Most Iconic Image of California

Quick! Pick an image you think best portrays "Southern California."  We're looking for a single shot that says it all.

You might have chosen the Hollywood sign.  Or maybe an inviting, curvaceous, nearly-nude young woman sitting on a pristine sandy beach while hunky guys surf near their Woody, which is parked in the distance.  Or a self-involved conspicuously aging big shot lawyer (or businessman or actor) with Donald Trump colored hair obliviously driving an expensive car, ignoring stop lights and pedestrians, and talking on a cell phone.

If you're a Republican (yes, we still have a few of those in California) maybe you think a picture of Ronald Reagan orating in front of the Stars and Stripes still says everything which needs to be said, all in a single picture.

Okay, not many Republicans read Mixed Meters, so that last one was a just a joke.  And the other images are only imaginary; they don't really exist except in the movies.  And movies, I'm sad to report, are not even close to being real.  Even Ronald Reagan knew that.

I've known for many years exactly which image I would pick to epitomize life in SoCal.  Just recently I had my first chance to actually take a decent photo of the object in question.  The locale was a new light-rail station in Azusa.

While I admit that this object may not be unique to this area, it reeks of cheap theme parks or cheesy B-movie special effects.  Both of those say 'Southern California' quite well.

This thing imitates nature.  It does that very badly.  It might be better to say that it defies nature.  It employs all the architectural panache of a sleazy strip mall, another Southern Cal speciality.

Its purpose is to whitewash essential infrastructure, hiding it from our consciousness behind a facade which is always in plain sight.

We find this thing acceptable, I guess, because it facilitates our modern lifestyle.  It's high-tech.  It brings people together.  It gives a strong signal to all the idiots with bad hair color who text while driving.

Have you guessed it yet?

Yes, it's a cell phone tower disguised as a palm tree.   Welcome to the silly side of SoCal.

I wonder what, exactly, they were thinking in Azusa when they approved this.  Maybe: "We need to put up a tall cell tower so people can Instagram and Twitter.  Let's disguise it to look like a cheap plastic palm tree and, after a while, maybe no one will notice that's it's not real."

Cell phone towers apparently go hand in hand with palm trees around here.  I've found two cell phone tower and palm tree combos close to my home in Pasadena, about 20 miles from Azusa.

The first shows a cell phone tower disguised as a . . . cell phone tower.  It's not really a disguise but it is ugly.  It's near a palm.  It's also right behind a super sleazy strip mall.

In the second one the horribly thick flag pole is the cell tower.  It's nestled amid palms in front of a church.  The little hut in the foreground holds electronic equipment.  I guess Ronald Reagan was giving a speech elsewhere when I snapped that picture.

Personally, I think neither of these offer that much improvement over the fake palm tree.  Looking at these things is the aesthetic price we all pay to keep your smart phone connected anyplace you go.

Just imagine what beautiful or curious or bizarre sculptures which could be built to beautify cell phone towers.   Modern sculpture might be too controversial.  How about a giraffe?  Maybe a 50-foot tyrannosaurus rex?  (Note the proximity of palm trees.)

We could make our cell phone towers into huge sculptures of our famous citizens and civic leaders.   Such huge human forms have a tradition already.  They're called Muffler Men.  Cities could honor their leading citizens by turning them into cell phone towers.

Maybe a sculpture of Will Rogers holding a lariat looking back at us while we text?  Gracie Allen?  Tom Bradley?  Cezar Chavez?  Sally Ride came from Southern California.  Dr. Dre?  Cal Worthington?

And, in reality, all of them would be hiding cell phone antennae for our personal convenience.

God forbid, Ronald Reagan could become a huge plastic immovable object, gracing our skyline somewhere, his guts filled with electronics, spewing an endless stream of tweets and Facebook posts, saying things that others people wrote but doing it with great feeling and empathy.  Republicans could make pilgrimages.

Now, that is a single picture which would speak volumes about Southern California.

Maybe it would even be too much information.

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They have cell phone towers disguised as palm trees in other states too, apparently.  Here's 25 pictures of cell phone towers disguised as all sorts of things.

Most palm trees are not native to California.  Neither are most of the people.  Here's a California palm history. (palmistry?)

Two LA Philharmonic Festivals of California Music

Dear Readers - this is the second of three unfinished Mixed Meters posts that have languished in my draft folder.  I'm posting them now to get rid of them in honor of this blog's tenth anniversary.

The line "Only now am I finding the energy to finish." seems quite ironic given the fact that it was written nearly 6 years ago.  (When I spoke of "January 16" I meant the one in 2010.)

This was not really intended as a concert review.  I have no interest in being a music critic.  Instead, I wanted to compare two music festivals, one held in November and December 1981 and the other in November and December 2009.  Both festivals dealt with the same general subject matter, music of California composers.

I have no idea what I wanted to add to this post.  My memory has deleted that information.  I've upgraded the links as well as I can.  Unfortunately the Internet has deleted some of that information.  I've been able to replace a few of them via archive.org.  

I also added links to each of the composers represented on the 1981 marathon concert.  Curiously, a couple have Wikipedia articles only in Dutch or German.  Finally I've added  a few relevant pictures which I squirreled away back in 2009.   

As always, thanks for reading.  I encourage you to sing along if you know the words.

//David

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I started writing this post on January 16.  Only now am I finding the energy to finish.  My subject is two Los Angeles music festivals, one very recent, the other nearly 30 years ago.  Both of these events were devoted to music with a real, direct relationship to California.  Both festivals were produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

The first, in December 2009, was called Left Coast, West Coast.  As far as I'm aware, this was the first time in nearly 3 decades that the Philharmonic had presented a series of events devoted solely to California composers.  The previous festival, in 1981, was called Festival of Music Made in Los Angeles.

In one of many pre-concert lectures he gave, the Philharmonic's Creative Chair, John Adams, indicated that the music of Left Coast, West Coast didn't really allow for any conclusion about California music.  The title itself suggested that our music could somehow be distinguished from Right Coast, East Coast music. That's not going to happen.

Personally, I found two interesting dichotomies of California music in the Left Coast, West Coast programs.  Turns out that it's not the longitude which is important.  It's the latitude.  In other words, the festival revealed differences between Northern California and Southern California composers.  It also displayed a split unique to Southern California composers.

You can still find a full program listing of the festival here.  My comments apply only to the four concerts I actually attended.  Other composers, mostly from the south, were presented by the L.A.Master Chorale, REDCAT and Piano Spheres   Other concerts were devoted to the worlds of pop and jazz.  And my comments should be considered very general - not hard and fast.  Exceptions abound.

The North California composers were John Adams, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Ingram Marshall, Paul Dresher, Mason Bates and Harry Partch (well, Partch moved around a lot.)  Their various pieces included elements of jazz, world musics, non-equal temperments, improvisation, found sounds, specially constructed instruments and electronic.  These all are cutting edge new music, valid, on-going trends.  They all have strong Northern California associations.

The Southern Californias were Thomas Newman, Franz Waxman, Leonard Rosenman, Jerry Goldsmith, Frank Zappa, William Kraft and Esa-Pekka Salonen.  These seven names divide neatly into two groups.  The first four are known primarily as film composers.  Except for the Goldsmith piece, Music for Orchestra (which was written specifically for concert performance and had my rapt attention from the very first note), these film-related pieces only strengthened my belief that film composing and concert composing require completely different talents.  I wish we could give a long, long rest to the notion that movie scores are worth listening to as pure music and without the visuals.

The three other Southerners, Kraft, Zappa and Salonen, were just as modern as anything from the North.  But these particular pieces revealed new music trends more attuned to East coast or European ideas.  (Let me note that Esa-Pekka Salonen lived in Southern California about the same length of time as Arnold Schoenberg, seventeen years.  Unlike Schoenberg, his music was strongly affected by California.)

It is good that the Left Coast, West Coast festival pointed slyly to this perennial issue of North versus South in California music.  Possibly, as Gustavo Dudamel comes into his own as music director of the LA Phil, we will see more consideration of North versus South, but on a hemispheric rather than statewide basis.

It's not particularly surprising to discover that Northern California boasts a more experimental music tradition while Southern California still struggles mightily to distinguish real art music from background sound tracks.   Still, for the time being, I see no sign that the South is any closer to resolving this musical schizophrenia than it was back in the days of, say, Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Mention of Korngold brings up another unique musical cross which Southern California must bear: our history of great musical talents who came here in the thirties and forties to avoid European politics.  The most inescapable of these were Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.  These days Arnie's and Igor's direct local influences are long gone.  I've said (via Twitter):

If you still think Los Angeles is a great musical city because Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived here, please set your clock back 50 years. 

Maybe I should have said 29 years instead of 50.  In 1981, the LA Bicentennial year, the Festival of Music Made in Los Angeles prominently featured music which both Stravinsky and Schoenberg had written while they lived here.  The two composers were given equal status on two concerts, performed by the LA Philharmonic at Royce Hall.

Back in 1981 it was still easy to find people in Los Angeles who had studied with and devoted themselves to these masters.  Lawrence Morton and Leonard Stein came immediately to mind.

The rest of the festival consisted of one concert - actually a marathon.  It featured music by a wide variety of other composers.  The only requirement for inclusion was that all the music had to have been written in L.A. - or at least nearby.    The list contains some names not often associated with California and, unlike the 2009 festival, few film-industry associated names but many academics.

Joseph Achron
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Gerald Strang
Leroy Southers
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Frederick Lesemann
Gladys Nordenstrom
William Grant Still
Hans Eisler
Paul Chihara
William Kraft
George Antheil
Roy Harris
Dorrance Stalvey
George Tremblay
Robert Linn
Karl Kohn
Henri Lazarof
John Cage
Donal Michalsky
Ingolf Dahl
Ernst Toch
Adolph Weiss
Lukas Foss
Aurelio de la Vega
George Gershwin
Oscar Levant
Ernst Krenek
Halsey Stevens

The only composer whose music was presented on both the 1981 and 2009 festivals was William Kraft, who started his career as an L.A. composer in the mid-fifties.  He's still going strong.  He's also one of the few remaining local musicians who worked closely with Stravinsky himself.

Personally I can remember attending only one of the three 1981 concerts.  I also remember reading the lengthy erudite essays in the program book by Peter Heyworth and Lawrence Morton.  These were devoted to Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Otto Klemperer.

I vividly remember being absolutely bowled over by Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Schoenberg's arrangement of Brahm's Quartet in G Minor.  It's strange to think any piece by such a famous nineteenth century German composer might have even this small a connection directly to California.  Maybe that's enough of a connection to hold a county-wide Brahms festival, which is a much better idea than a Wagner festival.  It's also much less offensive in my opinion.  (Sergei Rachmaninoff lived and died in Beverly Hills.  I'm unaware of any music he might have written here.)

I do strongly believe in holding music festivals which feature strong California associations.  Serious music in California desperately needs some sense of place.  My problem with these two Philharmonic festivals has nothing to do with the content chosen for them.  The differences between them no doubt reflect the differences of the times.  The big issue, however, is the length of time separating the two.

I wonder if anyone planning the 2009 Festival was even aware of the 1981 Festival.  There have been other new music festivals between these two.  Most notable would be New Music Los Angeles in 1985 but that had a nationwide scope.

I can dream than more regular surveys of serious California music, past, present and future, produced by our major performing arts organizations, might lead eventually to a pre-concert lecture at which the speaker would be able to suggest some common aspects of "California music".  Maybe there will be, by then, a proto-california music style.  I should live so long.  In another 29 years I'll be in my mid-eighties.  If I'm around then I will, naturally, voice my disagreements with the programming right here at Mixed Meters.

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Here's Mark Swed's review of West Coast, Left Coast
Read two Mixed Meters articles labeled William Kraft

Prostitution, Obscenity and California Politics

Election season is almost over again.  Because I don't own a television station I can't rake in the bucks selling time for sleazy political ads.   I do have a blog and I can rant about politics - that's what blogs are for.

We Californians are enduring a gubernatorial combat between former California governor Jerry Brown, who wants his old job back, and former E-Bay CEO Meg Whitman, who apparently can't find work elsewhere.  Brown has been a politician all his life and has achieved a personal net worth of $4 million (source).  Whitman rode the crest of the Internet boom and has a net worth of $1.2 billion. Billion!  That ties her for number 332 on the list of the 400 richest Americans (source).  So far she's spent more than 10% of her fortune trying to get elected.

Why is becoming governor of California worth millions of dollars to Meg?  Meg tells us that she isn't running for office because of money.

I know she isn't running because she wants a paycheck of $206,000.  Meg has SO much money already that she could pay herself a governor's salary out of pocket for over 63 centuries - roughly until the year 8310.  If she puts all her money in a simple savings account (one with a paltry .25% interest) in one year her money will earn over 157 times the governor's salary. Honestly, that's enough for even rich people to live on - or so I'm told.

I actually think Meg wants to be Governor mostly because of the money.    Someone who has accumulated so much money (and done it so quickly) probably spends her time thinking about nothing else except money.

Meg argues that her vast horde of money will keep her independent.  I think that's wrong.  As governor I think she would be a hostage to her money pile and would have trouble making decisions which would adversely affect the net worth of the ultra-wealthy. 

Meg Whitman's wealth is vastly out of scale for our society.  It's far beyond anything an average American can ever hope for.  Immense wealth gives its owner great power.  It is obscene for a few individuals to have so much wealth and influence.  America is harmed by this disparity between richest and poorest.  And recent tax laws have been increasing the distance.  That's very wrong. 

It's time to bring back a more progressive tax code - where people with higher income pay ever higher tax rates.  Government is supposed to take enough money away from people who can get along just fine without it in order to help people who really need help.  People who pay high taxes ought to think of paying taxes as simple patriotism.  The idea is elementary, but, alas, the details are staggeringly complex.

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Californians have been handed this line that "my obscene wealth makes me a better politician" before - by our current failure of a governor, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (net worth $400,000,000 source).  Meg Whitman's talking points in her current campaign are eerily similar to what Arnold has told us in previous elections.  Watch this fun Jerry Brown attack ad:

Arnold, who now must bear the burden of an actual political record, was clearly lying when he recited these nostrums.  California has an immense revenue problem.  In no way have Schwarzenegger's actions in Sacramento resembled those of a good business leader.  He has not created jobs.  He has not made government more efficient.

All the while Arnold has taken over $143,000,000 in special interest money (source) and we must suspect that he says the things he says because other people paid him to say them.  After all, Arnold's real experience is as an actor and that's what a professional actor does.  Here's a fun compendium of 160 things he was paid to say (many of which are not safe for the ears of your co-workers or republican prudes):

Want more?  Here's another 130. 

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Imagine California actually was a private business and that Meg Whitman applied for the job of governor.  Let's listen in on the initial interview:

Human Resources Interviewer: Welcome, Meg. Being governor of California involves lots of politics. What political experience have you had?

Meg Whitman: All my experience was running corporations.  I feel that I must have been very good at that job because I made a mountain of money.

H.R. Interviewer: Here at California Ltd. we believe that politics is the ability to convince people who already have money to hand it over to us so we can give it away to people who need it more than they do.  Is that something you know how to do?

Meg Whitman: I think government should allow people with money to accumulate even more money so they can pay salaries to people who need money.

H.R. Interviewer: How many California jobs have you created with your own mountain of money?

Meg Whitman: I had a housekeeper for a while.

H.R. Interviewer: Okay, thank you for coming in.  We'll call you if we need more information.

Meg Whitman's housekeeper (she's the one who claimed in public that she had been fired by Whitman from her $23 an hour job of nine years because candidate Whitman finally realized that having an undocumented maid was bad political form) became a hot topic during this election.   Whitman's campaign countered this mud with a tape in which one of Jerry Brown's assistants referred to Meg as a "whore" because she accepted an endorsement from a police union in exchange for exempting members of that same union from her own proposed pension cuts.

During one of those unwatchable debates Meg expressed great outrage at being called a whore:

I think every Californian, and especially women, know exactly what's going on here.  And that is a deeply offensive term to women.

It seems that Meg doesn't understand the most obvious implication of the word whore.  A whore is someone who "gets paid for it".  "It" can be anything, not just sex, and in these gender neutral times the person doesn't even have to be female. 

Being a whore means doing it for money.

You can see a list of contributors to the Whitman campaign here. 

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If you are a California voter and you read this before November 2, 2010, please vote for Proposition 19 (because the current situation clearly isn't working) and also for Proposition 25 (because the current situation clearly isn't working.)

Read a Sunday Times (of London) article about current U.S. income tax rates:

Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez writes about what Meg Whitman could have done with her money instead. 

L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes about why big-time CEOs make lousy politicians.

Money Tags: California election. . . Meg Whitman. . . political influence. . . prostitution. . . obscenity

Monday Evening Concerts: Mostly Californian

Last May Sequenza21, a New York music blog, wrote about the retirement of Randy Coleman, a professor of music composition at Oberlin. He described a concert from Oberlin's "glory days" (maybe the late sixties?):

"...to enter you needed to take a sugar pill with a dot on it...and you rolled the dice, cause 1/3 of the dots were LSD..."

I had never heard of Coleman before, but this description made my jaw drop just enough to bookmark the reference.


Today I ran across a YouTube video of composer Clint McCallum, that's him on the gun. Some of the things he said made my jaw drop just enough to want to share them here on Mixed Meters. Turns out that McCallum is a student of Randy Coleman. Now I've heard of Randy Coleman twice.

McCallum, clad in black cowboy hat and black t-shirt with the word "Death" on it, is describing his composition for soprano saxophone and piano. The piece is called "In a Hall of Mirrors Waiting to Die." (ah, the t-shirt does make sense) and it will be performed Monday night, January 11, 2010, at the venerable Monday Evening Concerts, a Los Angeles institution which has somehow survived until its seventieth season or so.

Here are Mr. McCallum's words:

I come from a tradition of avant garde academic composition and so a lot of techniques and a lot of ideas that have inspired me are very heady, very philosophical and very technical. But, there's also a side of my music that's just plain stupid.

He has to hold the same note which is very high at the very top of the range and very loud for a very long time. That adds a whole sense of anticipation for the whole piece. For one, you're wondering, okay, how long can this guy possibly hold this. You see his face get red, he seems to be in pain. On top of that, you're sort of in pain. I mean, it's loud and it's incessant and it won't stop.

By the time things change in the piece, we as listeners kind of are half deafened by this note.

My music, and particularly this piece, I think this is a good example of this, takes tropes of art music. I mean it's written for a concert hall, it's written for a concert audience, and that situation. The way it's written and the way it's performed, over the course of the piece, takes it outside of that. And gets to something that is more visceral but also just more physical and seems maybe not so much concert music anymore. I'm not going to say it's rock music, but there's something there that is breaking down that third wall.

It's not important to me whether the audience enjoys my music or not. But that is purely for the reason that as a listener I have found the most meaning in music comes from music that has challenged me, that has challenged my sense of self and my self of aesthetics. And if musicians had worried too much about whether I was going to enjoy the music they were playing for me, I never would have had these experiences where music literally changed me, where it literally changed my life.

So I have to approach music the same way because I do want my music to change lives.

This particular MEC concert is called Mostly Californian. The title perplexes me because three out of the five composers are very recent transplants to California, while the others, Anton Webern and Milton Babbitt, have no known relationship to the Pacific coast. Still, MEC is to be commended for even this small attempt at showcasing local talent.

Clint McCallum's home page. When he talks about the "third wall", I suspect he means this. The picture of him on the gun barrel comes from his MySpace page. The picture of the baby on the gun barrel sculpture comes from here via here.

Other MM references to MEC:
In Which David Says Good Riddance to Bad Acoustics
30 Second Spots - The Medallion (sorry, the mp3 of The Medallion is not available. If anyone cares, I'd be happy to repost it. This post prompted my Musical Manifesto)

MEC Tags: Clint McCallum. . . Monday Evening Concert. . . California composers

FLAP

For some reason I keep making videos of birds. First there was Birds Who Don't Know The Words. Then there was SQUAWK! Now, here is FLAP.



Copyright © 2009 David Ocker - 121 seconds

The video was shot from the pier at Avila Beach, California, last month. Here's a satellite picture.

This small city underwent a "remediation" in which old buildings were destroyed, 200,000 tons of contaminated soil replaced by uncontaminated and new buildings constructed. This was all because of a pipeline leak. Additionally, Avila Beach is just a few miles from the earthquake-fault-adjacent Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station. Nice place to visit.


FLAP is the first original piece I've completed on my Macintosh: the music in Sibelius and the video in iMovie. If everything about it makes sense to you, seek professional help. Koo-koo-ka-choo!


The first picture is Avila Pier at sunset. The second is underneath the pier. That's Leslie contemplating her ocean.

Flap Tags: David Ocker. . . Avila Beach California. . . music video

It's California's Fault

Last Saturday I tagged along with Leslie as she tagged along with an excursion organized by the Natural History Museum of LA County. That's where she works. The outing was called "Living on the Fault Line; A Day Along the San Andreas." We followed the San Andreas Fault for about a hundred miles in a small caravan of vehicles.

Our guide was Lindsey Groves, a colleague of Leslie's at the Museum. This is Lindsey. When he talks he uses his hands a lot.


Behind him, on the opposite side of the Antelope Valley Freeway, just north of the San Andreas Fault, you can see the wall of a freeway cut. A cut is where they excavated a hill to avoid having to build the freeway over it. This one is just north of Avenue S near Palmdale. Notice the vertical lines called strata. These were formed horizontally and then pushed upward by earthquakes. All the pushing took a very long time.

The next picture shows Lindsey in the middle of nowhere at a place called Pallet Creek. He is showing us where layers of sediment in a former lake bed have been toyed with by earthquakes. With his hand he's marking the level of a dark layer of peat which was moved upward by a quake. Notice that the dark band to the left of his hand is lower. An earthquake once broke the earth exactly at this spot.


When asked exactly where the fault line is now Lindsey would only point out a several hundred foot span. The next time the earth moves on the fault it'll be somewhere within that swath - probably. He seemed to enjoy pointing out structures which just might be straddling the San Andreas Fault.

At one point on the road, not far from this Pallet Creek site and not far from the fault itself, a band of helpful Boy Scouts erected a San Andreas Fault sign. This served as an excellent photo-op. Here's Leslie near the sign.


The tour began at Devore where several earthquake faults, including the San Andreas, meet with several freeways and several major railroad lines. Recipe for disaster? Then we moved to Wrightwood a town in the mountains. It sits right on the fault, nestled in tall pine trees.

Near Wrightwood are Earthquake Trees. These trees had their tops snapped off long ago during the earthquake of 1812. They kept on growing afterwards but with two trunks instead of one.


We lunched in an idyllic place called Jackson Lake, thick with green reeds and noisy with ducks. We saw many small lakes on the tour. These bodies of water are the result of seismic movement. Geologists use them as clues to where the fault lines are.


Indeed, picking an earthquake fault out of a scenic vista is difficult, although the geologists have their little tricks. But identifying a fault zone precisely takes careful measurements with precision instruments. It may be hard to see but we know it could cause a lot of damage. Preparedness is important.

I thought this is similar to certain medical conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar. You only can tell you have these diseases because doctors use their machines to identify them. You can't feel the illness, but it could do you a lot of damage. It's a good idea not to ignore them.

We visited Devil's Punchbowl, just one of several fantastic rock formations caused by seismic shifts. Devil's Punchbowl had been in great danger from the recent Station Fire. A pyro-cumulus cloud was just poking out over the mountains when we visited. A new fire had started several hours earlier somewhere in the area we had just visited. As we watched the cloud kept getting bigger.


This new fire (still burning as I write this) is called the Sheep Fire. It has now burned a large area which we visited along the San Andreas Fault.

Yes, there are a lot of dangers to living in Southern California. Earthquakes and fires are just two of them. Neither is easy to predict. Both can be devastating to lives and property. The similarities end there.

On a lighter note, at Devil's Punchbowl some local wildlife was on display - including three owls. Here's Owl Number Three.


Several of the links above connect to Google maps. In these the fault generally moves from upper left to lower right. There are some clues visible from satellite pictures which can't be seen from the ground.

I also suggest you visit geology.com where you can see Google maps with the San Andreas fault indicated using geopositioning data. I couldn't find a way to link to particular locations on those maps, however, so you'll have to navigate manually.

Lindsey Groves works at the Malacology department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His interests also include geology and paleontology. He wrote a fantastic article about the San Andreas tour for the museum's magazine. Hopefully I will find an online link to that. Hopefully he'll forgive me for the liberties I've taken in describing his interesting field trip.




Fault Tags: San Andreas Fault. . . NHMLAC. . . Lindsey Groves. . . earthquake. . . forest fire. . . Southern California

A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles

No musician admits it out loud and a few probably don't even admit it to themselves, but every musician wants to get into the history books. I've seen composers open a new book from the back just to look for their name in the index. I do that myself sometimes.

I'm very proud that I got mentioned even once in Frank Zappa's autobiography. (On page 175 in case you run across a copy because Frank didn't believe in indices.)

Recently I was contacted by Charles Sharp (also known as C. Sharp). He wanted to interview me for his doctoral dissertation. Here's how he described it:

[It is] ostensibly about avant-garde jazz in Los Angeles but it has become increasingly about the intersection of various different genres of experimental music in Los Angeles.

One of those intersections involved the ICA, the Independent Composers Association, a group in which I was active in the early 1980s. You can read several Mixed Meters articles about ICA. (MM is the only place on the Internet you can read anything about ICA, alas.)

I answered Charles' questions as best my memory would allow. A year passed. Charles finished his dissertation, charmingly entitled "Improvisation, identity, and tradition: Experimental music communities in Los Angeles". He has since defended it against all comers and earned some letters after his name which entitle him to a chance of being hired for menial college teaching positions.

The dissertation is 500 pages long! I immediately searched it for my name and found a gratifying number of mentions. Thankfully the quotes Charles picked didn't make me look like a complete idiot. It's not online at the moment but if you want to read it you should contact him. Charles created a blog to accept comments here which might be a good place to leave him a message.

The story Charles tells is important. It's about creative music right here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, in experimental music, what happens in L.A. stays in L.A. This telling should help delineate a historical tradition few people know much about. Even those of us who witnessed parts of it don't know the whole story. People from elsewhere will be surprised.

After an academical introductory chapter (in which the word hermeneutics confused me repeatedly) it's a pretty easy read. Charles starts off with Ornette Coleman, not often thought of as an L.A. musician. He left here for New York in 1959 after recording The Shape of Jazz to Come. Three Los Angeles jazz musicians, pianist Horace Tapscott, cornetist Bobby Bradford and clarinetist John Carter are the backbone of the story.

I was acquainted with John Carter, heard him play a bunch of times and even got to play with him once, if only in private. He was a nice and genuine person. His cycle of 5 albums, Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, is the centerpiece of Charles' story. I could have learned a lot from John - had I thought to pay more attention.

Sharp discusses the music of Tapscott, Bradford and Carter :

...these musicians had preunderstandings, which were informed by bebop and also the developing music of free jazz. Their music suggested different realities and possibilities. If racism, which was a systemic part of urban planning, policing, and public policy, was a reminder that black people were not fully valued as individuals, the music was a reminder of the importance of individuals and the power of community. ... Their music was supposed to sound unique, different every time, and challenge the listeners; aspects that seldom result in broad mass appeal. ... As their music was understood, it expanded the horizons of the listeners and new communities would emerge. (p.126-7)

Charles writes a lot about communities - little groups of like-minded people within which music could take on some meaning. Telling how these groups arose and interacted with each other and eventually disappeared makes the story interesting.

For example, I found the early histories, starting in high school, of drummer Alex Cline, guitarist Nels Cline and synthesist Lee Kaplan (who ran an important concert series at a little dump pretentiously called the Century City Playhouse) fascinating. My buddy Vinny Golia gets a lot of space. (You can hear ancient recordings by an improv trio of myself, Vinny & flutist Anne LaBerge in this MM article.) Others (like Bill Roper, James Grigsby, Titus Levi, Kraig Grady, Lynn Johnston, Will Salmon) who I know or worked with get space as well.

Charles puts a lot of different things into his narrative. A chapter about punk rock. A chapter about the various Los Angeles city-wide arts festivals (which I alluded to in my recent post about opera.) Dr. Sharp takes the story right up to the present - long after I dropped out.

Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly 35 years, first as an active participant in the local experimental music scene and then an observer of same, I think this dissertation deserves to be widely read. Creative musicians, non-creative musicians, music fans of all kinds and even music critics will find it interesting. And they might just realize that Los Angeles is not quite the creative wasteland we pretend to be.


To accompany this post I've gone through the chaos of my archives and selected some flyers, newspaper clippings and concert programs which relate one way or another to Charles' subject matter. All of them mention my name somewhere - why else would I have kept them? But most are more interesting because of the others involved.

The material is in two formats. One is a 16 meg. PDF of scans of each item - get it here. The other is the same material only converted to searchable text. Read that one here.

Here's a list of the items included:

• Promotional Articles - Ornette Coleman and Golia/LaBerge/Ocker (LA Herald Examiner September 1984)
• Postcard Ocker/Golia/LaBerge TRIO and Peet/Fumo DUO (Galeria Ocaso August 1985)
• Flyer - An ORT FESTIVAL (Oranges & Sardines, March 1985)
• Promotional Article - Lee Kaplan with Golia/Ocker (LA Weekly, no date)
• Program ....INTO MUSIC (LACE May 1985)
• Flyer - SEVEN NIGHTS FOR LOCAL COMPOSERS (Nov/Dec 1984)
• Postcard - L.A. Festival: Jazz & the New Thing and Golia/Ocker (Sept 1990)
• Review - Carter Compositions Featured (Los Angeles Times Sept. 6 1990)
• Review - Clarinet concert like fine conversation (Daily News, Sept. 17, 1990)
• Program - The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble (Harbor College, Oct. 1991)

Ice Cream Wishes

A lot of this post deals with Yoko Ono.

One night many years ago when I was a freshman in college I spent what seemed like hours, stoned out of my mind, standing in front of the menu board of the school's late-night snack bar, The Tea Room, trying hard to pick the perfect munchie-crunching taste treat.

Suddenly There It Was - Chocolate Marshmallow Ice Cream!! I knew instantly that it was my favorite flavor even though I can't remember ever having tasted it before that night.

And so it was - Chocolate Marshmallow was indeed my favorite flavor of ice cream for many years afterward. When I arrived in California I found that chocolate marshmallow ice cream was called Rocky Road and made with bits of real marshmallows. How bizarre. Yuchh. It had been the swirls of sweet marshmallow creme inside the chocolate which sealed my passion. Life went on and new flavors replaced chocolate marshmallow on top of my fave list.


Years later -- many years later -- at Tutti Gelato, a small ice cream spot hidden away in the corner of an off-street courtyard in Old Pasadena - I again studied the menu, completely straight this time, searching for the perfect after-dinner taste treat. Here's a picture of the menu. Click it to enlarge. What would you have picked?


My choice? A combination of mascarpone and sour cherry gelato in a cup. In my mind the smooth creamy cheesy mascarpone and the tart bright citrus sour cherry instantly became the perfect flavor combination - just as chocolate and marshmallow had years before. I decided that I must have it.

Alas, they were out of one flavor (or the other). I returned to Tutti Gelato many times over the years - okay it was about a half dozen times over two years - and either they were out of one flavor (or the other) or they were too busy or I was too stuffed after dinner or something.

But then, a couple weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, just at opening time, I scored the perfect cup of gelato: half mascarpone and half sour cherry. Here's a picture I took just before my first highly anticipated bite.


Disappointment. The mascarpone wasn't cheesy enough. The sour cherry wasn't terribly sour - more like a watered down cherry soda flavor. My taste bud imagination had let me down big time. I was highly dissatisfied. Plain old chocolate would have been so much better.

To be fair Tutti Gelato serves great ice cream and sorbet. I would not hesitate to suggest that you try it. The problem was that I had imagined such a high level of unobtainable perfection in the synthesis of flavors.

Disillusioned, I wandered around that off-street courtyard (click here for satellite view). In the courtyard there's a Crate and Barrel at one end, a trendient Italian restaurant at the other. There's a micro-brewery and a Johnny Rockets and a sushi bar. There's a movie multi-plex. There are a couple more even more trendient boutiques and a sculpture of plexiglass workmen digging a trench. Click on the next picture for a panorama shot of the whole courtyard.


What I found in the middle of the courtyard that Sunday was an ongoing interactive art project by Yoko Ono. It's called Wish Tree. Here are Yoko's old fashioned fluxian instructions:

Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)
Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
Ask your friends to do the same
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes

Each tree has a little set of steps so the top branches can be reached. Pencils and little tie-on cards are provided. From a distance the trees look like they are blooming a lot of white flowers. In my imagination the cards were provided in many different colors: chocolate, sour cherry and the like.


Here's some description of the project at Yoko's website. She tells of tying wishing papers to trees as a young child in temples in Japan. The notion of supplicating the higher powers with a words on a small piece of paper probably exists in many religions. Here it is, in action at the Western Wall, serving an important function in the religion of U.S. presidential politics. The ancient Jews didn't have many trees to tie their wishes to. But they had plenty of rocks.


I wandered around the courtyard reading peoples wishes. No one folded their cards as Yoko instructed. Most, as is predictable, ask for health or wealth for themselves or for loved ones. Peace for the world. Love. A few, however, were much less predictable. I snapped photos of my favorites.

I wish I had a rocket propelled corgi! Adorable.

I wish for my sunglasses to make me look sexy!

I wish to swirl forward

I wish I had another wish - Nathan

I wish I wans't dyselxic

I wish for the chance to make a difference with
my music and go to music school - Melinda

(Poor Melinda. Someday she'll find out how little effect music has on the real world.)

A lot of ice cream!
(I suggest you avoid combining mascarpone & sour cherry)

How to make marshmallow videos: here (yuchh) or here (yuchh yuchh yuchh)

Search for the phrase "chocolate marshmallow ice cream"

Mascarpone and Sour Cherry Tags: ice cream. . . gelato. . . Wish Tree. . . Yoko Ono. . . Pasadena CA

Boopin' on the Bass

I couldn't resist the first picture which I found on Flickr here:


I took the second picture in San Luis Obispo. Note how much better Betty looks without the instrument. Our friend Jean seems to be pointing that out.


Boop Tags: Betty Boop. . . electric bass

Branches Before Blue

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