Dildos on Mixed Meters

September 15 was the eleventh anniversary of Mixed Meters.  I must have started this blog for some good reason.  Right?

In my very first post I admonished myself to keep things short.  I've failed at that quest many times.   In one early post an anonymous commenter said that I "went on and on and on about it..."  ('It' was a hip hop song which quoted the Dies Irae.)   Dude was right.  "Going on and on" has become a motto around here.  Thanks, Dude.

I really appreciate everyone who reads my blather, either here or via email.  Getting comments is a pleasant bonus.

What's really amazing is not that I'm still posting.  I'm amazed that I haven't found an excuse good enough to get me to quit.

It's been remarked that Facebook has killed blogging.  True enough.  Many things which I used to post here I now post there - and they disappear completely in a few days.  If I link Mixed Meters posts to my Facebook page they might get a few extra comments on Facebook.  FB, however, doesn't increase the traffic here much.

Incomprehensibly Google tells me that Mixed Meters keeps getting hits anyway.  Google, as you know, owns Blogger and competes with Facebook.  They provide me with this fine web forum for free.  Thanks, Goog.

What's more, they've been keeping track of my hit totals since 2010.  Last month MM registered the highest monthly hit total in that entire time, double the amount from the previous August.  Why?  I have absolutely no clue.  Certainly not because of all the great articles I've been posting.

In 2008 I joined something called Google Adsense, where the Goog posts ads on my blog which they think will interest you, my dear readers.  Every time you click their ad a small sum of money is paid to an account in my name.  Over 6 or more years I had gotten over $25 in credits.  Hey, don't laugh.  It's the biggest revenue stream in Mixed Meters entire history.

The trick - and there's always a trick - is that in order to get paid in actual currency, my earnings would have to reach $100.  And that would take, give or take a long time, another 24 years or so.

Recently I learned that this is not the incredibly sweet deal I thought it was.  Google Adsense, for all its largesse, does have a few rules.  And one of those rules is 'family friendly'.

Last February (the February in 2016) an email arrived calling my attention to one particular page http://mixedmeters.com/2007_09_01_archive.html - an archive of all seven posts I made in September of 2007.  Their complaint was pretty non-specific considering the variety of subjects I addressed that month.

Google ads may not be placed on pages with adult or any kinds of non family-safe content. This includes, but is not limited to, pages with images or videos containing:

• Strategically covered nudity
• Sheer or see-through clothing
• Lewd or provocative poses
• Close-ups of breasts, buttocks, or crotches

Were they complaining about my piece of music named after my dog's genitals?  Maybe.  Maybe they didn't like this picture of a topless Hawaiian goddess:

Or this historical, usually strategically blurred, photo (from my article comparing judicial punishments for Abu Gharib prison and Nazi death camp officers):

Or this musically relevant photo of nude people doing couples yoga on a Paul Horn concert poster which I had found in Leslie's papers:

I'll never know exactly which post that month triggered the warning, only that it took 8 and a half years for me to get the news.  I opted to ignore the notice.

Then in June another warning, this time for a specific post from an even earlier date: http://mixedmeters.com/2006/12/what-you-cant-call-artificial-penis-in.html    This time their complaint was more specific:

Google ads may not be placed on adult or mature content. This includes fetish content as well as sites that promote, sell or discuss sexual aids. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• sexual fixations or practices that may be considered unconventional
• sexual aids or enhancement tools such as vibrators, dildos, lubes, sex games, inflatable toys
• penis and breast enlargement tools

So Google objected to my discussion of the legality of saying the word dildo in Texas.  I was inspired by this video clip from a film called The Dildo Diaries. Watch for a good laugh at the Texas legislature's expense.  It features Molly Ivins, a political reporter who had a knack for finding humor in narrow-minded politics.

These days, 10 years later, I have no clue whether it's still illegal to say the word "dildo" in a Texas sex shop, though, apparently,  at least parts of this particular law have been declared unconstitutional.  I do know that Molly Ivins, then the reigning champion at exposing Texas hypocrisy, has since died.  I hope someone is carrying on her work because it's a sure bet that Texas politics are still jaw-droppingly crazy.

Anyway, after the second notice I decided to make Google happy and remove the ad from Mixed Meters.  It represented my blog's only source of income.  Now it's gone.

Had I kept the ad, sometime around the year 2040 — when I'll be nearly ninety years old — if Mixed Meters still exists then — if the Internet still exists then — if I'm even capable of writing blather then — I might have earned $100 from Google as payment for my 35 or so years of blog writing.  That would have been a sweet moment of validation.   And I'm giving it up to preserve my right to write about dildos if I want to.

Hey, that's the Mixed Meters blog news for another year.  Thanks for reading.

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The subject of penises used to come up a lot on this blog to the point that I created a "penis" label.  Click here to see all my blog posts marked "penis".  Google Adsense would have been shocked by that.

Read more Crankshaft.
Buy stuff that says No One Cares About Your Stupid Blog.
Buy the complete Dildo Diaries.
On my original dildo post you can still watch the Dildo Song video and the links to OhMyBod and The Phallic Logo awards remain active.

The Meaning of a Clarinet

Here's a movie poster I snapped today at a bus stop.  (View a high-res photo.)  Can you guess why it interests me?

Mind you, I'm not planning to see this movie.  To be honest, I'm not planning on seeing any upcoming movies, even the Star Wars reboot.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are great comedians but this poster is not particularly funny.  It contains a collection of clues to their movie characters, carefully selected to separate us from our theater admission money.

Two grown women are taking a bubble bath together, presumably in the nude.  Strewn about are a series of artifacts from their lives.  Apparently the plot line revolves around selling the home where they grew up.  Am I interested in the bottle of wine?  The plastic Big Lots bag?  The pink bra?

The answer is . . . The Clarinet . . . that musical instrument I used to play.

You don't see ads with clarinets in them much any more.  Well, never.  This one must be there for a reason.  What exactly is this clarinet telling us about the movie character Maura as played by Amy Poehler?

First of all, clarinets aren't usually stuck in boxes quite that way.  That's a really bad way to store a clarinet.  You can also see the clarinet case peeking out of the box, behind a thick book.  So, this clarinet is not well cared for.  We can guess that Maura played in high school band for a while, then gave it up through a combination of lack of interest and lack of talent.  I'm guessing she does not much care for her old clarinet.  Or for any clarinet.

Lots of high school kids try playing the clarinet.  Marching bands need lots of clarinetists.  I wonder how many of them think back on the experience with any sort of fondness.  Probably very few.  In America, a lot of clarinets end up gathering dust in closets.  Still, for this movie, it was important enough to be included in a box marked "Maura's Special Memories".  Maybe she aspired to be a great clarinetist -- a sure way of becoming an unhappy adult.   I'd have to see the movie to find out if the clarinet really is important to the plot.  I'm not that interested.

Could the licorice stick be a kind of phallic reference?  After all, clarinets are longer than they are wide.  I found another picture of a scantily clad woman with clarinet, a magazine cover from 1937.  The clarinet was actually an important instrument in pop music then.  And this picture also shows a brassiere.  I wouldn't want to over-interpret this, but the girl certainly has a provocative way of holding her instrument.  The clarinet was sexy then.  Now, not so much.  (Her purple shadow however is the weirdest part of this painting - kind of like a jellyfish.)

Another idea might be that the clarinet in the movie poster is like countless bags of movie groceries
with a long French bread sticking out of them.  Just one item tells you immediately what is in the bag.  Here's actress Anne Hathaway carrying such a bag in real life.  It doesn't take much imagination or even a line of dialog to guess where she's been or what else she has in that bag.

In just the same way, a clarinet sticking out of a box, even if it weren't marked "Special Memories", quickly tells us that the box is filled with old, unfulfilled childhood dreams.  On the other side of the tub, Tina Fey's box is marked "Kate's Shit".  (Of course in America you can only show the "sh" and not the "it".)   Can you imagine what kind of shit we are supposed to be reminded of by that box?

And what have we learned about the semiotics of clarinets in popular advertising?  Has the clarinet become the go-to icon of abandoned, forgotten childhood fantasies and aspirations?  The advertising industry doesn't have much use for it otherwise.  Actually, you never see clarinets in advertising at all, so they must not have any use for it.

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Here's a movie poster from a movie called Solo für Klarinette.  I suspect the instrument here is actually phallic and not musical.  Go ahead, read the plot description.

Here's a woman who actually played the clarinet.  (source)

Here's a Mixed Meters post about women in ads with tubas.

Some other MM clarinet posts:
What To Do With a Clarinet
Worst Clarinet Playing Ever

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

Banksy Speaks

Banksy is the name of an anonymous artist.  At this moment this little essay about advertising, attributed to him and probably from his book Wall and Piece, gets 4500 hits on Google.  I found it here first.

His point of view will not make capitalists happy - and I think that is a good thing.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

- Banksy

These images come from Banksy's website.  (I'd like to have this one on my office wall, especially if turning the handle actually produced some sort of liquid.)

Here's another Banksy quote:

We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

Banksy, Wall and Piece  

And another:

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time. 

Banksy

Lots more quotes here and here.
Banksy appeared tangentially in Mixed Meters once before, here.

Can't resist.  One more quote:

One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.― Banksy

Banksy Tags: Banksy. . . copyright. . . advertising

Music for a Horned Helmet

Recently I was surprised to hear operatic singing from a television commercial.  There was even a bass voice. You never hear basses sing on television. The ad was for a big financial firm which has figured out how to make money from people who can't wait to be paid. On YouTube I discovered three such opera-mercials - all with the same music but different voices.

The first commercial spoofs an actual opera on stage:

The second focuses on the uses of cash now - like home repair, car repair, newborn quintuplets:

And the third is everyone's favorite setting for opera music - a city bus:

Watching all three of these, I was struck by the recurring use of one particular image: the horned helmet - sometimes called a Viking Helmet. I guess nothing says "Opera" like a metal hat with horns on it.

If you really care whether the Vikings wore Viking helmets and how this particular headgear got to be associated with opera, this Straight Dope article Did Vikings Really Wear Horns On Their Helmets? is for you.

If you think there might be a better music/horned-helmet association, you'd be correct. Here's a picture of Moondog:

The Moondog picture came from here - where you'll find a link to some radio interviews on WBAI.  For a while - a few years ago - certain of Moondog's compositions were being used in automobile advertisements.  (Couldn't find those on YouTube.)

Do yourself a favor. Listen to some Moondog.

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Previous MM posts about classical music in television commercials:
Selling With Vivaldi "These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit."

Advertising with Disney Hall  "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming  "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway  "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"

Horned Tags: horned helmet. . . Viking helmet. . . opera. . . J G Wentworth. . . Moondog

Selling with Vivaldi

(If you have time to watch only one of these videos, definitely watch the last one, Beer Vivaldi.)

In the museum-like world of classical music one of the most revered and oft-displayed masterworks is a set of violin concertos, The Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi.  These pieces easily evoke meteorological images in the minds of listeners who, after all, have come to believe that music is really just like a movie - but without anything to watch.

But these pieces are among the very few which have a life as part of contemporary pop culture.  They aren't as well known as the Ode to Joy or the Ride of the Valkyries.  One doesn't have to look too hard to hear them in unexpected places - for example, as a soundtrack to a television commercial.

This short advertisement, running currently on television, shows a fearless stunt every-man jumping out of his luxury car onto an auto carrier, in hopes of acquiring an even better luxury car. The exciting derring-do music is the end of the first movment of Vivaldi's Winter. Perfect images for baroque music, don't you think?

Lest you think Vivaldi can only be used to sell automobiles, here's an ad for Hewlett Packard computers. The music is from Vivaldi's Summer and the guy waving his hands, creating fantastical images in mid-air, is none other than Joshua Bell, a violinist most famous perhaps for his performances in the Washington Metro. If he really could make visuals like these, live on stage just by waving his hands, Bell could probably become a really big star.

Lest you think that Vivaldi can only be used to sell autos and computers, here's another ad, with the very same Joshua Bell performing the same movement from the same Vivaldi concerto. The only difference is that in this one he is selling perfume, not that you can tell until the very end.  Listen for the horrible cut in the music, just before the voice over.

Lest you think that Vivaldi's Four Seasons can only be used to sell high cost, high tech or high prestige items, here's an example of it being used for a different type of product. We see a scruffy college student amidst piles of forbidding obscure tomes, apparently translating an oriental language. In his notebook he writes "The divine truth one must find lies within." This idea provokes him first to deep thought and then to begin a quest through the stacks of the library. What he finds is ... a package of noodles. (Actually it finds him.) The remainder of the saga involves fancy kitchen prep work - the kind performed nightly by inscrutable Japanese chefs at your local Benihaha.

If you're paying attention, however, this commercial should make you want to buy an Audi. Yes, this noodling music comes from the same Vivaldi movement so perfect for jumping out of your car on a busy freeway.

These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit. Our last example is much more interesting, vastly more creative, much more focused on Vivaldi's music - it's another performance of the same Winter movement which we've heard twice already. Alas, it is also much more forgiving of over consumption - in this case the item being promoted is beer. The image we see is a creative inebriate, an otherwise anonymous person called Pianobloke who must be a big fan of beer, creating pitches on a wide selection of beer in bottles, cans and glasses - the last of which he performs like a glass harmonica. These recorded snippets are assembled into Vivaldi using fancy video editing.

This video is chock full of visual imagery. There's no way to catch everything the first time.  Go to YouTube and watch in high definition if you can.  Notice that the first note is performed on a bottle of Duff, the beer of the Simpsons. After the music finishes each bottle of beer gets a cameo shot. Then our hero passes out. Congratulations, Pianobloke, a job well done.  If you can turn out something like that I guess you weren't really that drunk. Why would you want us to think you were?

Other Mixed Meters pieces discussing classical music in advertising:
Advertising with Disney Hall  "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."

In Which David Is Confused by The Second Coming  "Does this, I wonder, sell shoes or religion?"

Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway  "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"



Violin Concerto Tags: Antonio Vivaldi. . . The Four Seasons. . . television advertising. . . beer. . . capitalist realism. . . Joshua Bell

The Future From A Car Commercial

Last night I came across the nine-minute 1956 movie Design for Dreaming.  This particular bit of Fifties Futurism is a big-budget General Motors industrial musical - an almost-modern ballet with lots of costume changes danced to almost-modern music with sung rhymed couplets.

Girls don't go to motoramas, 

dressed in a pair of pink pajamas!

The Cars of the Future are the real stars, of course.  The movie ends with the "fabulous turbine-powered Firebird 2" which is "designed for the electronic highway of the future."

Firebird 2 to the control tower.

We are about to take off on the Highway of Tomorrow.
Stand by.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. 

Our dreams will come true.

Together, together.

We'll make the world new.

The Kitchen of the Future from Frigidaire, a subsidiary of GM, also makes an appearance.  That's where the lady of the house will bake a cake, decorate it and even put candles on top, all quite unattended.  The kitchen does this inside of some sort of glass dome and then phones her when the cake is ready.

Aside from any marketing or corporate branding aspects, this movie struck me as a great example of how we saw the future during the fifties.  And the future was good, all filled with gleaming chrome.  Here, watch the future for yourself:

I immediately associated this advertisement with a current one for a different automobile with a different view about the future, a much darker outlook.  Elaborate music, dance and poetry, gleaming chrome, formal costumes are all missing. Instead we have a car in a dark tunnel accompanied by a sober, threatening male voice listing the evils of the future as predicted by competing automobiles.

Here's his text. It's kind of free verse:

Hands-free driving.

Cars that park themselves.

An unmanned car

Driven by a search engine company.

We've seen that movie.

It ends with robots

Harvesting our bodiess for energy.

(motor sounds)

This is the all new 2011 Dodge Charger.

Leader of the human resistance.

Apparently, in 2011, Fear of the Future can sell cars.  As cars become more and more computerized it looks like the "electronic highway of the future" from Design for Dreaming might just happen.  But if that future is frightening, you can forestall it by purchasing a noisy, muscle car - one that wouldn't have looked or sounded out of place on the highways of the nineteen fifties.

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The tunnel in this (and many other) television commercials is Second Street in downtown Los Angeles.  Here's a shot from the end of the commercial showing the car driving out of the tunnel.  I've added the same shot from Google Street View.  Google, of course, is the search engine company developing a "self-driving" car.  In spite of what the Dodge ad says, the Google car isn't yet "unmanned".

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Here's an ad from the August 1964 Readers Digest (page 200). I xeroxed this myself sometime after the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979 and saved it ever since because it touts cheap electricity from atomic power.  The picture shows a well-manicured woman holding the household control device of the future and therefore it fits into this post quite well.

She's monitoring her baby in the crib via the "Video Scan".  The other rotary knobs are marked "R/C Clean", "Lawn Care", "Disposal", "Floor Care", "Food Prep."  (Click the picture for enlargement.)

 

 Here's the text in a format Mrs. Google's robot can read.

easy does it

someday you may be able to run your all-electric home by fingertip control

Whatever electrical wonders come your way in the future, there'll be plenty of low-priced electricity to help you enjoy them.

America's more than 300 investor-owned electric light and power companies are seeing to that right now.  For example, they are investing about a billion dollars to develop atomic power as another source of cheap electricity.

And they have more than 1800 other research and development projects in progress or recently completed.  All are pointed toward keeping you and all Americans amply supplied with dependable, low-priced electric service, now and in the wonderful new world of your electric future.

Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies

People you can depend on to power America's porgress

Sponsors' names on request through this magazine.

Here's a collection of articles about how the 50s viewed the future, from a blog called Paleofuture.

Fifties Tags: Design for Dreaming. . . motoramas. . . Dodge Charger. . . the future. . . household automation

Andy Warhol's Essential Elements of Gracious Living

Fine music:


Fine dining:



Fine art:



All items found here.

Here's the text of the first picture:

Andy Warhol doesn't play second base for the Chicago Cubs.

He doesn't even know who does. But he's a man of many talents and interests - art, music, movies, literature - in fact, everything that's exciting in the world around us today.

You know him for his Campbell's soup can ... camp ... the Velvet Underground ... Heat ... Lou Reed. He knows which high fidelity system does the best job in the world of perfect sound reproduction. That's why Andy owns Pioneer.

Philip Glass enjoys a Cutty Sark

Andy Tags: Andy Warhol. . . Burger King. . . Cash for your Warhol. . . Pioneer Stereo

Wagner with an asterisk

I expect this will be my last Wagner(*)-LA Opera-Ring Festival related post. That's because Supervisor Antonovich's now failed resolution is, most likely, the high-water mark of the anti-Ring Festival movement. The Gettysburg of anti-Wagnerism in Southern California. Another failed rebellion. Mike A.'s totally impractical suggestions lost by a vote of 3 to 1. I'm pretty sure it would have been 4 to 1 if all five Supes had shown up.

I have one final suggestion for the opera company on how they can allay the fears and complaints of people like me, the unwashed non-fanatical normal people who don't care for opera, can't afford to buy tickets, wouldn't have the patience to sit through a whole performance if they were given tickets for free and who number well over 99% of LA County's population. (My calculation for that made-up statistic is in a footnote here.)

My suggestion is simple. It will cost nothing. It will reach everyone who ever sees Ring Festival advertising, promotion or propaganda. It will be understood by all Americans because it is copied from baseball - which was America's pastime before Nascar. This idea will provoke the unitiated to ask the right questions. It will repeatedly remind the fanatics about the downside of their addiction. Not one program or event need be altered or canceled. Any event, no matter how relevant or tangential to the subject of Richard Wagner, be it academic seminar, hip-hop concert or country western musical, can easily be accommodated. This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring.

And it will get me to shut up.

To see how overwhelmingly simple this idea is, check out my version of the LA Opera Ring poster. My apologies to the company for modifying what is obviously their property. This is, in my opinion, a great graphic - simple and to the point. I took a very small, postage-stamp size Gif from their website, enlarged and sharpened it by hand so the text was kinda readable. I added only one small element. Can you spot it?



Yep, there's a little asterisk (*) after the composer's name. The asterisk means that some special circumstance of which everyone should be aware affects the name to which it is attached.

An asterisk, just like in the baseball record books. Everyone, at least everyone here in the U.S., understands that when some guy breaks the hallowed home-run record by hitting 756 of them in one season but does it by taking performance enhancing steroids, he gets an asterisk in the record books. And he also doesn't get into the Hall of Fame. Here's the LA tie-in.

I propose that the LA Opera should add the asterisk to the name Richard Wagner each and every time it appears in their publicity, program books, public displays -- everything!! Even on Festival letterheads. .

Put the asterisk on the COVER of the programs, on the huge banners hanging in front of the Chandler Pavilion, on the flags hanging from the lightpoles on Grand Avenue. Put the asterisk everywhere that the word "Wagner(*)" appears. Make absolutely certain that it appears on the expensive souvenir tomes that the Ringnuts and Wagnerds will treasure for years and decades to come.

Think of it as changing the name "Richard Wagner" to "Richard Wagner(*)" You can just edit your word-processor spelling dictionary to make the asterisk omnipresent. I think that the asterisk is sufficient. No footnotes are required if the asterisk really is everywhere. Sure, a footnote would be nice. It could read "Richard Wagner's name is forever stained because of its evil use by the German National Socialist party."

If my suggestion is followed every person who comes into contact with the Ring, with the LA Opera and with their Ring Festival will be forced to think about why that asterisk is there. Remember, it's Their Festival not My Festival because, if I had been there, I would not have attended. When the Simple Child asks "Why is that asterisk there?" you can reply "Because Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer."

It's as easy as that.

Of course, like all do-gooder suggestions, this will be ignored. It will be ignored by the Ring fans even if the Opera does add the asterisk exactly as I have suggested.

Come on. Allow me my fantasy. In reality LA Opera will only add asterisks if they are forced to - like the cigarette companies are forced by the government to add a notice about smoking being hazardous to your health. And they'll position them graphically in out of the way places. No smoker really pays attention to those notices - at least not consciously. And no true Wagner fan will see the asterisk. At least not consciously.

We at Mixed Meters like to mix things up. Combining things no one ever expects to see combined is our thing. Along that line, here's a picture of the back of a Brazilian Marlboro pack. This one belonged to our houseguest, Joao. He's a worm-guy from Sao Paulo.


I assume everyone, anyone will get the connection of this picture to my suggestion about the Wagner asterisk. The asterisk is a very simple, subtle idea not in your, er, face like this cigarette ad. Both are warnings that certain actions can have bad results.

The asterisk would show us that the LA Opera has a real understanding of the opposing point of view. Sadly, Supervisor Antonovich has shown that no one can force them to change their plans. And they won't do it just to prove how nice they are.

Or will they?


Want to read more of my blather?

Worm-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here and here.

Wagner-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here, and here.

Opera-related posts on Mixed Meters: here, here, here and here. (A couple of these have to do with both Sex and Opera!)


Ring Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . LA Opera. . . Mike Antonovich. . . Richard Wagner

Che's Brand

I read this review of Michael Casey's book Che's Afterlife, the Legacy of an Image. Here's the image in question. It shows revolutionary leader Che Guevara. This is apparently the most reproduced picture in history:


I decided to read the whole book because of a bit of fluffy advertising copy quoted in the review. It's for an Australian ice cream flavor called Cherry Guevara:

The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!

Silly! But together with a picture of a violent long-dead Communist these words apparently have the power to sell sweet frozen dairy fat to hungry Aussies. Maybe that's because this picture is an icon, an icon that can be called to the service of either socialism or capitalism.



This picture has been used on bottles of beer, condoms, bikinis, bubble bath and countless t-shirts. It has been part of Smirnoff vodka ads and fake Andy Warhol prints (which Andy claimed to be his own work anyway). The picture has been used by leftist politicians in Latin America and right-wing religious fundamentalists in the Middle East. In parts of Miami this is a picture of the devil himself.

Here's the original photo as taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda in 1960.

The facts of Guevara's life provide only a starting point for explaining the picture. After becoming famous in the Cuban revolution Che pretty much bounced from job to job failing to make good as a bank president, a prison commander or a guerrilla revolutionary. He tried the last gig both in Africa and South America finally getting martyred for his trouble. Today, in parts of Bolivia, he is known as "San Ernesto"

Casey quotes Jorge Castaneda:

If ever there was an illustration of the anguish evoked in sensitive and reasonable, but far from exceptional, individuals, at being affluent and comfortable islands in a sea of destitution, it was Guevara. He will endure as a symbol, not of revolution or guerrilla warfare, but of the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of indifference.

Che's Afterlife shows how the picture has avoided contradicting itself into meaninglessness. Explaining what it does mean is no easy task.

Casey writes:

We have invested so many competing ideas and meanings into the concept "Che Guevara" that we can't collectively conceive of what it actually represents with anything near homogeneity

Later he seems to contradict himself:

It functions as the universal symbol for the act of following one's convictions.

Until Cuba joined the international agreement on copyrights the image was public domain. Now Che himself is licensed commercially just like Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein or any living or dead celebrity.



Branding is a trendy buzzword right now. People are trying to apply this marketing concept everywhere and anywhere they can. Che's Afterlife wastes no effort discussing brand concepts.

Che Guevara has become a brand and Korda's picture is its logo. Nike is a brand with a swoosh as logo; McDonalds has golden arches. The guardians of these brands - Korda's and Che's descendants together with the Cuban government on one hand, corporate executives on the other - try to preserve its value and focus its meaning by controlling where their brand appears. They decide which contexts, products or events should be associated with their brand and which should not.

Here's a picture of Che Guevara bubble bath.


The very pose of Che in the Korda photograph - a somber man, looking slightly up and off into the distance, imagining a better future (or maybe dreaming of a soak in the tub) - is reminiscent of an important graphic from recent U.S. politics, Shepard Fairey's Hope poster. Here it is slightly modified.


With the recent change in the U.S. government many people are hoping for a change in the brand image of United States of America. There's no doubt that intelligent, thoughtful pedantic people are bending Barack Obama's ears with suggestions on how to portray America now that the dark ages are ending. You can read some suggestions for Re-Branding America here. This picture comes from that page.


I found the Obama-Guevara-Obama t-shirt picture and the Hasta la Victoria Siempre picture (the neon Che) at This Isn't Happiness.

The photo of the Cherry Guevara ice cream wrapper (and many other Che-ish graphics) can be seen here.

A Wikipedia entry which documents Che Guevara in Popular Culture

The Che beer picture came from here. The Che bubble bath picture came from here.

Here's a documentary about the life of Che Guevara.

Che Tags: Che Guevara. . . Alberto Korda. . . Guerrillero Heroico. . . branding. . . advertising. . . Che's Afterlife. . . Michael Casey

Queen of the Night lubricant

Classical music sells product - in this case the Queen of the Night aria by Mozart and a feminine lubricant.



Read an article by Tom Serivce in The Guardian here. I found it via Arts Journal. This ad will appear on US television after hell freezes over, which is to say - never. This group posted the video online.

For a video of a young boy singing the same music very well, go to the MM post Prince of the Night

Other MM posts about classical music selling stuff on television are here (Mozart's Requiem sells shoes) and here (Dies Irae sells shoes).


Lubricant Tags: Mozart. . . Queen of the Night. . . Durex

Mayor Resigns; Will Move to Italy to pursue opera career

This is an advertisement from today's LA Times, page A11, whose red ink is elsewhere in the news today. This ad is part of a series on successive pages each marred by a splotch of differently colored paint. Each is related to something Italian: ruins, scooters and opera.

Can you guess what is being sold to you? It has "uninhibited flavor".


Click the picture to enlarge it. Then you can read the small print to at least find out who is selling something to you. The secret is revealed on the next page of the paper. My local branch doesn't seem to be participating in this product roll-out in favor of a different new product.

Here's another MM post featuring a musically themed beverage advertisement.

Here's another article about the Times' red ink. It has this quote:

The decline in advertising, fueled by a weak real estate market, has boosted the copy-to-ads ratio above the industry target of 50-50, giving readers more stories than they can digest

Opera Tags: Starbucks. . . opera singer. . . mayor resigns. . . LA Times. . . staff cutbacks

Sousaphones on the Beach in Art and Advertising

In March, 2006, a Mixed Meters post entitled On the Religion of the Past and the Future included this picture from a perfume ad, a scratch'n-sniff insert from our Sunday paper. The picture shows a beautiful skinny topless woman in bright red pants sitting on a stool on a beautiful white sand beach as waves played about her feet. Unremarkable except that she is wrapped in a sousaphone.

The text reads:

LIFE IS HOW YOU CHANGE IT - 360°
Perry Ellis Fragrance - Robinson's/May

Maybe she's a member of an all girl topless marching band and synchronized swim team.

Here's another magazine ad from Playboy, September 1964. We see a different beautiful skinny model, not topless but wearing a skimpy bikini, while sitting side saddle on the back of a red Honda scooter. She too is wearing a sousaphone. Maybe she's on the way to a gig at the beach and the guy in the suit is the band director.


(Click any picture for an enlargement. The text of this ad is included at the end of this post so Google's bots can enjoy it too.)

The similarity of elements in these two pictures - pretty girl, sousaphone, references to the beach plus a bright red visual accent - are probably just a coincidence.

Here are two other pictures of art, one created with a sousaphones the other with a tuba (which is a sousaphone twisted differently.)

I took the first one at an art gallery in Carmel California which overlooks the Pacific. Another beach reference. The second one was sent to me by I don't remember who. I do seem to remember that it is from the garden of a local tubist - but again I don't remember who. It's not on the beach but there's plenty of water.




The Honda ad:

Some tootin'

She likes to blow her own horn.

And she's got the displacement for it, too: 90cc compression ratio 8:1. And hits 6.5 hp at 8000 rpm.

There's a lot of lungpower for a lightweight.

What's more, she tops 55 mph without pressing. Delivers 165 miles to a gallon of gas. She's a four-stroker, OHV aircooled, of course, with a 4-speed foot shift. Never fails to meet you more than halfway.

Look for the new Honda 90. Always hits the right note.

For address of your nearest dealer or other information, write: American Honda Motor Co., Inc., Dept. CX, 100 West Alondra, Gardena, California.

HONDA world's biggest seller!

Here and here and here and here are links to a few women who play the tuba. I wonder what they think of the sousaphone/beach-bunny ads.

Read about the video game Sousaphone Hero

Tuba Tags: Tuba. . . sousaphone. . . Honda scooter. . . Perry Ellis 360°. . . women tubists

Tower Records Aftermath

About a year ago the music world was abuzz with bloggers bragging of the bargains they had brought home from Tower Records. The chain was closing down forever, an early victim of the continuing collapse of the record industry. I don't miss Tower Records in the slightest.


But I did enjoy picking through the remains at the various levels of discount, a kind of musical near necropsy. Apparently I needed more clutter. I still have albums from the final 90% off frenzy which I haven't opened yet.

Today we visited the site of Tower Records Pasadena which is now the home of a mattress superstore: Sit 'n Sleep. Here's a panormaic view of what that space looks like now:


Click for an enlargement. If anyone wants to submit a picture showing what socially useful purpose has been found for their local Tower location I'll be happy to add it to this post.

Sit and Sleep is advertised on television almost continually by Larry Miller, its owner and pitchman, announcing in an annoying sprechstimme that "We'll beat any advertised price or your mattress is free." thus proving that we Americans are, as a group, not very good at logic.

I asked the saleswoman if they'd ever given a mattress away for free, knowing full well that they hadn't. She had her response down pat segueing easily into stories of what a great boss Larry is and how the illogical catchphrase had made the company into a huge success. They probably teach all that on the first day at Sit 'n Sleep University.

She also said lots of really disappointed people have been showing up at the store looking for Tower Records. Those must be the customers who only bought albums once every few years. There's still a large yellow and red Tower sign visible from the parking lot.

Here's a picture of Larry and his accountant Irwin as bobbleheads. Why would I expect logic from a bobblehead. The saleswoman wondered what the Chinese factory workers who make these things think of them. They cost $16 each, about the same as a compact disc. I didn't buy one, but I thought about it. Even a lousy compact disc that I only listen to just once would be better value for my entertainment dollars.




Read about Tower Records here.

Tower 'n Sleep Tags: Tower Records. . . Sit 'n Sleep. . . bobblehead dolls. . . CD sales. . . mattress