David's Blogs

Poof You're A Pimp animated art by Eric Peterson

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:53 GMT

Eric spent a lot of time creating and then animated iPod album art for my musical piece entitled Poof, You're A Pimp http://meters-mixed.blogspot.com/2008/08/poof-youre-pimp.html is where you can read about it and listen to it. Eric's online presence is http://www.myspace.com/ericnp and http://www.ericnp.net Thanks Eric!

Author: docker1
Keywords: Poof Pimp animation art short film
Added: August 20, 2008

Branches Before Blue

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:00 GMT

At Mount San Jacinto State Park I took lots of pictures of bare tree tips against the blue sky. This post tells more about the trip. Click any picture to enlarge it.

Tree Tip Tags: trees. . . branches. . . pictures

Camo ______________________________________________________...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:51 GMT

Camo

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"I suggest that those of us who have cited bequests to the Metropolitan Opera in our wills contact..."

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:07 GMT

“I suggest that those of us who have cited bequests to the Metropolitan Opera in our wills contact our lawyers and leave bequests instead to other organizations that do not have an attitude.”

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Carol H. Schwartz, in a letter to editor of the New York Times

Opera fan accuses opera company of having “attitude”? NEWS FLASH - Pot Calls Kettle Black.

Found via

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Blue Lights Special

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:16 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

two outdoor light fixtures at the Salvation Army store in Pasadena on Del Mar Blvd.

Red Mask ...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:14 GMT

Red Mask

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Seeing only a half mask? Click it.

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"Oh, please, don’t display them. Displays of saints’ relics have nothing to do with..."

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:21 GMT

“Oh, please, don’t display them. Displays of saints’ relics have nothing to do with scholarship.”

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Richard Taruskin, famous musicologist, on the subject of St. Beethoven’s skull bones. Quoted in an article from the San Jose Mercury News, quoted here.

Is the phrase “famous musicologist” an oxymoron?

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Old Alarm Bell ...

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:09 GMT

Old Alarm Bell

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If you can’t see one entire old alarm bell, dear Mixed Meters reader, please click on what you see. Hey.

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Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:44 GMT

Timothy Mangan, the last full-time newspaper music critic in O.C., has a blog. (which is not true of the last full-time newspaper music critic in L.A.)

Tim posted an excerpt written by H.L. Mencken at the time of the Scopes Trial, 1925. It's about Beethoven. The excerpt bothers me quite a bit. Go read it now: Beethoven and the Scopes Trial. Reading it is important because Tim's bosses probably peg his salary to how many hits his blog gets.

The excerpt really pushed my buttons. It smacks of vile cultural elitism coated with that sickeningly childish Beethoven worship which I hate so much. It made me want to rant.

Of course it's entirely possible that Mencken has his tongue firmly in his cheek. How am I to be sure - with no smiley faces in the text?

It starts out like one of those "There are two kinds of people..." jokes. For example: "There are three kinds of people - those who understand math and those who don't." Warning: certain mathematical concepts will be abused in this post.

Here's an excerpt from Mencken's excerpt:

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only ... That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States ... it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all.

I have no clue how many people in the US in 1925 had actually heard of Beethoven. Neither did Mencken. He was making up his facts ("it is probable"). That's an old journalistic tradition now preserved mainly by us bloggers. These days real journalists are into "fact checking". (Quick, name the capital city of Mongolia. )

Let's take Mencken at his word and stipulate that in 1925 about two percent of Americans actually knew who Beethoven was and the rest would have lynched him in the street for the crime of being meaningful and for coming back from the dead.

But times have changed. Allowing for the three-fold increase in U.S. population, no one could claim in 2008 that only 6 million Americans have ever heard of Beethoven. Any other composer (except Mozart), maybe, but not Beethoven.

I wanted to shout back at the excerpt: "Hey, H.L. Now-a-days, thanks to our limited choices of infotainment conglomerates, the U.S. is homogenized pretty thoroughly. We've all heard of the same stuff - including Beethoven."

We here at Mixed Meters set out to prove the point that everybody knows Beethoven by conducting a poll. The sample was small (9 responses) but the results prove the hypothesis so why bother going on. (Call that going, call that on.)

METHODOLOGY: I told each person that I had a question and asked for the first answer that popped into their head. No thinking, please. The question was: "Name a classical composer." (Not really a question, but hey.)

DATA: Here are the answers listed in descending frequency together with the first names of the respondents:

Beethoven (Kevin, Sean, Claudia and Tom)
Mozart (Rose and Lucy)
Bach (Sandra)
Brahms (Kristina)
Takemitsu (Daniel)

Most of the answers were immediate, almost joyful. The exception was Claudia, secretary at an auto repair shop, who needed nearly a minute of her deepest cogitation before she came up with an answer, any answer (which she mispronounced.) But she knew "Beethoven".

Daniel's unexpected answer stems from the fact that he's a professional composer, the only trained musician in the sample. He cheated by thinking for several seconds before answering.

My poll has a probable margin of error of 25%. Remember: the "probable" - like Mencken I make up facts too. Please attempt to reproduce my results with polls of your own and post the probable results as comments below.

CONCLUSION: Forty-four percent of all Americans think of Beethoven first when they consider classical composers. If the question instead had been "Who is Beethoven?" my poll would have shown name recognition of 100% or more. That's because anyone who knows of Bach, Mozart, Brahms or Takemitsu probably knows of Beethoven too.

Poor Ludwig is now a cultural icon considerably separate from the appreciation of his music. Beethoven, who could still write music even after he went deaf. Beethoven, who overcame insurmountable obstacles. The Beethoven of Disney movies, disco hits, dog movies, strange rock band names and the John Thompson arrangement of Ode to Joy, among others.

We have made Beethoven's life's lemonade into a cultural kool-aid so diluted that everyone has tasted it but no one need be affected by it. The more diluted he becomes the less meaningful he gets. If people don't know why Beethoven is famous, they still know that he IS famous. Famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Mencken goes on to tell us what would happen if the 1925 unwashed did happen to notice our hero composer. He doesn't even say "probably".

If [Beethoven's music] could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.

Okay, I get it now. Beethoven is really a stalking horse for Mencken's real target - the anti-teaching-of-evolution crowd. He wants to show us how stupid those people really are by telling us about the bonehead stunts they would pull if they catch up with the poor unsuspecting Ludwig.

How much have things changed since 1925?

Suppose that in 2008 a teacher were arrested somewhere in America, just as John Scopes was in 1925, for telling his class about evolution. Could it happen? Would you be surprised? I wouldn't. The battle over teaching the idea of evolution continues to this day.

Could a contemporary journalist attack the opinions held by creationists (or neo-cons or right-to-lifers or some other deserving group) by describing their probably hateful retribution on a ... composer? A composer of music? I doubt it. A blogger might try it, but not a real journalist.

Which composer's villification at the hands of the cretinous masses would arouse the most sympathy among us - the good people? Copland? Carter? Leiber and Stoller? Keith Burstein? Richard Thomas? In the wildest journalistic imagination could any composer be plausibly turned into the next Andres Serrano or Robert Maplethorpe?

In a word, no. That is because it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels.

And what of Poor Beethoven in all this? Suppose he did come back from the dead, hearing restored, to observe the holy adulations he so regularly receives. What would he think of his universal name recognition? Would be giggle nervously when asked about Immortal Beloved? I don't know.

But it is probable that if he actually listened (for the first time ever) to a performance of his own Ninth Symphony he would say "That's awful. I must completely rewrite it."

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The picture of John Belushi as Beethoven channeling Ray Charles on Saturday Night Live comes from here.

The Beethoven figurine picture comes from here.

The picture of Beethoven's skull comes from here.

The picture of John Cleese as Beethoven comes from here which also has a story about how poor Ludwig might have died. The script to Beethoven's Mynah Bird, a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, is here.

The Beethoven action figure pictures come from here and here.

The picture of Beethoven's ear trumpets comes from here.

I took the pictures of the Ludwig sticker (which looks like Johnny Depp) on the traffic box in Civic Center, downtown Los Angeles.

Click any picture for an enlargement.

H.L. Tags: Mencken. . . Beethoven. . . Scopes Trial

House of Cigars sign

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

on Mission Liquor's old building - this sign has been removed. See it blinking in this UTUbe video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tHM9zOBuOM

Peeling Paint

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

underside of a canopy at an abandoned gas station at the corner of Allen & Brigden. Some kind of vinyl covering peeling.

Pasadena Sign signs

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

Another sign on Mission Liquor old building - this one also has been removed.

Red Lips Black Hair Sign

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

part of a sign in Old Pasadena - full red lips with just a hint of a straggly mustache

Rust and Peel Gas Station Canopy

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

a rusted out spot of the canopy on another abandoned gas station on the corner of Hill and Washington

Sky and Colored Glass

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

the underside of an eave on some building or other on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena

Three Felixes on Pasadena Street

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:03 GMT

mixed meters posted a photo:

looking north on Lake Avenue about a half block south of Colorado

"Whatever happened to boogie-woogie? Got what it deserved."

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:10 GMT

“

Whatever happened to boogie-woogie?

Got what it deserved.

”

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An interchange on the 1959 Album How to speak HIP available for download at WFMU’s Beward of the Blog.

This interchange occurs at the end of Field Trip No.2. Also recommended: the man who lives inside a violin from the episode The Riff.

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Angled ______________________________________________________...

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:32 GMT

Angled

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From Mixed Meters, please click the picture.

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HISTORIA DE UN LETRERO

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:08 GMT

A short film, winner of a prize at Cannes. You can spend 5 minutes doing lots of different things on the Internet. Most of them are not as moving as this.

Thanks to my cousin Bev for passing this along.

"But Kathryn is not reluctant to discuss her reaction to the music, critically, with the composer, as..."

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:37 GMT

“But Kathryn is not reluctant to discuss her reaction to the music, critically, with the composer, as I found out. It was after the second performance of my piece, Bright Kingdoms, by the Santa Rosa symphony under Jeff Kahane, that she made a specific criticism of a passage in the music that she thought didn’t work.”

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Composer Ingram Marshall, in this letter to the webstie New Music Bachs about businesswoman and patron of new music Kathryn Gould, who, it appears, really wants to be a composition teacher as well.

Kathryn was recently quoted in Mixed Messages here.

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Palm Strings ...

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:06 GMT

Palm Strings

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If you’re looking at this from Mixed Meters, my blog, you might consider clicking on the picture which will enable you to see all of it. Or not.

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Palm Springs Means Summer Heat

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:01 GMT

We spent a few days in Palm Springs at the end of last month. Here's a picture of the Road to Palm Springs.

It's hot in Palm Springs at the end of July. Really hot. Here's a picture of the sun. Don't look at it.

We were there to attend the wedding of our friends Len (he's the one with the beard) and Kristian (he's the other one with the beard). They were married by a retired judge, an outside ceremony in Palm Springs in July. Did I mention that it was hot?

When the judge said "By the Power Vested In Me By The State of California" there was a welcome bit of extra breeze - probably from the flurry of virtual buttons popping at that moment. We were proud to be there.

Here's a panoramic view from the front door of our hotel. Click on any picture for a much larger view but especially this one. Note the mountains. In the distance there's a second ridge of gray-colored mountains.

While Leslie spent the day with the wedding party, I got high on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Here's the official tramway site. It takes people to Mount San Jacinto State Park a mile above Palm Springs, somewhere up in those gray mountains.

I'm glad I went because, earlier this year, California's Actor/Governor proposed balancing the state budget by closing Mount San Jacinto State Park (and dozens of others). Click here. I can't find any information on whether this proposal is still part of this year's state budget impasse.

Look closely at the next picture. You'll see a tram car, the cable it's hanging from, a tower supporting the cable and, at the top of the picture, the lower terminal of the tramway.

As you look down you can see various climate zones ending with the heat and haze of Palm Springs.and the Coachella Valley.

Our hotel would actually be visible in the next photo but for the large tree on the left. Click here to see the Google satellite view of that area. In the picture north is to the left; on the map north is to the up.

I hiked around in the park. It was hot there also but in a cooler sort of way. Here are some friends I made during my hike. Can you guess which two wanted me to feed them?

On our drive home I snapped this picture of some windmills waving us goodbye.

Here's a Wikipedia article about same-sex marriage in California.

Hot Tags: same sex marriage. . . Palm Springs California. . . aerial tramway. . . Mount San Jacinto. . . California state parks

Ringing Tree Rings ...

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:05 GMT

Ringing Tree Rings

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From Mixed Meters, click to see all the rings.

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"My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new..."

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:36 GMT

“My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new music being written. Most of that music is being written outside the academic circles, it seems, and much of it by younger composers—not because they are young, but because they did not grow up with teachers who grew up in the dark musical shadow of the World Wars.”

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Kathryn Gould, patron of the arts, who gives her own money as she sees fit to commission new orchestra works and who is thereby perpetuating the top-down system of selecting “important” composers. It was ever thus.

Interviewed by Molly Sheridan in this article at New Music Bachs

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Strips ______________________________________________________...

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:31 GMT

Strips

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From Mixed Meters I dare you to click on the part of the piocture you can already see.

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