The Floating Minion

So I was walking down Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena one day and I noticed something floating aimlessly in the sky near a cellphone tower.  At first I thought it might be a distant helicopter.  Then I realized . . .

It was a balloon in the shape of a minion - those goggley-eyed yellow twinkie-shaped sidekicks from some heart-warming animated movie or other.  Because it was filled with helium it floated aimlessly on the air currents.  Helpless.  We can all relate to that.

Somewhere, I surmised, there was a small child who was disconsolate - bawling his or her little eyes out and being told by its parent that they had been told not to let go of the string and no I'm not going to buy you another one.  Easy to relate to that as well.

Google reveals that minions are not to be confused with minyans.  It would take 10 minions to have a minion minyan.  Try Googling "anti-semitic minion" and you'll find some people with strange ideas who are not amused by minions.  One has to wonder if every possible word is paired with the adjective "anti-semitic" somewhere on the Internet.

Anyway . . . as this particular mylar minion meandered past I captured it on video. You can see some trees and traffic lights and a few birds.  Those are the San Gabriel mountains in the distance.  After a minute and a half the poor thing passed out of sight for good.  No doubt it eventually was caught on some electrical lines and caused a power outage; one last bit of evil - and an honorable death - for the floating minion balloon..  I've added some aimless floating music to its aimless bobbing and weaving.  Enjoy.

The Toy Drum (Summer 1953)

Few people remember that I began my musical career as a percussionist.  In fact, even I had forgotten this fact until just recently.

I was reminded of this when I had a pile of old family home movies converted to video.  These date from the late 40s, when my father must have purchased a 16mm camera, to the early 60s, when - given my absence in the action - I must have been old enough to be entrusted with the role of cameraman.

If these videos prove anything, it's that I am descended from a long line of cinematographically challenged ancestors.  Exposure is random and framing is laughable.  There are countless shots of people without heads.  Also occasionally heads without bodies.  No sound of course.  Lots of classic home-movie embarrassed movement.

Here's a photo of one of thsee film reels and the box it came in - this one is labeled only "Summer 1953".    It says Kodachrome Daylight Type Double 8mm Magazine - which held a whopping 25 feet of film.

The transferred video has 3 minutes and 48 seconds of nostalgic action.  I appear the most often - making me the nearly 2-year old star.  Well, I was cute, wasn't I?  There are also shots of my parents, my Grandmother and Great Aunt Kate, my uncles Ben and Carl and Carl's wife, my Aunt Esther.  (I had two Aunt Esthers.  How many did you have?)

Fear not, brave Mixed Meters reader.  I am not posting the entire video for you to endure.  I have excerpted a few scenes.  The first is an unusually high quality shot of  me with my parents outside their apartment in Sioux City Iowa.   Here's a still.

(The brick apartment building and the wooden one behind it are still visible in Google maps.  Pan the street view shot to the left and you can see my eventual high school - complete with stone turrets - up the slight hill.)

The other shots in this following video show me with what was apparently my first musical instrument - a cute little toy drum and cymbal combo supported by a neck strap.  And I appear to be having a great time banging away at it.  Yes, I was the center of attention when I was hitting that drum.  Ah, lost youth.  Cute and talented!

In the last scene you'll notice a huge drop in video quality.  It was very underexposed, almost solid black.  I adjusted it as best I could because I wanted to include the final frame of the film - my father, looking plaintively at the camera and covering his ear with his hand, as if to say "Take the drum away from the boy, please."   Or maybe he was unhappy being pigeonholed in conversation by my Uncle Carl, whose suit-coated wrist can just barely be seen.

Oh.  I also added some music and titles to the video in a futile attempt to enhance the home movie experience.  You should prepare yourself in coming blog posts for more blasts like this one from my early history and even pre-history.

Here's an early MM post about my Mother and Ronald Reagan - and her last pack of cigarettes.
Here's an MM post called My Mother, My Worm.
Music in Sioux City, Iowa?  Here's a post called Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa (there's a picture of me and my Dad)
You could also read Forty Years in California - there's another pic of me with my Father.

On Flowers

On Flowers is my new video.  It's less than 90 seconds long.  I'm trying not to tax your attention span with long pieces. I'm saving those for the future.

The music is quiet, lots of noodling piano, perfect for that spare moment in your day when you want to escape your otherwise harried life.  Please don't watch or listen while operating heavy machinery.

The video imagery features our six-legged winged friends feasting on nectar from purple flowers at the Huntington Gardens, here in Pasadena.  The people going to and fro in the background were more interested, no doubt, in seeing Pinky.

On Flowers by David Ocker - © 2016 by David Ocker - 87 seconds

This is the 31st music video I've ever posted to YouTube.  All of them are in one place if you're curious.  Here's an oldie you might like, called Lilypad.  The subject of Lilypad is goldfish.

With Extra Butter and Naughty Last Movement

With Extra Butter and Naughty Last Movement are the titles of two new 30 Second Spots.  If you don't know what the heck I mean when I say "30 Second Spot" you might want to read more about 30 Second Spots.  (It's a really old post.)  Since I started working on The Seasons more than 4 years ago I've written very few new spots.  That makes this post sort of an occasion for me.

With Extra Butter and Naughty Last Movement started out as a single piece.  That ur-piece kept getting longer and longer.  It was getting close to two minutes!  I noticed that I had created two unrelated sections.  So I severed them like a musical Ben Carson separating conjoined twins.  I doubt that qualifies me to be a Republican presidential candidate either.

With Extra Butter and Naughty Last Movement both have unhelpful titles.  Do not attempt to relate music and title.   One of these titles was selected in the classical 30 Second Spot manner - an overheard phrase; in this case it was on television rather than at a Starbucks.  The other title was selected in the current Mixed Messages manner, using a random phrase generator.  I'll let you guess which is which.

With Extra Butter and Naughty Last Movement aren't terribly interesting.  Expect no transcendent meanings, elegant harmonies or beautiful melodies.  There are no revealing formal structures, virtuosic performances or clever twisted endings.   These are simple pleasant brief quiet musical moments for piano.  They will take less time to listen to than it has taken you to read these paragraphs of exegesis.

Click here to hear Naughty Last Movement by David Ocker   -   © 2016 David Ocker - 49 seconds

Click here to hear With Extra Butter by David Ocker   -   © 2016 David Ocker - 44 seconds

JB-AFAP Jingle Bells, As Fast As Possible

I haven't posted a 30 Second Spot in, like, more than a year.  (One year and four days to be precise.)

'Tis the season for my annual contribution to the War on Christmas, and let me tell you, this is not my best work.  It is scored for bass guitar, bass tuba, bass drum and sleigh bells.

The one thing JB-AFAP has in its favor, however, is short length.  You could listen to it twice in one minute - and that includes 10 seconds of silence.

Got half a minute?  Merry Melodies to all.

Click here to hear JB-AFAP (Jingle Bells, As Fast As Possible) by David Ocker, © 2015, 30 seconds

---

---

My personal history with Jingle Bells as an expression of my seasonal musical disaffections is almost as old as Mixed Meters itself.  Here's a complete list of the Jingle pieces so far:

Jungle Bells (2006 - 209 seconds)
Jingle Bulls (2006 - 231 seconds)
Jingle Bills (2007 - 30 seconds)
One Note Open Sleigh (2008 - 38 seconds)
A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale (2009 - 327 seconds)
Solstice Lights (2010 - 640 seconds)
Jingle Bells - The Long Version (short version) (2011 - 212 seconds)
Jinglemonics (2012 - 247 seconds)
The William Bell Overture (Jingle Tells) (2013 - 390 seconds)
Jiggle Belts (2014 - 75 seconds)
JB-AFAP (Jingle Bells, As Fast As Possible) (2015 - 30 seconds)

Jiggle Belts

Although it's been very quiet around Mixed Meters lately this blog does have some traditions worth preserving.  One of these is my annual encounter with Jingle Bells.

J.B. is a simple tune, useful as a musical starting point because everyone knows it.  Also it is "seasonal".  It evokes winter: snow and cold and darkness and a sense of gloomy despair that these short days might never start getting longer again.  It all adds up to a good reason for a big party.  You build a fire, get drunk and beat on some drums.  Before long, you're having a night of wild sex.  Anything to stay warm.

J.B. also evokes Christmas.  This is because anything which evokes cold and snow has been co-opted as a Christmas ornament.  Houses are decorated with white lights meant to resemble icicles. Penguins, polar bears, reindeer, snow men, igloos and Santa Clauses are called out to serve the Capitalist Christian Solstice holiday.

Music is called on as well.  As a non-Christian and a musician living in a mindlessly Christian society I have often found all the Christmas music unbearably oppressive.  So I've made an effort to cope by hollowing out a little space for my own musical interests in the galaxy of Christmas music.  It makes me feel a bit better.  Your mileage may vary.

This years offering is called Jiggle Belts, if only because I'm running out of Jingle Bells puns.  It's not so much an idyllic sleigh ride in a one horse open sleigh as it is a subversive unrelenting drag race between people with noisy powerful machines who need to shed a few pounds.  Enjoy:

Click here to hear Jiggle Belts, © 2014 by David Ocker - 75 seconds

Other Christmas music references I have enjoyed.

The Little Drummer Boy Game  - anyone can play this at Christmas time.  (You lose the moment you hear any version of The Little Drummer Boy.)  (So far, this year, I'm still a winner.)

Here's a poem by Charles Bukowski on the subject of classical music radio, Christmas and people:

Finally - a list of past Jingle Bells pieces from Mixed Meters and me.  Merry Happiness everyone.  The days will start getting longer soon - trust me.

Jungle Bells (2006 - 209 seconds)
Jingle Bulls (2006 - 231 seconds)
Jingle Bills (2007 - 30 seconds)
One Note Open Sleigh (2008 - 38 seconds)
A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale (2009 - 327 seconds)
Solstice Lights (2010 - 640 seconds)
Jingle Bells - The Long Version (short version) (2011 - 212 seconds)
Jinglemonics (2012 - 247 seconds)
The William Bell Overture (Jingle Tells) (2013 - 390 seconds)
Jiggle Belts  (2014 - 75 seconds)

All works © David Ocker

Phoney Religion 9-27-04

This post is the third of a trilogy on Mixed Meters.  A Trilogy of Anniversary Posts.

The first one celebrated the 40th anniversary of my arriving in Southern California.  The second, the 9th birthday of this here blog.  Now we will celebrate a decade of 30 Second Spots, my series of short musical compositions.

The record of exactly when I started the 30 Second Spot project has been lost.  There was, of course, an initial period of trial and error as the concept took shape.  Rules were made up (by me), some were kept (by me), others discarded (also by me).  At some point one of the rules became "30 Second Spots are written in one sitting."

That rule (broken more than it is adhered to) quite naturally led to adding a date to the file name.  The first dated 30 Second Spot was called Phoney Religion.  The date was September 27, 2004.

Don't expect much from Phoney Religion.  I can modestly claim that my work has improved since then.

I don't remember anything about the origin of the title.  It may have been suggested by the A Mighty Fortress reference.  Or maybe I added the music quote to match the title.  Most likely this piece was written at Starbucks on Leslie's hand-me-down 286 Gateway laptop using its sleazy onboard midi synthesis.  (Translation for non-computer musicians: "It doesn't sound very good").

Anyway, take a listen while you try to image how long a decade really is.

Click here to hear Phoney Religion 9-27-04 
© 2004, 2014 by David Ocker, 31 seconds

Here are two pictures of a ceramic yard ornament which we named Irving.  Irving is part of a couple.  His spouse (not shown here) is Happy.  The first picture of Irving, who had recently been installed in our backyard, was taken in late 2004, a few months after Phoney Religion was composed.  The second picture was taken last week.

Irving is showing his age - his complextion problems are noticable.  He also seems to have a lost lots of colorful succulent hair.  To his credit he appears to still have all his teeth.

Phoney or Phony?

You're Blaming Me For This is the most recent 30 Second Spot posted to Mixed Meters.  That was way last March.

Minuet - Spring 2014 short version

Back in 2006 I wrote a 30 Second Spot called Carpool.  You can still read the Mixed Meters post about Carpool.  It's dated March 12, 2006, a Sunday.  The Internet never forgets.  Usually never.

Better yet, if you read that post you'll discover that the link to listen to Carpool still works.  (Go ahead, listen.  I'll wait.  It's a short piece.)  I've had to update the link a couple times over the years in my efforts to keep my music from disappearing at the whim of some failing capitalist website entrepreneur.   Actually the Internet does forget.  Quite often.

Carpool, all 38 seconds of it, has a particular type of septuple meter which I discovered while listening to music on a streaming Internet radio station playing music of Afghanistan.  This particular song, whatever it was, divided the seven beats into three groups: three plus three plus one.  It was the kind of discovery that makes a composer's heart beat just a little more quickly.

This 3+3+1 meter, plus the hand drums, plus the semi-sinuous melody I cooked up give Carpool a kind of camel caravan feel.  I thought about calling it "Caravan" but reconsidered.  Hence my 2006-ish comment

I was going to call this spot "Caravan" but someone said the name had been used. I think "Carpool" gives that same sense of slow, long-distance travel via pollution-emitting beast.

The thing is, however, that you don't get a "sense of slow, long-distance travel" in 38 seconds.  Pollution control or not, a 30 Second Spot just isn't long enough for this particular music.

---

So, earlier this year, when I was beginning work on Spring 2014, yet another episode in my series The Seasons, I decided to use the music from Carpool as a source material.  For the next three months, ending last week, I wrote a bit of music every day.  For these bits I appropriated the melody, harmony, rhythm and most especially the meter of Carpool.

Spring 2014 turned out to be almost one and a quarter hours long.  Eighty percent of that time is pure unadulterated silence.  You can read all about Spring 2014 (and even listen to it) by reading the previous MM post Spring 2014 from The Seasons.

---

Grizzled, old time Mixed Meters readers know what's coming next.  For the rest of you, keep reading.

Once I'd finished Spring 2014, a.k.a. the long version of Carpool, all 72 minutes of it, I mercilessly removed all the silences, leaving only the music.  This revealed a piece of music nearly 14 minutes long.  I called this piece Minuet.  You'd be surprised how different it seems than the longer version.

Yes, I can hear what you're thinking, even over the Internet.  Minuet is a dull name.  Yup, I agree.  It is also a very musical name.  I especially like it because it's an antique.  It gives virtually no expectations to modern listeners.  No one, at least no one that I'm aware of, writes or dances minuets these days.   And if they do, they're probably professors or professors in training.  These days a composer has no problem living up to your expectations of what a modern minuet should be because you don't have any of those sorts of expectations.   Nor should you.

The musicologists amongst my readers will know that a minuet is usually in triple meter.  In my piece, the meter is also triple - if you ignore that extra beat crammed in there after every second measure.  Sometimes Minuet does have a kind of dance feel - a lopsided, bad-dancer, one-leg-shorter-than-the-other, Ministry-of-Silly-Dances dance feel, to be sure - but danceable nonetheless.  Go ahead, dance.  I'll wait.

Click here to hear Minuet (Spring 2014 - short version) by David Ocker  
© 2014 David Ocker, 833 seconds

You can listen to Spring 2014 (the long version of Minuet) here.
You can listen to Carpool (the short version of Minuet) here.
You can find links to all The Seasons, both long and short versions, and their associated Mixed Meters blog posts here.
You can't imagine what I'm talking about when I say "30 Second Spot".  Click here.

Addendum.  Here's a minuet by the great Slim Gaillard that's not in seven.  Nor is it in three.  It's in vout.

Rose Room

The title does not refer to your grandfather's Rose Room.  This post is about my own piece entitled Rose Room.

In this case "Rose" refers to Leslie's Aunt Rose Harris, who, after one of her gravitational accidents, very briefly stayed in our guest room.  That would have become the Rose Room.

This happened in September of 2009.  That's also when I wrote the music.  I've never posted Rose Room because I wanted to change it very slightly.  Now I can't remember what changes I wanted to make.  Something about the final chord.

Musically, Rose Room is about the conflict of accelerando and non-accelerando.  The drum sounds stay at a constant tempo while, simultaneously, the other music gradually gets faster.

Also there are ducks.

Click here to hear Rose Room by David Ocker Copyright © 2009, 2014
83 seconds

---

And now, variations on a theme:

Here's another piece of mine with duck references:

The blog post Water With Ducks has links to my other bird related music.

A book review:  Moby-Duck

The Ocker Scale is another piece I posted after forgetting what changes I wanted to make.

You're Blaming Me For This

In the Classical Era of 30 Second Spots, back when I composed them on a laptop at Starbucks, my titles were selected from snippets of overheard conversation. These days, composing at home, overheard conversations are hard to come by.

I started a new Spot on Monday.  I needed a title in order to save the file.  So, I walked into the other room, flipped on the television and the first words I heard were "You're blaming me for this."  Great.  Problem solved.

In case you need attribution, it was the Fox show TMZ.  I turned the set off immediately.  I have no clue what celebrity indiscretion was being blamed on whom.

Click here to hear You're Blaming Me For This by David Ocker
© March 25, 2014 - 59 seconds

Click here to hear more 30 Second Spots.

Since the title of the 30 Second Spot came from television, a video parody of a television commercial seems appropriate.  It's flogging a big generic corporation.  Yes, this is one of "those" commercials.  You'll recognize the genre immediately.

Ask yourself: how interchangeable are big American corporations?   Big corporations cannibalize one another with billion dollar buyouts.  They keep getting bigger as their numbers decrease and they want you to like them no matter how evil they are.

We get shown an awful lot of this kind of crap these days. They're trying to project the humanity of the corporation.  Corporations are trying to avoid getting blamed.

Legalistically corporations are supposed to be people too.  I don't agree.  It's just a convenience for business purposes.  Sadly, right now, the Supreme Court is deciding whether corporations have religious rights.

You can find the script here.  I found the video here.

Before the Parade

The centerpiece of Pasadena's yearly Solstice celebration is a parade - the Rose Parade.  If you live in the U.S., I'm sure you know all about it.   We Americans assume you also know all about it even if you live in another country, so just nod your head and pretend that you understand what I'm talking about.  OK?

We, the staff of Mixed Meters, have an veritably un-American disinterest in the floats and bands and horses and fully-fertile nearly-adult young princesses that make up the parade, even though the route comes quite close to our central offices, high atop Mixed Meters Towers.

What we are interested in, however, is all the civic preparation which goes into such an event. Especially the clean up.  There's really a shit-load of cleaning up to do afterwards.

Click this link to see all of MM's Pasadena parade coverage over the years.

On Mixed Meters you'll have seen Rose parade trash, Rose parade religious fundamentalists and honking Rose parade tow trucks - but no floats, bands, horses or princesses.  This year we seem to have focused on heating devices used by the Rose revelers who spend the entire winter night outside waiting for the parade.

I spent New Years Eve with Leslie and friends in Old Pasadena, our trendient restaurant district.  At 11 p.m. I elected to walk home along the parade route, Colorado Boulevard.

The sidewalks had long since filled with people camping out overnight - preparing to sleep on the street just as homeless people do.  Except the authentic homeless don't sleep in plain view on major streets.  Nor do they build open fires nor buy over-priced luminescent trinkets and plastic noisemakers from wandering vendors nor make a mess by hurling eggs, tortillas and silly string at passing cars.  Those are privileges of upstanding citizenship.

I stopped occasionally during my walk to shoot video.  When I got home I quickly edited the clips and composed some music.  The music took longer, even though there's just a little over a minute of it.  Strange music.  Very strange.

Enjoy!

---

A word about this music.  I downloaded a huge sample sample library from Samplephonics.  Sorry,  these freebies have since disappeared.  Largely intended for techno, pop or pretty much any form of music I don't do, I used this project Before the Parade as an opportunity to explore this huge collection of audio whatever.  It includes hundreds of samples.  I listened to only a couple dozen and used sixteen of them. I  think the result is kind of fun.  Also strange.  Very strange.

Here's the Mixed Meters' Rose Parade video from 2009. Honking tow trucks. Repent placards. You can see a gas station in the background - low test gasoline was $1.89 per gallon.

The Fan

The Fan is a short piece of music composed in NotateMe, "performed" in Sibelius and used as a soundtrack for a video of the ceiling fan in our sunroom taken in September 2009.  Like my previous video, Baby Elephant Seal Walk, the music was completely finished before I sought out any visuals.  I didn't select a title until I knew what the visuals were.

Astronomical scenes, flickering as if in an old movie.
Lunar landscape, vaguely changing focus.
Circumnavigating an unseen sun.

It must mean something.
Figure out what, exactly, by yourself.
Good luck with that.

Playing a C Major Scale with One Finger

Mixed Meters' readers with good memories will remember that I once composed all my music on a laptop PC while drinking coffee at Starbucks.  That era ended about four years ago when I acquired an iMac.  An iMac makes music making much simpler.  Alas, it's not very portable and I stopped composing at Starbucks.

A year ago I purchased an iPad Mini, my first ever tablet device.  I like it so much Leslie calls it "my precious".  I wanted it for two reasons: one was to waste copious amounts of time surfing the Internet and the other was to once again compose music away from my desktop.  The iPad instantly fulfilled my first goal, wasting time online.  That was simple.  Composing music, however, was a different story.  Finally, a couple weeks ago, I found an iPad app which seemed to meet my requirements for composing on the iPad.

Let me introduce you to NotateMe.  It lets you draw music using a finger, something you always have with you, or with a stylus, something you always forget to bring along.  It plays back whatever you write down.  It lets you keep changing things until you like the music.  When your magnum opus is finished NotateMe will export the piece so it can be imported into other music programs.

I've made two new videos for this post.  One of them shows me entering the simplest musical structure, a C major scale, into NotateMe using only my index finger.  The second one, a 30 Second Spot called Baby Elephant Seal Walk, has a musical score which I composed in NotateMe.  Let's do the second one first:

Once the music for Baby Elephant Seal Walk was as good as I could get it using only NotateMe I exported it to Sibelius using MusicXML (don't worry if you don't know what that is).  Using Sibelius I tweaked the sounds quite a bit because NotateMe sounds pretty tinny right off the iPad.  I changed a few pitches - not many - and adjusted a few tempi, but 98% (or maybe more) of the music you hear in that video is just as I composed it on my iPad

Once I had completely finished the music I decided to add it to a video.  I searched my recent videos for one of the correct length.  This one, showing a small elephant seal lurching across the beach, blowing sand out of its nose and settling down next to another seal (which I suppose to be its mother, although they all look identical to me), fit surprisingly well with the music.  Remember, I had absolutely no idea what the visuals would be while writing the music.

But enough about pinnipeds.  This post is about iPads.  Here's a video produced by Neuratron, the makers of NotateMe.  This is exactly what I watched before buying the app.  It will give you a good idea about the features of the app which seems to work perfectly in this video.

Using NotateMe takes some practice, both for the user and the iPad.  There is a "learning" feature that the program uses to recognize the handwriting of its master.  The help file warns that loaning your tablet to someone else will cause NotateMe to adjust gradually to their hand and forget about you.  As they used to say "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."  Or something.

Needless to say, even after several weeks of regular use, my usage is not nearly as reliable as that shown in the Neuratron video.  That's why I decided to make my own video: more "real world".

I chose to enter a C major scale.  Just one octave.  Nothing else.  What musical structure could be more basic than that?  This task turned out to be a small adventure - both in using NotateMe (as you'll see, although in a previous take I did the scale without errors) and also in editing the video.  I photographed myself simultaneously from two angles and then tried to combine the videos.  I've never tried that before.    The video editing results are pretty basic: C major scale basic.

NotateMe may not be perfect but it works pretty darn well.  In fact, it works much better than I expected.  It already has potential for considerably more musical complexity than just a major scale.  For sure it can do more complexity than you can hear in Baby Elephant Seal Walk.  I wonder how far I can push it.

I am using it to write small pieces of music while drinking coffee in Starbucks (and elsewhere) and then exporting the music back to my desktop for finishing.  That's what I wanted all along and I am happy to have that much.  Since the current NotateMe version is listed as a "public beta" I trust there will be many improvements in features and reliability as time goes on.  

---

Neuratron is on Facebook too.

I shot the beach video at Piedras Blancas beach near San Simeon in Central California.  Here's another elephant seal link.

Here are two of my videos with music which involve coastal scenes: Going Coastal and Going Coastal 2.  The second one has a few quick shots of elephant seals in the waves at the very beginning.  You could also watch Flap which has a couple quick glimpses of sea lions amongst all the birds, but you've got to be alert to see them.

I Don't Know Why This Piece Is Called Whiskey

I like ambiguous and misleading names for my pieces.  The names I like the most are self-referent: the title mentions itself.

For example, I've written pieces called The Name Of This Piece Is, This Is Not The Title and This Is Not The Title EITHER.

It is factually true that I don't know why this piece is called whiskey.  When I started it I needed to save a sound file before I could start composing and for some reason the word "whiskey" popped into my head at that moment.  Maybe I needed a belt.  In any case I saved the sound file as WHISKEY.NKM and assumed that's what I would call the music as well.

Of course, the title of the piece did not turn out to be Whiskey.  The eventual title, I Don't Know Why This Piece Is Called Whiskey, is incorrect on that point; it contains a fundamental falsehood.  I did not end up calling this piece by the name Whiskey.

I did chose to spell the word "whiskey" rather than "whisky" because I do like a bit of single malt now and then.  There's even a bottle of Laphroaig in the cabinet although I didn't bother to pour myself any while I was writing.  Nor did I partake once I was finished.  Thus proving that needing a drink was not the reason I chose that particular name (or rather, didn't choose that name).

I promise you that I was stone cold sober the whole time.  Also I'm sober as I write this spiraling-to-nowhere essay.  I haven't had even a glass of wine for weeks on end.  You see, temperance is one of my many endearingly annoying traits.  I've just never had much desire to over-indulge.

My music also has annoying traits.  While temperance and sobriety are not among them, my music can be quite ambiguous and misleading.  I would love to find a way to make my music refer to itself somehow directly, using only music.  You know: the whole "This Is Not A Pipe" thing.  I haven't figured out how to do that without using words.  Titles always use words.  Sometimes they misuse them.

Click here to hear I Don't Know Why I Called This Piece Whiskey - © 2013 by David Ocker 42 seconds

Apparently John Maynard Keynes' last words were "I wish I had drunk more Champagne."    It would be a good thing if we were to learn from his mistake.

Self Referencing Tags: self reference. . . single malt. . . 30 second spots

I Need A Better Placebo

At times everyone wants to feel better.

If you don't like the way you feel at the moment and you want to improve on it some how, there are courses of action available.  Depending on circumstances (and availability) you could try eating chocolate, having sex, buying a pair of shoes, taking drugs or watching a funny movie, just to name the obvious solutions.  Listening to music (or composing it) is often my choice.

Not every remedy works in every case.  What's more, some remedies have side effects, often nasty ones.  These include weight gain, headaches, drowsiness or death.  Or something worse.

You can avoid dangerous side effects by taking a placebo - which is a treatment that does nothing but still works somehow.  That's because things often work just because people think that they work, even if those things don't actually work.  (I suppose religion could be a good example of a placebo.)

More remarkably, some placebos apparently work better than others.  Here's a list (from this site) of types of placebos roughly ranked by their effectiveness.

• Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
• Placebo injections work better than placebo pills
• Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
• Capsules work better than tablets
• Big pills work better than small
• The more doses a day, the better
• The more expensive, the better
• The color of the pill makes a difference
• Telling the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”

Why am I posting a short superficial essay about placebos, I hear you wonder.  Well, I was looking for a title for a new short piece of music (I call them 30 Second Spots).  The phrase "I need a better placebo" popped into my mind.  This seemed promising because I like titles which contain logical inconsistencies, for example This Is Not The Title.  The notion of a "better placebo" seemed pretty logically inconsistent - until I did a little surfing.  I found it surprising that people have studied the subject and discovered that some placebos are actually better than others.  Who knew?

Click here to hear I Need A Better Placebo © 2013 by David Ocker 40 seconds.   I hope it makes you feel better.

Placebo Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . placebos

Inspiration and Punishment

No one ever asks me where I get my ideas.  Sometimes I have ideas I would be better off ignoring.

For example, listen to this little bit of piano music.  Eleven seconds!



It's the end of a cadenza played by someone famous as part of a concerto written by someone even more famous.  I happened to be listening to this on my iPod last week.  When I heard the scale passage (the first half of this clip) I thought to myself "I could make a piece out of that."

But how would I make such a piece?  Sure I had the initial idea.  That's easy.  Then I had to pay the penalty - I had to do it.  That's what I didn't know how to do.  My inspiration was followed by the punishment of following through.

As it turns out I used not just the scale passage but the trill after it.   Inspiration and Punishment begins with an attempt at recreating the "inspirational" material.   And I added some annoyingly mistuned and unstable bass notes as well.  Throughout the piece there is a feeling of preparation for the big moment of recapitulation which inevitably follows a cadenza.  Remember, that's just a feeling.

Click here to hear Inspiration and Punishment  © 2013 by David Ocker, 113 seconds.

I didn't say it would be a great piece.

Here's another Mixed Meters post in which my brain got me into trouble by having a crazy idea: Milton Babbitt and the Superbowl

Cadenza Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . piano music. . . cadenza

Cuffus

Yesterday seemed to be a day for doses of musical academia - first when I unscrambled anagrams  using clues gleaned by skimming this post by Daniel Wolf.  Later John Steinmetz sent me an article, Terminal Prestige by Susan McClary.  I even started reading that.  I'm sure it's a fascinating article.

But then I thought it would be a better use of my time to compose some of my own music rather than try to parse other people's ivory tower prose.  So I set to work.

A couple hours later I had a new 30 Second Spot which I entitled Cuffus.  It's apparently some sort of tailoring term, unfamiliar to me, but prominently displayed in the window of a local dry cleaner on a street I walk.

Cuffus is also the name of an online dating website.  I assume, based only on their logo (handcuffs in the shape of hearts), that it is not my cup of turn-on.

Cuffus, my 30 Second Spot, is a jazzish little trio for piano, bass and drums.  Nothing deep about it.  Nothing restrictive like handcuffs.  Nothing academic.  Just a bit of enjoyable music creating for me.  I hope you like it too - not that it matters.

I'd like to thank Peter Schmid, the pianist, and his compatriots Cornel Reasoner and Luis Jolla, for rushing right over to Aphrodite Japonica Studio to record it.  Thanks guys.

Click here to hear Cuffus by David Ocker © March 26 2013 - 37 seconds


Cuffus Tags: 30 Second Spot. . . Cuffus. . . misspelled words

The Super Bowl Baby Trilogy - Reposted

American culture is just chock full of fun holidays which combine the celebration of competition with crass consumerism.

For example there are the Oscars (and Grammies and a slough of other pointless entertainment award shows) in which Americans are encouraged to pay their money to enjoy a blockbuster movie (or pop album or whatever) because it is on the list of industrial in-crowd-chosen nominees heavily advertised as this years "can't miss" entertainment.

Another good example of an American holday devoted to competitive consumption is Black Friday.  That's when patriotic Americans wait in line all night for the chance to elbow their fellow Americans in the gut (or pepper spray them) while sprinting through the aisles of Wal Mart (or Best Buy or K-Mart or whatever) seeking yet another deal of a lifetime on cheap mass-produced merchandise which carry generous 90-day warranties.

The best example, however, is Super Bowl Sunday.

Super Sunday celebrates competition in the form of metaphorical warfare between two football teams from cities you don't much care about who fight over symbolic territory with a weird leather ball but periodically wait around doing nothing while elaborate advertisements are shown to people on big screen TVs as they consume mass quantities of chicken wings (or pizza or beer or chips or guacamole or whatever).

Here's an article about the effects of the Super Bowl on domestic violence police calls and other health related matters.  I wonder if the sale of Alka-Seltzer spikes just after the game.  Apparently more food is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday in the U.S. than on any other day, except Thanksgiving.

Here's a helpful video for people mystified by the game of professional football.

In the past Mixed Meters has explored the Super Bowl tradition.  Most recently there was a largely unsatisfying effort to find a connection between Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl.

Long before that, way back in the darkest Dark Age of Mixed Meters (about 2006 or so), there was the Super Bowl Baby, a trilogy of 30 Second Spots.

In those early days I was composing on a laptop at Starbucks.  You may think that a crowded noisy Starbucks was not conducive to musical composition (you'd be right) although mostly I found it easy to ignore the distractions.

But one day (January 29, 2006, a Sunday, to be precise) my local Starbucks was afflicted by a small baby, wailing with all its might, no doubt after imbibing one-too-many cups of bitter Starbucks coffee - or maybe just not happy with post-partum living.   I still managed to finish my piece (a half-minute march, inspired by John Phillip Sousa, including a trio section in the subdominant).

I decided to immortalize that damn baby in the title of my piece.

click here to hear The Crying Baby Halftime March
Copyright © January 29, 2006 (and 2013) by David Ocker - 34 seconds

The next day, Monday, I returned to the same Starbucks where I transformed The Crying Baby Halftime March into another, very different sort of music.  The baby still gets the title role:

click here to hear The Sleeping Baby Postgame Wrap-up 
Copyright © January 30, 2006 (and 2013) by David Ocker - 33 seconds

I tried the same trick yet again that Tuesday, transforming the first piece into another Thirty Second Spot.
click here to hear The Hungry Baby Pre-game Tailgate Party
Copyright © January 31, 2006 (and 2013) by David Ocker - 31 seconds

You can see that the trilogy was not composed in sequential order.  This doesn't matter much.  Heck, it doesn't matter at all.  Listen to the three spots in whatever order you want.

I'm reposting now because I've uploaded the files to a different location and added a new playback option (which uses a new computer hell called HTML5 that allows playback on my mobile Apple device).  (If you have trouble listening on your device, please let me know.)

And besides, according to Google's records, the original post has gotten only one hit in over five years.  I'm hoping to double that within the week

Baby Tags: superbowl. . . holidays. . . babies

My Ten Favorite Things About 2012

You see them a lot this time of year.  End of Year Lists.  Best Of Lists.  Worst Of Lists.  All Kinds of Yearly Lists.

I've always supposed that journalists, needing an easy column during the holidays, keep notebooks during the year, jotting down candidates for best or worst as they happen.  Then in mid-December they review the list, make a few editorial decisions, add some literary polish, check their spelling and get on with more important things, like drinking.

At least that's what I imagined journalists did.  I tried to come up with a personal Best Of List during recent Decembers but couldn't think of anything worthwhile.  My memory isn't what it used to be, as you well know.

This year I tried to keep a running list during the year.  Whenever something that generated a bit of my enthusiasm came up during 2012 I added it to a special file.  Then, last week, thinking it was time to polish off my own Best Of List for 2012 so I could get on with my drinking, I looked at the list.

Imagine my horror to discover that there were only five items on it.  And three of them were food products.  I guarantee you do not want to read about mini peppers or high fiber bread any more than I want to write about them.  You might have been somewhat interested to learn that Starbucks occasionally serves a decent cup of coffee.  Or read something funny.  Or discover some progressive political articles.

I probably would have added my new iPad as item number six. That's still four enthusiasms short of a minyan.  People who know me know that enthusiasm is not one of my strong personality traits.

That's when I came up with Plan B.   I'll tell you what Plan B is in a moment.

Plan B was this: write a 30 Second Spot entitled My Ten Favorite Things About 2012.  In other words, compose music with a misleading title.  That way I could avoid the problem entirely without having to even feign enthusiasm.

That's what I did.  Once I'd finished writing the music I slapped on a bit of random video.  Any correlation between this music or image and my actual ten favorite things from 2012 (assuming I even had ten favorite things, or even six) is totally in the mind of the beholder.  The beholder is you, Mr. or Ms. Beholder.

So behold.

My Ten Favorite Things About 2012 - © 2012 by David Ocker 39 Seconds

---

Back in the early years of Mixed Meters there was a B.O.L. tradition.  Try 2006 or 2007 or 2008.  I'm happy to discover that all but a few of those items still merit quantums of my enthusiasm.

Watch more of my music videos.

Listen to more of my 30 Second Spots.

"I wish you'd just tell me rather than try to engage my enthusiasm, because I haven't got one."  Marvin the Paranoid Android

B.O.L. Tags: enthusiasm. . . why do I bother. . . Best Of Lists

Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar

Leslie has a lot of strange plants in her garden. She keeps working on raising orchids and has gotten good with african violets.  Her best category lately has been various carnivorous plants - like pitcher plants or Venus flytraps. They eat insects and we love them for it.

She came home with a new Venus fly trap the other day plus something she called a "sensitive" plant. The web tells me that it's also called mimosa pudica.  I don't know what this species has in common with a mixture of champagne and orange juice.  Probably nothing.

She demonstrated the wonderous properties of mimosa by raising the thing a couple inches and dropping it on a table.  The leaves reacted by curling up.  Self-defense, I guess.  The poor thing is probably afraid of its own shadow.

I whipped out the aging point-'n'shoot from my pocket and made a video of this vegetarian flight response.  Later I edited the video a bit, adding titles and repeating a section in slow motion (that worked better in my imagination than in reality).  The whole video barely breaks a minute.

Here it is if you want to watch. You can see part of Chowderhead on the ground behind the table. The finger aggravating the poor sensitive plant belongs to Leslie herself.

When I'd finished video editing I decided to it would be better with some music. I dropped a few tracks onto the video and I found one that seemed to work well enough. It's called Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar. I don't know why I called it that.

Since only the first minute of the piece was needed for the video I figured I'd link to the complete online version on the off chance that someone who reads Mixed Meters is obsessed with cigars. That's when I discovered that I had never uploaded FWWATC.   I composed it in May of 2011.  It's on my iPod where I listen to it periodically.

I don't know why I didn't share it.  Better late than never.

Click here to hear Freud Was Wrong About The Cigar - © 2012 David Ocker - 108 seconds

---

This is Freud's first appearance on Mixed Meters.

You can see a cigar in this post about a Fourth of July barbecue.

Cigarettes have come up previously in conjunction with my Mother and Ronald Reagan.

Cigar Tags: Freud. . . cigar. . . plants. . . 30 Second Spots