe leading telepathically. Raised eyebows, twitches, head snaps and his clenched jaw muscles are all he needs. He finally does wave his arms. You can guess when. It seems that he manages to attract a lot of attention by not moving.
The video is in two parts. Listen for little variations by the bassoonist and the tenor player.
It reminded me of this short clip of Pierre Boulez leading a bit of Debussy's Nocturnes looking a bit like private security guard. Or maybe a Secret Service Agent without his earpiece. Or a character in the movie Men In Black.
Classical music sells product - in this case the Queen of the Night aria by Mozart and a feminine lubricant.
Read an article by Tom Serivce in The Guardian here. I found it via Arts Journal. This ad will appear on US television after hell freezes over, which is to say - never. This group posted the video online.
For a video of a young boy singing the same music very well, go to the MM post Prince of the Night
Over the centuries people have come to Southern California from all over the world. They bring their art and religion and they build monuments to their own cultural heritage. In Southern California these monuments mix in unexpected ways.
I photographed an example of cultural heritages mixing: two architecturally antagonistic church steeples. They're one block apart and were built one year apart.(1) The congregations, although close physically, are heirs to very different cultures and mythologies. Their histories stretch back, along very different paths, to different parts of Europe. Neither church, neither congregation, neither religion, neither style of architecture is representative of Southern California by itself - but the area is richer for having both. And lots of others too.
Music can be a religion, it has a heritage and it has monuments. People often attend concerts to connect with their music history - like another Mozart symphony or another Rolling Stones tour. And just like the diversity of churches and religions, there are many different types of music in Southern California - hugely different heritages in close proximity.
One kind of music is opera. For many decades Los Angeles civic leaders dreamed of their own opera company and eventually they got it. Then they wanted their own Ring Cycle - as if that were some sort of validation. Their theory seems to be that Los Angeles Opera wouldn't be considered a "real" opera company without a Ring cycle, and without a "real" opera company Los Angeles wouldn't be a real place.
WAGNER'S RING
Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung is one of the biggest musical monuments imaginable - nineteen operas, each over two full days in length. (Hyperbole!) The plot screams about lust, murder, incest and revenge - but all in a good way. (Sarcasm!) "Love" and "Redemption" and "Heroism" and "Magic Fire" and "Helmets of Invisibility" and "Women Warriors on Flying Horses with Longer-Than-They-Are-Wide Swords" make it no weirder than Star Wars.
Some people keep coming back to these operas again and again. Those people are called Ringnuts (although I think it'd be cool to call them "Wagnerds"). Read my favorite Ring synopsis here. (Better yet, go find a recording of it.)
Richard Wagner was quite the egomaniac, a short, offensive scumbag who hated Jews and loved adultery - all in a good way as well. (More Sarcasm!) And of course Wagner's most famous fan was named Adolf. He used Wagner's music as inspiration to become the most evil person in history. Unfortunately the music world has largely forgiven Wagner for the horror of Hitler's ways.(2)
I'm not a believer in any religion, most particularly not that of Wagnerism. Others can believe whatever they want and attend whichever ceremonies make them feel good. I don't have to pay any attention. The L.A. Opera production of The Ring is easy to ignore.
In the press release Placido Domingo modestly tells us:
Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles,
This one-ring circus will start in April 2010. The final program won't be announced until January 2010 - 14 months from now.
WHY A RING FESTIVAL?
Civic boosterism is a good answer: dollars and profit. As Eli Broad, the rich local patron who has given Six Million Dollars towards the opera productions themselves, said:
Ring Festival LA will bring worldwide attention to our city and attract an increasing number of visitors.
In other words: more tickets sold, more hotel rooms filled.
Less credibly, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is quoted as saying:
Ring Festival LA will highlight the wealth of arts and culture that is unique to our town.
Someone should mention to him that Wagner operas are never going to be unique to Los Angeles. We will not become Bayreuth on the Pacific. Someone should also mention that Los Angeles has a history of arts festivals - a history which reflects conflict between elitism and populism.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ARTS FESTIVALS IN LOS ANGELES
Although from 1947 through 1966 there was the Los Angeles Music Festival created by composer Franz Waxman, apparently the first attempt at a city-wide multi-discipline arts festival was the Olympic Arts Festval in 1984.
Here's a bit of Olympic Arts Festival hype (from here)
[T]he 1984 Olympic Arts Festival threatens to become one of the wonders of the contemporary world. These projects are Los Angeles theatre, Korean dance, California sculpture, performers from the People’s Republic of China, and above all, “freeway murals”.
The programming of the first two festivals was still hugely Eurocentric in spite of the hype. Some local creativity and non-European artists were included. The freeway murals have not survived several generations of taggers. Art is ephemeral.
The last Los Angeles Festival in 1993 suffered from the lack of large corporate donations. Although Peter's philosophy was both positive and praiseworthy, it didn't really fulfill the desires of the arts community. I guess they were mostly interested in European arts and so the L.A. Festivals died on a petard of multi-culturalism. No one, to my knowlege, talked about another festival again until now.
SO WHAT'S MY COMPLAINT?
I am bothered that Ring Festival LA will be promoted as a centerpiece of our entire local arts community - a keystone to all things expressive in Los Angeles.
While it might be nice for some people who live here, this festival, as it was announced, will be far from representative of the arts community as a whole. In fact it is elitist in the extreme. As such it could well do our arts community - especially our creative music community - a grand disservice.
I'm assuming that the plethora of arts organizations taking part in Ring Festival L.A. will program events related to the Ring or to Wagner. This would be a a way of attracting the Ringnuts who are expected to infest L.A. during the festival.
Go here to read about the events announced so far - everything seems to be Wagner related. except for one "little" Stockhausen piece. (Sarcasm!) Stockhausen fits in because he was German and he had an ego even bigger than Wagners.
There's this gem (yep, more sarcasm):
LA's ground-breaking daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra, led by Geoff "Double G" Gallegos, premieres a new work inspired by the revolutionary spirit of Wagner.
There are many "to be announced" festival events on their list. They might eventually include all sorts of things in the festival - Latin jazz, oriental dancers, gospel choirs, klezmer bands, etc. - events with significance to large segments of the other 97.6% of the city who couldn't care less about Wagner. Not holding my breath. (3)
WHAT WOULD I SUGGEST INSTEAD?
The Los Angeles Opera should have their Ring festival. My fears could be allayed. Here are some suggestions. Only the first one is simple.
1) Change the name of the festival to "Ring Festival L.A. Opera" or "L.A. Opera Ring Festival"? Just don't claim to represent the entire Los Angeles arts community.
2) L.A. Opera also has a project called Recovered Voices which presents operas suppressed by the Nazis. Mix the Recovered Voices operas into the festival. In my best of all possible worlds you would only be able to attend a Ring opera if you had previously attended a Recovered Voices opera. . 3) A big Ring Cycle production might someday appear on DVD. Before that let the masses listen in and watch for free. Broadcast all 4 operas live on radio and/or television. The opening of Disney Hall had live broadcasts. Share the operas.
4) A Los Angeles Ring should not further expunge the black marks on Wagner's personal rap sheet. The man should be viewed as reprehensible and his personal opinions and behavior are still highly relevant if his music is to get so much attention. Expand the educational seminar entitled "Richard Wagner and the Jews: The Use of Wagner by the Nazis." Los Angeles has the second biggest Jewish population on the planet and this subject should not be swept under the rug, especially here. One seminar in front of a few hundred people without extensive media would be an insult.
5) Be realistic about the debt which the Los Angeles film music community still owes to Wagner. Big ticket film scores draw their lifeblood from Wagner's leitmotivic composition methods. This is discussed interestingly here by John Mauceri. He's talking about emigre composers, but the practice persists. L.A.Opera has not had terribly good luck commissioning works from film composers - but that doesn't mean they should stop trying. Maybe they'll come up with something better than the Ring.
6) Hold a fringe festival at the same time as the Ring Festival. This is not something the L.A.Opera should do on its own. Instead the opera should give other organizations money to create an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian festival showcasing local creativity. Let those Ringnuts see that Los Angeles arts have gone beyond Wagner and movie soundtracks.
THE WRONG FESTIVAL LOS ANGELES
In my best of all possible worlds I've picked a name for this fringe festival - The Wrong Festival. The Wrong Festival is the Right thing to do. Like a clapper hitting opposite sides of a bell - we can hear "ringgg" and then "wronggg". Ringgg. Wronggg. Two sides of the same sound. An aural pun.
Like the two churches at the start of this essay, the Ring Festival and the Wrong Festival can coexist. They can occupy adjacent space at the same time and still validly and vividly represent entirely different artistic traditions.
A Los Angeles Festival should show the world that the people here respect one another through their art and music. It should show how Los Angeles residents hail from a huge number of backgrounds. We should celebrate our diversity in festival. We should not trumpet elitism.
FOOTNOTES (1)The picture of two church spires on North Lake Avenue will be familiar to residents of Pasadena and Altadena. On the right is St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church (in Altadena) and on the left Westminster Presbyterian Church (in Pasadena). The one on the left is actually much taller; it's visible for miles. One is Gothic Revival, built in 1925, designed by Marston, Van Peet & Marbury. The other, in Mediteranean Spanish style, was built in 1926 and designed by Wallace Neff.
(2) Jews included. I believe that the contemporary pardon of Richard Wagner represents the loss an important lesson from the history of National Socialism. Namely, that the arts can be used for bad purposes. My parents taught me to avoid Wagner, not by telling me 'Avoid Wagner', but by simply avoiding Wagner themselves. All the while they were teaching me to appreciate other music instead.
In our current politics, the lessons of political appeasement before World War II are repeated endlessly as an excuse for our wars. Now and again society should remind itself about the powerful dangers of all encompassing arts. These days the danger isn't from opera - more likely that television or movies or country music or books could get everyone's brains into lockstep as we make yet another foolish national mistake.
(3) 97.6% - calculated like this: 4 complete performances of the Ring, NINETEEN operas per performance, all 3200 seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion sold out for every performance, no person ever attends more than once. Total attendance - 243,200 people or 2.33 percent of the total estimated population of Los Angeles County as of Jan. 1, 2008 - 10,363,850. More realistically, if they only performed 4 of the 19 operas the percentage drops to just under one half of one percent. And divide that figure by four if everyone attends a complete cycle. On anyone's scale an event accessible by barely one tenth of one percent of the population qualifies as elitist.
I've never participated in a meme before, not for lack of opportunity. If you have no idea what a meme is, click here. In this particular meme (Sevens) you're supposed to post the rules of this meme, answer them, then tag others. Weird, because I've seen the same meme elsewhere - with sixes. Maybe it's time for Eights.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. If you don't have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers.
My Seven Facts
1. My Mother, a life-long coffee drinker and cigarette smoker, claimed to have spontaneously stopped smoking tobacco and drinking coffee while she was pregnant with me, but as soon as I was born she again wanted a smoke and a cup. I've never smoked and for the first 40 years or so of my life the smell of coffee made me ill. (I still don't smoke, but now I adore coffee and can drink unlimited amounts any time of the day without effect.)
2. I grew up in Sioux City Iowa, where there was a large pile of manure between the stockyards and the Interstate, not far from the Missouri River. When the wind was right, you could smell it at our house. A potentially bad job could always be excused by saying "It's better than shoveling shit."
3. In high school I read Eugene Ionesco's absurdist The Bald Soprano (in this wonderful pictorial edition) and I couldn't believe how much it seemed like my own life. Later I became a big fan of the equally absurd Goon Show.
4. In college I changed my major from Math to Music because the music courses began over 2 hours later each morning than math classes. Since then I've consistently made career choices based on how late in the day I could sleep.
5. In graduate school I taught myself to juggle using oranges picked by my roommate Wildman from trees belonging to the percussion teacher, John Bergamo. Oranges are very bad things for inexperienced jugglers because they split when dropped and get sticky juice all over. Eventually I took a juggling course at CalArts. Juggling was the only talent I graduated with that I didn't already have when I matriculated.
6. I have a huge tendancy towards motion sickness and I can't read in any moving land-based vehicle. Just glancing at a map while riding in a car can make me dizzy. Fortunately, although I'm a musician, I've never had to tour extensively. I really like sleeping in the same bed every night.
7. Here's a piece of music I wrote in a particular seven meter that I heard on an Internet radio station devoted to Afghani music.Read a little more about it here. I like music in non-standard meters - like five, seven, eleven. And I liked music which changes meter so much I named my blog after it. And I think the Diabolus in Musica is not what you've been taught - it's really the Back Beat.
8. The pictures in this post were left over from an aborted blog post entitled "Purple Things on the Grass".
As promised and explained here, this is the sequel to This is not the title entitled This is not the title EITHER. You should probably listen to one of them before you listen to the other. Another piece of advice - play it loud!!
The two pieces are very similar. They have one melody and one sound effect in common and everything else is different.
This is not the title EITHER has:
a section influenced by the wondrously crazy music by the Kocani Orkestar, an oriental Romany Macedonian brass band
another section influenced by the piano stylings of Art Tatum, the famous jazz pianist who seemed to have four hands. (Read a MM post about Tatum's recent comeback tour here.)
a little piano lick which I cut from the first piece but didn't want to throw away. Listen for it at 36 seconds and at 210 seconds.
a lot of musical phrases and rhythms based on the number seven
Mixed Meters offers you ways to waste your time at warp speed. Hang on.
The first one comes from Guinness and Cream Cakes. It was described (in jest I hope) as the first rap song. It's from a 1936 movie called Night Mail with music apparently written by Benjamin Britten after he returned home from a performance of Facade.
Here's another video found at Guinness and Cream Cakes. Martha Argerich plays the Scarlatti Toccata damn fast!
Finally here's some Zappa music with frantic imagery.
I found this one at Andrew Durkin's Jazz: The Music of Unemployment I'd like to tell you that these are the sort of images Frank would have liked - but I'll have to check with Gail first to see if that's still true.
You can listen to my piece This Is Not The Title. Skip to the end of this post, past all the verbiage and pictures, to the part about the sequel and then click on the link to hear my piece which is entitled This Is Not The Title.
Kozinn mentions the young composer Caleb Burhans who
... keeps a list of lines from films, television shows and advertisements, as well as random overheard phrases that catch his ear, pinned to the wall over his composing desk.
I've been doing something similar for quite a while - except my "composing desk" is virtual and it's at Starbucks. And of course Caleb's composing desk is in New York, so it's more important than mine.
Here's a picture of my real desk. You can click it to enlarge. Notice OJ the cat sleeping in the foreground. The music on the easel and on screen is John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer.
In the upper right corner, next to the Lucky Strike sign, is a famous picture of a pipe by Rene Magritte. The pipe picture probably inspired me to chose the title This Is Not The Title.
I wanted to call it This Is Not Music. Unfortunately, unlike Magritte's title,This Is Not Music would be an outright lie. In our post-Cageian age anything can be music - even that crap he wrote. Or the crap I write. Or the crap you write. No matter what it is. No matter what we call it. Or not.
"Enough about the damn title," I hear you say, "What about the music?"
The music of This Is Not The Title was inspired by a host of irreconcilable musical moments which happened to cross my consciousness in sort of the same way I take pictures.
It began with music I heard from this post, They Were Doin' The Mambo - Hillbilly Style at the WFMU blog. I also incorporated a small bit of a fifties R 'n B novelty tune about cavemen - sorry I can't seem to find that one again. And there's a Tito Puente lick in there as well.
Later in This Is Not The Title there's a long exact quote from my piece Bombed. Bombed has three movements: "Into the Stone Age", "Pan Am 103" and "Out of Your Mind". Both Bombed and The Death of Klinghoffer were written in 1991.
I sent a preview mp3 of This Is Not The Title to my friend Scott, Mixed Meters' reader in Boston. He wrote back:
I also really like 'This Is Not The Title'! It reminds me of so many of the cliches in the pop music I loved when I was in high school (Yes, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, Incredible String Band, etc.)
I have no clue what Scott is talking about but he's a professor so he must be making sense. I have never consciously listened to Yes, Gentle Giant or Incredible String Band. I do remember one Jethro Tull album in college because J.S. Bach wrote part of it.
THERE IS GOING TO BE A SEQUEL!!!!
This Is Not The Title has a sequel. I will post it soon. The sequel to This Is Not The Title also has a title - or maybe not. What do you think the title will be? What won't it be? Please feel to make suggestions - maybe your title will be no better than mine isn't.
