Mixed Meters is Eight Years Old

I had a birthday.  It was a while ago.  Birthdays are hard for me.  What I mean is that I have a hard time with birthdays.  By that I mean - I have a hard time with my own birthday in particular.  This was true when I was a child and it's also true now as an adult.

Over the years I have learned to cope with the problem of my birthdays by trying not to expect much from them.  In fact I expect nearly nothing,  And that's what I get.  I'm fine with nothing.  It's the Expectations themselves which are the problem.

I have a blog.  Blogs apparently have birthdays too.  My blog, this very blog called Mixed Meters, just turned eight years old.  In Internet years (which are something like dog years - an anthropomorphic fiction derived from the notion that online lifetimes are somehow more comprehensible if we equate them to actual human lifetimes), Mixed Meters seems to have reached its early sixties.  That's not surprising because so have I.

If you're one of Mixed Meters' Three Readers you will have noticed that my blog, like me, has been slowing down recently.  There's not as much going on now as when the blog was younger.  Posts are less frequent.  Subject matter repeats.  Topics don't arouse my indignation or excitement like they used to.  This is a natural result of aging, of course, both internet aging and human aging.

I also believe that the slowdown is a result of isolation.  Mixed Meters just doesn't get that much attention.  Frankly, I would not have started blogging eight years ago if someone had told me just how little attention I would actually get.  Back in 2005 I expected to create some sort of community, even if only a small one, around Mixed Meters.  Like with birthdays, the real problem turned out to be my own Expectations.

With few exceptions, MM posts barely reach triple-digit hit counts.  If someone looks at a MM page for a fraction of a second, then goes away never to return, that counts as one Hit.  Google helpfully counts my Hits.  If someone else looks at a MM page, reads it beginning to end, listens to the music, and even spends time thinking about the content - that also counts as one Hit.  Hits far outnumber Thoughtful Readings.  Google does not care how many Thoughtful Readings I get.

Comments are also rare.  Google does keep track of those.  Over eight years, Mixed Meters has averaged 6 comments for every 5 posts.  That includes my own comments.  Honestly, more feedback would be nice.  Sometimes "comment free blogging" makes me feel like I'm just pissing in the wind.

Theoretically, blogging less means I have more free time.  This leads to the question "What do I do with my extra time?"  Well, you would ask that question if you were reading this post, which you have probably stopped doing already.  The answer is that my extra time goes into my life.  Overall, I do have a good life which I am thankful for.  I'm an extremely lucky person, bitchy blog posts not withstanding.

My life revolves around  the Four Ws.  These are Working, Walking and Writing.  Also my Wife.  The Four Ws are those things I have identified as being essential daily activities.  Described without W's, the four are earning some money, getting some exercise, doing something creative and being a good husband.

Each of the Ws leaves me plenty of room for improvement.  There are days when doing all four is quite difficult.  I formulated the Four Ws philosophy after reading a greeting card I saw in a gift shop. It said "The most important things in life are the ones you do every day."  Imagine what life would be like if every greeting card you receive, like the ones from doctors or insurance agents who never forget my birthday, were as life changing as that one I saw (and didn't purchase) in that gift shop.

My other activities include eating, sleeping, picking up the mail, cleaning up cat and dog shit, drinking coffee, reading and, of course, Facebook.   More important than any of those, I think, is taking out the garbage once a week.  I have even enshrined the act of taking out the garbage into my music.  I call this musical structure "Garbage Day Periodicity".

"Garbage Day Periodicity" can be heard in my on-going once-a-day composition project called The Seasons.  Garbage is an easy problem to solve.  If you have garbage you simply put it in the dumpster, put the dumpster at the curb and, eventually, someone takes the garbage away.  Problem solved.  If only I could do the same thing with my Expectations.

I spend much time thinking about music I would like to write.  I would like to spend more of my time actually writing that music and less time thinking about it.  I post all my new pieces on Mixed Meters. Alas, people don't listen much.   That makes sense because, like blogging, writing music is something else which I do in isolation.  With computers I can make performance-free music.  Also audience free.

The important thing is that I enjoy the process of creating music immensely.  I try to tailor the process to intensify the aspects I like and avoid those I dislike.  Luckily this has worked out pretty well for me.  I'm extremely fortunate that I can spend as much of my life writing music as I do.

I've been thinking about bucket lists.  Until recently I thought that I didn't have a bucket list - you know, a personal list of as yet unfulfilled experiences.   Then I realized that I do have such a list.  The difference is that it's filled with unfulfilled composition projects.  Lately I've crossed a few items off the list with The Seasons.  There are many more to go.  Someday I will actually write that parody of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, only, instead of a five-year old prodigy performing it, mine will be played by a ninety-five year old prodigy.

I'm also still posting my pictures.  I don't go looking for pictures, they find me.  My pictures are found objects in the truest sense.  If I notice something visually interesting on my walks or elsewhere, be it tree or trash, I whip the point'n'shoot out of my pocket and snap a couple photos.  I take enough that a few usually turn out well.  I post some to my other blog, Mixed Messages.  You can see the latest ones here, in the righthand column.

I suppose I will still find the occasional blog topic which gets my excitement and/or indignation up, you know, over politics or society or whatever.   Some topics force me to drop everything and write an essay of doubtful value and indefinite logic.  Naturally these postings produce Expectations that others will read and get excited and/or indignant as well.  After eight years, that idea has been completely disproven.

And, speaking of politics and society, my disappointment knows no bounds when I think about my youthful Expectations for the country I live in.  During my lifetime the U.S. has invented the Tea Party, fracking, Miley Cyrus, megachurches, Shock and Awe, Dick Cheney, Walmart, the NRA, the rapture, Real Housewives, Three Strikes laws, Grand Theft Auto and mass murder in schools - to name just a very few things I would gladly live without.   Society is SO fucked, people, and it saddens me to admit that my generation, the Baby Boomers, gets much of the credit.  I would like to apologize to the world for all these American things - and more.  Sadly, I have no Expectations that my apologies will help.

One thing I don't seem to do with my time any more is doodle.  I found the doodles gracing this post in a stack of music and other papers I had put away for later use and forgotten about completely.  Click on them for enlargements.  I suspect they date from the early 2000's before I started Mixed Meters.  You probably see things in them the same way you see things in Rohrshach ink blots.  The numbers will allow you to make comments about specific doodles, telling the world which one looks like a pregnant shark riding an upside down motorcycle.

Like these doodles, things out of my past are easy to turn into blog posts.  Mixed Meters could easily become a compendium of work I did years ago.  Realistically, you should expect more and more of this.  I have boxes and boxes filled with projects either only I remember or I have already forgotten.  If I don't post them here no one will ever know about them.  Then again, if I do post them here nearly no one will ever know about them.  Gradually my blog will become my autobiography - disorganized, incomplete and totally non-chronological.  Already, after just eight years, I discover my own posts that I've completely forgotten about.  My memory isn't what it used to be.

And so, the question "Why to blog?" remains without a satisfying answer.  Honestly, I could completely stop blogging and the world and my life and everything in between would not change one bit.  I could post completely random gibberish or I could give the real irrefutable answer to the meaning of life, and the reactions would be pretty much identical.  Hey, maybe the real answer to the meaning of life is random gibberish.  How wonderful that would be!  Probably I will continue blogging because I'm not ready to stop.  Until I am ready to stop I will simply continue.  Meanwhile you should expect more of my random gibberish and pessimistic drivel here.  I hope you enjoy it.

Drawings by Oscar Littlefield

My last post, Pointing at my iMac, included a 20-year old Everex computer advertisement.  I kept it so long just to use on Mixed Meters.  Yup. In my search for it I came upon a manila envelope I've been saving for even longer.  Dating the envelope is easy - here's the return address:

Inside are four pen and ink drawings.  I intended to have them framed.  As my Mother always said, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  Words to live by.

The framing and hanging might still happen someday.  Until that day comes I've scanned them for display here.  (Click on any of the drawings for an enlargement.)

The artist is Oscar Littlefield. He was a resident of Sioux City, Iowa, during the period when I was a child growing up there.  He earned his living as the director of the Sioux City Jewish Federation.  Art was his hobby.  I didn't know Oscar until the mid-80s, the last few years of his life, when he, a widower, had married my Mother's best friend, a widow like my Mom.

There had never been artist role models for me while growing up in Sioux City.  One very minor exception was a visiting composer who wasn't even close to being an inspiration. (Read a little about that guy in Drummer Replaced by a Machine.)

Oscar, however, was different.  When I met him I had finished my education.  My music had been inspired by a number of abstract modern artists.  He and I fell easily into talking about the creative process - and he quickly became a reason to look forward to my visits to Iowa.

Oscar's principal medium was woodcarving.  Some of his sculptures are visible now on the Sioux City Art Center's website.  Check them out.

His drawings made a big impact on me.  I saw them, framed, hanging on the wall in his home.  Even more impressive was a hand-written letter from Albert Einstein, displayed nearby.  Einstein was saying (in German) how hard it was then (in the '30s) to find a job for a young physicist - because he was Jewish. 

These four drawings, like most pen-and-ink drawings, are about lines.  Oscar generally makes his lines of even thickness.  Darker shadows are represented by carefully placed parallel lines.  The lines swoop and curve.  They go places.  Oscar uses them to suggest three dimensions, especially in the last one.  The skull-like silhouette is the only real bit of representation.  I may not have picked his intended orientation - especially in the first two. (Feel free to swivel your monitor around to check out other possibilities.)

This page at the Sioux City Art Center website discusses Oscar's working method as a woodcarver.  It says:

The approach is very simple: an artist looks for inspiration in random patterns and pays attention to their own personal, subjective responses and imaginings

These drawings seem to have resulted from exactly that method as well.

Oscar's drawings were comparable to my own pen-and-ink "doodles" - little drawings I've done my entire life.    I think that the abstraction, the process, the long curved lines and the medium itself reveal many similarities between us.

Examples of my own "doodle" drawings are viewable in one, two, three, four, five, six different Mixed Meters post.  (If you time for only one I suggest #3.)  Also, you could see some doodles done in the medium of refrigerator magnets (along with a good story about cat piss.)

Here's a post, not about drawing, but about growing up musical in Iowa: Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa.

Finally, here's a post called Sevens, in which I discuss the large pile of manure Sioux City, Iowa, is famous for.

Pen-and-ink Tags: Oscar Littlefield. . . Sioux City. . . drawing

In Partial Fulfillment of Something Or Other

My friend Scott Fessler has been scanning and publishing his collection of posters from his student days at CalArts Those were the days we called "the seventies". (I wonder why.)

One poster he scanned was for my own clarinet recital on Febrary 19, 1976. Thanks for scanning it, Scott. Now I can share it with my other two readers.

It's about 10 inches wide and four feet long. It can be viewed either horizontally or vertically. I designed and executed the beast myself using dry transfer letters and my newly acquired set of rapidograph pens. These graphic techniques turned out to be far more important to my career as a musician than the clarinet ever would. It was reproduced on the now obsolete ozalid machine.


Click the picture for enlargement. Better yet, download a copy here. I suggest that you look at it up close to see lots of little text items and musical visual jokes. Go here to read a searchable text file of the poster.

The music, which floats on twisting curvy staves, quotes the various pieces on the recital. (Read the full program.) The guy with a clarinet coming out of his nose was obviously traced from Hieronymus Bosch and the skull playing the piano came from somewhere, Dali maybe? Does the poster remind you of my doodles?

Peppered throughout, in tiny stenciled letters, are 20th century musical events which also happened on February 19. These are quotes from the massive Music Since 1900 by Nicolas Slonimsky, which I, bafflingly, found time to read from cover to cover while I was a graduate student simultaneously studying clarinet and composition.

The beauty of Music Since 1900 is that you can learn just how much music gets written and performed that no one evers hears again. This one revelation has enriched and clouded my entire adult life.

At the bottom of the poster, inside a large mannered half notehead, are the words Sesquipedelian Macropolysyllabification, a Slonimskian term. A link to Slonimsky's definition can be found here.

Yes, I really did call my graduate recital "In Partial Fulfillment of Something or Other". I didn't think much of my CalArts degree even before they gave it to me.

Partially Fulfilled Tags: CalArts. . . David Ocker. . . Nicolas Slonimsky. . . Scott Fessler. . . ozalid. . . rapidograph. . . doodle

Blue Doodles

I scanned five of my old doodles and altered the background color using Photoshop to create a sequel to the earlier Mixed Meters post entitled Branches Before Blue. Pick your favorite.








Bloo Doo Tags: doodle. . . blue. . . sequel

Doodles Around the House - Part Two

Because we love our four cats (and also the little birds outside which our healthy, fluffy, well-fed predators might hunt and kill) we do not let the cats outside .. ever.


Problems arise with multiple always-indoor cats. For example: getting the kitties to pee in appropriate places. We provide them with boxes of cat sand which they use instinctively.


Inside a cat's walnut-sized brain, however, it apparently seems just as instinctive to use the soft absorbent seat of an overstuffed chair. We have several overstuffed chairs and two couches. Those are sort of like boxes of cat sand ... to a cat. I guess.



To protect our overstuffed cat-box-like-to-a-cat furniture we cover it with pee-impermeable materials. An excellent easily available chair-size sheet of impermeable plastic is the common vinyl shower curtain liner. Available in a wide variety of mostly garish colors.



I can tell you from experience that store checkout clerks will ALWAYS ask why you are buying a half dozen or more shower curtain liners. My first answer: "We have a lot of bathrooms"

Then I tell the truth.



Each shower curtain liner comes equipped with three little magnets at the bottom designed to hold the curtain against the tub. When the liners become torn (think cat claws) and thus non-impermeable, we toss them out.

But I try to rescue the three magnets first. These wind up on our kitchen refrigerator.



Recently our came-with-the-house-when-we-moved-in refrigerator stopped refrigerating. We replaced it. The old one was sent off with some nice men who promised it a good home.

But first the nice men made me take down all the various magnet-held pictures and coupons and memorabilia and stuff which was attached to it.


When the new unit was in place I started to reattach the pictures and coupons and memorabilia and stuff. But it seemed wrong to hide this brilliant, gray, metallic, functional and, most importantly, NEW refrigerator with all that crap.

So all we did was put the cat-pee protecting vinyl shower curtain magnets on the fridge and nothing else.


Nature took its course, of course. Instinctively I started forming designs out of the magnets and taking pictures of some. Please do NOT click on any picture above for a closer view of these Refrigerator Magnet Doodles. There's no reason to. There's nothing you can't see already.

Here's a wide-angle shot of doodle workspace shown in the kitchen. You might want to click on just this one to see more detail. You might also want to read Doodles Around the House - Part One which has nothing to do with cats.



Refrigerator Magnet Tags: David Ocker. . . doodle. . . drawing. . . cats. . . refrigerator. . . magnets. . . vinyl shower curtains

Doodles around the House, Part One

This is the first of two posts documenting small doodles which I do at odd moments around the house. This post contains Phone Message Doodles. I do these while I listen to your endless messages on our answering machine. (You know who you are.)


My doodles are not intentional representations. Sometimes, however, they end up looking like something. For example the first one looks like two faces, one floating in mid-air and the other squashed into the ground while wearing a pointed German military helmet.

The next one looks to me like a cow's skull.

Others will see different things in these little drawings. For example, Leslie will think this is a drawing of one of her sea worms.

Dear reader, please share your own ideas about what these pictures really are. Just add a comment at the end of the post (or email me at the link in Hey, Over Here On The Left).

Next doodle: Pooh Bear, missing an eye and with an inverted-heart shaped heart.



This is obviously a Turtle. That's because Leslie added the shell. I only drew the long, extended phallic neck and face part of it.

The most problematic one comes last. I'd say it was a picture of a man, wearing a huge court jester's hat while skiing downhill backwards. Yes, that must be it. I know these things. I'm the artist.


The yellow ones were drawn on Post-It notes. Click any picture for a horribly larger version.

You can also read Doodles Around the House, Part Two.

Phone Message Tags: David Ocker. . . phone message. . . doddle. . . drawing

Large Flightless Bird Reaches For Low Hanging Fruit

A Doodle by David Ocker

Large Flightless Bird Reaches For Low Hanging Fruit

March 16, 2008
22 cm. x 16.5 cm.
Media: black ball point pen on recycled manila envelope
Copyright (c) 2008 David Ocker
Click for full size.

Click here for other doodles by David.

Doodle Tags: David Ocker. . . doodle. . . drawing