Post-rational Jingle Bells

Humans need holidays. Otherwise our lives would get just too bleak.

And what could be more bleak than the winter solstice in the northern latitudes?

Consider the facts . . .

• There's not nearly enough sunlight.
• It's cold cold cold every day.
• Snow everywhere.
• Spring will never come.

How did those pre-Europeans cope with such adversity?  They decided to kick back near a fire to overeat and overdrink.  Maybe sing some cheery songs.  After they'd done that for a couple years - or a couple of centuries - they had themselves a solstice holiday.

Of course, the nature of this particular holy day has changed over time.  Pagan holiday became Christian holiday became Capitalist holiday.  Whatever.  It's a holiday no matter what your religion.  And it comes just when you need it most, during the dark time.  Go ahead.  Turn on all the lights.  Drink too much.  Give useless gifts.

This year - given our recent presidential election - a lot of people (including myself) really need a good holiday.  Current events have stopped making sense for us.  And there's no expectation that the news will be getting better in the future.  It's going to be an awfully long time before America's political winter is over.

I've dubbed this the "post-rational" period of history - everything seems beyond reason.

And when life makes no sense, you need holiday music that makes no sense.

That's why I'm offering you my piece called Post-rational Jingle Bells.  It's just another installment of my yearly series of incomprehensible Jingle Bells arrangements, a Mixed Meters holiday tradition since 2006. 

Click here to hear Post-rational Jingle Bells by David Ocker - © 2016 David Ocker - 322 seconds

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Curious about the picture?  Here are a couple Mixed Meters posts on the subject of bio-geography:
Stalking the Christmas Penguin
Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2
Christmas Zoology

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You may be surprised to learn that one or two other musicians, besides myself, have dealt with the Jingle Bells Question.  Here's a version narrated by the composer Juan Garcia Esquivel directly from his Space Age Bachelor Pad.  I particularly like the line "There is a lovely view of Venus tonight."

Here's a Mongolian folk ensemble playing the tune.  It looks genuinely cold where they are. Watch for a guy with a rifle.

Finally, to hammer home the post-rational aspect, here is a Walmart commercial.

Towel Day

Today is Towel Day.   As literary holidays go celebrating the works of author Douglas Adams isn't quite yet in the league of Bloomsday.  That's because Joyce had a head start.

I'm not dorky enough to actually carry a towel in public on Towel Day.  Instead I will mark the occasion by posting some quotes from the later books of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  I marked these the last time I read through the canon.

Many of Adams' quotes are well known.  What other author can claim to have invented a whole new meaning for a single number?  (You know which one I mean.)   Some of his quotes have become life principles for me.  For example

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." 

pretty much defines my attitude towards national politics these days.

The following quotes may not always be his greatest or most universal.  Instead, these are the ones that jumped out at me because of who I am, because I'm a musician, because I live in Los Angeles or just because I thought they were wry or twisted or funny.  Or some other reason.

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From Life, The Universe and Everything (book three of the trilogy)

Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.  (Chapter 10)

He had been planning to learn to play the octaventral heebiephone, a pleasantly futile task, he knew, because he had the wrong number of mouths.  (Chapter 14)

He had returned to his own ship, the Bistromath, had a furious row with the waiter and disappeared off into an entirely subjective idea of what space was.  (Chapter 32)

In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move.  (Chapter 34)

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from So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish  (book four of the trilogy)

They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold.  (Chapter 9, referring to Californians.)

Being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth.  (Chapter 15, a description of Los Angeles)

They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped immediately at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the spectacle.  As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through what this particularly dramatic sea of light was illuminating they didn't think much of it.  (Chapter 30, describing the San Fernando Valley)

Their mood gradually lifted as they walked along the beach in Malibu and watched all the millionaires in their chic shanty huts carefully keeping an eye on one another to check how rich they were getting. (Chapter 30)

They were suddenly feeling astonishingly and irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously.  So what, they were both playing good rock and roll.  (Chapter 30)

But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child.  If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not.  See first, think later, then test.  But always see first.  Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.  Most scientists forget that.  (Chapter 31)

If we find something we can't understand we like to call it something you can't understand.  (Chapter 31)

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from Mostly Harmless (book five of the trilogy)

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.  (Chapter 2)

When it's fall in New York, the air smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building. (Chapter 2)

Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.  (Chapter 8)

Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.  (Chapter 8)

Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. (Chapter 9)

"Oh, all right," said the old man.  "Here's a prayer for you.  Got a pencil?"
"Yes," said Arthur.
"It goes like this.  Let's see now: 'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know.  Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know.  Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about.  Amen.'  That's it.  It what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open."
"Hmmm," said Arthur.  "Well, thank you-"
"There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important," continued the old man, "so you'd better jot this down, too."
"Okay."
"It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord . . . ' It's best to put that bit in, just in case.  You can never be too sure.  'Lord, lord, lord.  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.' And that's it.  Most of the trouble people people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part."  (Chapter 9)

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.  (Chapter 12)

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place. (Chapter 17)

Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.  (Chapter 19)

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Other Mixed Meters' name checks of Douglas Adams can be found in these posts:

Floating Rocks ("What keeps it there?"  "Art.")

Unqualified for President (contains the full quote referred to above about being president)

In which a Docker Award goes to Oolong Colluphid (the 8th MM post ever)

Floor Shows (specifically the Shoe Event Horizon)

Making the Scene with the New Classic L.A. Blog   (expanding the body-fat-into-gold quote)

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

Bubala Please explains Hanukkah

The Hanukkah holiday is here. Hooray. I guess. Although this is one celebration which leaves me with some doubts:

• Without any children to mollify who needs a substitute Christmas?
• Is it really a good idea to celebrate religious wars?  Even ancient ones?
• When it comes to the solstice lights, shouldn't the first thing we honor be the invention of electric lights? 

Did you say Hanukkah Grinch?  Yes, that would be me.

Here's a picture of some special pasta sold to help celebrate Hanukkah by (who else?) Bed Bath and Beyond.

At least they weren't selling matzoh.

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I did enjoy reading a very even-handed appraisal of Hanukkah by Hilary Leila Krieger in the New York Times.  Here are her last few paragraphs:

While elevating Hanukkah does a lot of good for children’s morale, ignoring or sanitizing its historical basis does a great disservice to the Jewish past and present.

The original miracle of Hanukkah was that a committed band of people led a successful uprising against a much larger force, paving the way for Jewish independence and perhaps keeping Judaism itself from disappearing. It’s an amazing story, resonant with America’s own founding, that offers powerful lessons about standing up for one’s convictions and challenging those in power.

Many believe the rabbis in the Talmud recounted the miracle of the light alongside the military victory because they did not want to glorify war. That in itself is an important teaching, as are the holiday’s related messages of renewal, hope and turning away from darkness.

But it’s a story with dark chapters as well, including the Maccabean leaders’ religious zealotry, forced conversions and deadly attacks on their neighbors. These transgressions need to be grappled with. And that is precisely what the most important Jewish holidays do: Jews on Passover spill out wine from their glasses to acknowledge Egyptian suffering caused by the 10 plagues, and congregations at Rosh Hashana read and struggle with God’s order to Abraham to bind his son Isaac as a sacrifice.

If we’re going to magnify Hanukkah, we should do so because it offers the deeper meaning and opportunity for introspection that the major Jewish holidays provide.

Sadly, thinking like that just doesn't stand a chance against "eight nights of presents"!

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This Hanukkah will be most memorable for me because of these two YouTube videos from Bubbala Please.

Our guides to celebrating the Festival of Lights are two gangsters, one Black, the other Latino (their names are Jaquann and Luis, played by Marcus Wayne and Rick Mancia).  In the first video they explain how to make latkes and then they show the proper way of decorating a Hanukkah bush.

Enjoy!  This is the sort of cross-cultural mash-up which makes America great!

But Be Warned - these videos are NSFW.  They contain many words that are definitely not derived from Hebrew or Yiddish.  Words like Motherfucker and Puto.  If you can handle those you're about to have a good laugh.  Even if you're another Hanukkah Grinch.

"Happy Hanukkah, Bitches"

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Here's a previous Mixed Meters post with Hanukkah pictures taken at Bed Bath and Beyond.  (That year it was Hanukkah bears.)

A previous Mixed Meters post with a picture of Hanukkah matzoh.

Here's a previous Mixed Meters post about the word Fuck.

Menorah Tags: hanukkah. . . Bubala Please. . . Hanukkah grinch. . . fuck

September Eleventh

The fire fighters who died rushing into the burning towers trying to save the lives of other people will surely define the word heroism for a long time to come.

The other victims, both in New York and Washington, were killed doing what most of us Americans do everyday - they were going about their regular lives, mostly at their jobs. In that sense they were no different than any of the rest of us. An attack on one was an attack on all.

I cannot comprehend the horror of such an experience. I can only offer feeble condolences to the survivors and to the families and friends of those who died. Such offerings must seem very inadequate after the millionth repetition.

The September 11 attacks have been compared to Pearl Harbor.  Ten years after Pearl Harbor, however, World War II had been over 6 years and America had moved on to a different fight (with global Communism).  Pearl Harbor had become old news since that attack had been paid back in full.  Today, ten years after 9/11, there is no sense of closure.  We seem incapable of finding a way to reduce the fear of terrorism.  The media is overflowing with every possible angle.  People are still trying to figure this out.

Another thing I cannot comprehend is what would lead an ostensibly intelligent adult into becoming a suicide bomber. What manner of dark faith motivates such behavior?

I do regret some of the decisions made by the United States in reaction to the attacks.  Foremost among these, of course, is the invasion of Iraq.  Many of our country's worst moves were a result of the dark faith of our own leaders, people like Dick Cheney.  A clear-headed United States should have recognized their lies.  Courageous people, like Michael Moore, who spoke against those bad choices at the time were accused of treason and threatened with violence. 

Of course once it became clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq, we needed new excuses.  Popular ones were "promoting democracy" and "nation building".  No one seems to talk much about fighting for God or controlling their oil reserves.

As a U.S. citizen, voter and taxpayer I regrettably must accept my share of responsibility for the bad decisions of my government.  One three-hundred-and-twelve-millionth of the total, if the blame is to be parceled out equally - although in truth, some people are far more culpable than I.

And I must face the sad prospect that I will never see a solution to this conflict.  The September eleventh attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did not start our war between cultures, between religions, between haves and have nots.  The attacks merely brought the existing conflict to the attention of the United States populace and provided excuses for our leaders to intensify the battles.

Finding an end to the real conflicts - achieving something one might reasonably call "peace" - seems more unlikely to me now, ten years after 9/11, than it ever has.  The sadness of this anniversary goes far beyond the death and destruction caused by four hijacked planes.  This gloom shows every sign of becoming a permanent feature of the American experience.

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I recommend an article entitled The Long War by Tom Hayden.  Here's a couple paragraphs:

But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a pre-existing blindness to the way much of the world sees us. That, in turn, led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — in all, a dozen “shadow wars,” according to The New York Times. In Bob Woodward’s crucial book, “Obama’s Wars,” there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009.

From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of “The Long War,” a counterinsurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting US open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on The Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.

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The pictures came from here and here.

Sneak Attack Tags: 9-11 attacks. . . terrorism. . . endless war

On Labor Day, Think of the Problems of CEOs

In 1894, when the U.S. government decided on a holiday to celebrate working people, they picked a date in September instead of May first, the existing International Workers Day.  They did this to avoid negative associations with the Haymarket massacre which happened at a union rally on May 1, 1886.

Over the years, of course, Labor Day has come to mean the end of summer and the beginning of school.   In the business world it's the best excuse for a retail sale between the Fourth of July and Halloween.

Meanwhile labor union membership has shrunk and unions have (again) been cast as the economic villains in our society.  There's the recent fight in Wisconsin to rescind public worker union's right to bargain collectively.   A few nights ago there was a noose left at the Orange County Labor Federation.  (Someone is trying to send a message.  But, hey, if they don't like unions, let them go to work on Monday.)

So, in the context of Labor Day, I'd like to present links to several recent interesting articles about our Captains of Industry, the chief executive officers of wealthy, powerful corporations.  These people who get paid a king's ransom to not hire people for menial jobs.  In fact, these are the people who most likely celebrate the high level of unemployment in the U.S. because, if they should decide to hire some workers, they can more easily find desperate unemployed people willing to work cheap.

The four articles are:

• Beauty Justifies Wealth
• One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds
• Study: Some US firms paid more to CEOs than taxes
• How Rich is Too Rich? and follow up: How to Lose Readers (Without Even Trying)

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Beauty Justifies Wealth is an article in the Democracy in America blog of The Economist. It is credited only to W.W. (possibly someone named Will Wilkinson).  The subject is Steve Jobs, recently retired CEO of Apple, who has been canonized and beatified for giving the world computerized fetish objects and getting really wealthy doing it.  (He's number 42 on the last Forbes 400 list.)

W.W. writes:

It occurred to me that, as lovely as I find Apple's gizmos, Mr Jobs's wealth, like that of other billionaire barons of the information age, was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress while concentrating massive rewards upon a privileged few, generating unfair and unproductive inequality.

Most technical writers would never say such a thing.  If they did, Apple probably wouldn't send them any neat drool-inducing free products to review.  Here's a tweet which W.W. wrote:

Class-war fact: Ruthlessly competitive, patent-monopolist, multi-billionaire executives are worth fawning over, if they've got design sense.

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One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds is an article in The Guardian.  It details a psychological study which reports that some very successful people can hide their psychopathic behavior.

The survey suggests psychopaths are actually poor managerial performers but are adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they can cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates. This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath.

The study also reports that 1% of all Americans are psychopaths.

Here's a bonus article: Psychologists Explain Why Most Creative Executives Are Arrogant Jerks

Here's the definition of psychopathy from Wikipedia:

Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime. Though lacking empathy and emotional depth, they often manage to pass themselves off as normal people by feigning emotions and lying about their pasts.

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Study: Some US firms paid more to CEOs than taxes is a Reuters story.  Here's the opening:

Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said Wednesday. It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

Remember that this is one out of 4 of highly paid executives.  Only 1 out of 25 is a psychopath.  But it stands to reason that there is at least one CEO in the top 100 who makes more salary than his company pays in taxes and is also a psychopath.

A Democratic representative wants to investigate. He wrote to the Republican chairman of his committee saying he wants  

to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today.

Good luck with that.  The chairman himself is a highly paid corporate executive. Notice that he doesn't want to investigate whether CEO compensation led to our crisis.  That's a given.  He just wonders whether the problem still exists.  (Yes it does.)

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Sam Harris is an author who presents a ray of sanity and reason discussing the subjects of religion and morality.  His article How Rich Is Too Rich wondered whether the vast disparity of wealth in our country would be allowed to continue.  This is the context of Warren Buffet, the world's third richest man, who keeps telling us that he pays less percentage in taxes than his secretary. (And we, collectively, keep ignoring him.)

Sam Harris asks:

How much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China

But the article which actually caught my eye was Harris' follow-up How to Lose Readers (Without Even Trying) in which he described some of the looney, knee-jerk responses that first post got.

In the discussion of whether taxes are theft, or not, Harris writes:

Many of my critics imagine that they have no stake in the well-being of others. How could they possibly benefit from other people getting first-rate educations? How could they be harmed if the next generation is hurled into poverty and despair? Why should anyone care about other people’s children? It amazes me that such questions require answers.

Would Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, rather have $10 billion in a country where the maximum number of people are prepared to do creative work? Or would he rather have $20 billion in a country with the wealth inequality of an African dictatorship and commensurate levels of crime? I’d wager he would pick door number #1. But if he wouldn’t, I maintain that it is only rational and decent for Uncle Sam to pick it for him.

 Let me repeat the last sentence:

But if he wouldn’t, I maintain that it is only rational and decent for Uncle Sam to pick it for him.

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I doubt that the richest people in America, even if they could agree on what should be done, could solve our problems with their money.  I think that a large part of America's problems is their money, the disparity of wealth between richest and poorest.

The twenty richest American's together have about 385.5 billion dollars in wealth  (I quickly added up the figures from the Forbes list.)  Wouldn't it be better for the country to have 385.5 billionaires, each with only a single billion, than to leave all that wealth with twenty people?  (Try a little mental arithmetic to figure out how much One Billion Bucks is.  An awful lot.  Enough to retire on.)

Trust me, these people are never going to give up their money.  They are driven, possibly by dark psychological forces or maybe just by greed, to acquire more and more.  That's why it's my opinion, and a humble opinion because I know how unlikely this is, that the U.S. government should take their money away.  Not all of it.  Leave them a mere billion each, enough to survive with just one yacht and two vacation homes.

The mechanics of this are complex of course - but I'm talking fantasy, not tax code.  Our government really does have the power to redistribute wealth.  After all whoever said “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session” spoke the truth.

Our government won't do anything like this unless the politicians realize that doing it is the only way to get reelected.  In the era of unlimited political money that's never gonna happen.

Sorry to have bothered you with impossible ideas.  Enjoy your day off.  You get a lot less of them in the U.S. than in other rich countries.  Go back to work tomorrow.  Do your job.  Don't complain.

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Other MM rants on similar subjects:

House and Wooster and Income Disparity  (It's not just a saying these days that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".  Today it's more like an actual law.)

Eli Broad, Masterpieces, Money and Monuments (The fact that these valuable objects of art might be culturally meaningful in some non-monetary sense, if indeed they are, doesn't seem terribly important to him.)



Price Tags: wealth disparity. . . income disparity. . . CEO salaries. . . psychopaths. . . taxes

Nineteen Years and a Couple of Months

Today is Memorial Day, in which we remember those who have died in wartime.

I took this picture in South Pasadena. There are plaques for servicemen who died in Vietnam just off Fair Oaks Boulevard in War Memorial Park. Terry Brooks Dyer appeared to be the youngest of a small handful.

This man was less than one year older than I.  He was killed less than one year after he would have graduated high school.   Of course I didn't know him, but seeing this memorial to him made me very sad.   War is followed by lifetimes of might-have-beens.

Someone needs to remind me why we fought in Vietnam.   Would anything today be different if we had won?

Memorial Tags: Memorial Day. . . South Pasadena. . . Terry Brooks Dyer

Ring Festival LA meets Hitler's Birthday

Today, April 20, 2010, would have been the 121st birthday of Adolph Hitler. Usually Los Angeles has no public celebrations of Hitler's birthday. This year we've had two, very different in basic nature but with surprising similarities.


EVENT NUMBER ONE

The first was a march last weekend by the National Socialist Movement, an American neo-Nazi white-supremacist group who marched Saturday in downtown Los Angeles waving swastikas and sieg heiling. The called it their "Reclaim the Southwest" rally. Having received a parade permit from the city, they were separated and protected by the LAPD from the much larger crowd of counter-demonstrators.

Judging by their website (nsm88.org), these people came here from a long distance. They chose LA because we have so many illegal aliens who, back wherever they came from, are taking their jobs. You can just imagine what they think about Jews.

Here's what I read in this article:

According to NSM leaders, the rally was being held to remember the birthday of Adolf Hitler, the former German leader of the Nazi Party. Hitler's actual birthday is not until the 20th of April.

The United States is a free country and every one has the right to say what they think even if it's hateful.  People did not have that same right in Hitler's Germany. Making sure there is strong First Amendment protection for people with nutty, contrary opinions means our protection against developing our own fascist government is also strong.

EVENT NUMBER TWO

It's called Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard and it's part of Ring Festival LA.  Here's a description I found at the website of Villa Aurora, the event's sponsor:

Nussbaumer’s Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard is a passage opera that processes Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen through the respectful distance of time, marking both obvious and obscure references.

Preceding the first complete performance of his four evening cycle in Los Angeles, Wagner’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” — which ignores the presumed boundaries of opera, theater, music, stage and audience — was conceived contemporaneously with California’s gold rush and is therefore completed by the invisible Siegfried’s journey from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean across Sunset Boulevard, featuring alto Christina Ascher.

Huh?  Here's the idea as I understand it:  People are going to put on heavy metal Wagnerian-style helmets, possibly including those with horns, and march and sweat their way down sections of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, starting downtown and ending four days later at the ocean and there's going to be a woman singing Wagner and we are assured that there will be drinking and who knows what else.

The artist who conceived of all these conceptual concepts is named Georg Nussbaumer.  I bet there has been drinking. 

The description of Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard which really pushed my buttons comes from this LA Times article by Simone Kussatz:

It's no coincidence that the event concludes on the birthday of Adolf Hitler, the best known and most notorious Wagner lover of all. Nussbaumer said he consciously chose the date to defy Hitler by transforming this historical day into something "new, bright, excessive, peaceable and lively."

Transform Hitler's birthday into something "new, bright, excessive, peaceable and lively"?  It's like a traditional Hitler birthday party but with beer instead of cake.  In my opinion that's just plain sick.  In reality Nussbaumer's event is not defying Hitler, it's calling attention to him.  It's positive publicity for Hitler.

Has no one at Ring Festival LA noticed that this is one small step in the exculpation of Adolph Hitler?  Maybe they don't care about this aspect as long as the event involves Wagner in some way.  Maybe there's been drinking at RFLA as well.  Maybe they're ROFL.

Nobody who is actually from Los Angeles whom I'm aware of celebrates Hitler's birthday, at least in public.  If there is any notice of Hitler's birthday, it should be a sober affair with somber, temperate reflection on the anguish of Hitler's victims.

Jews already have a holiday to remember Hitler's evil deeds.  It's called Yom HaShoah, it's the Holocaust memorial day and it just happened last week.  It is not a bright or lively day.  Nor should it be.

COMPARING THE TWO EVENTS

It's easy to see how they're different, but how are Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard and the National Socialist Movement's Reclaim the Southwest Rally alike?

• Both events happened in Los Angeles.
• Both events observed Hitler's birthday.
• Both events involved people marching.
• Both events have people wearing helmets.
• Both events displayed Nazi symbols: swastikas in one, Wagner's music in the other.

These two events, happening so close together, are creepy and wrong.  I suggest that if people really need a date on which to remember Adolph Hitler they might choose April 30.  April 30, 2010 will be the 65th anniversary of Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker.

 Read all of Mixed Meters articles concerning Ring Festival LA

Looking for a different holocaust holiday? Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is April 24. It's widely observed in my part of Los Angeles.

The story behind the Washington Holocaust Memorial door with bullet holes is here and ends here.  The picture came from here.

The picture of the guy with the helmet and the swastika flag and the picture of the guy with the watering-can helmet on a beach which is not in Santa Monica came from the LA Times.  My apologies for swiping the pictures.  More pictures are here.

The picture of the coin showing an all-American Richard Wagner panning for gold in the California Gold Rush with the words "Liberty" and "In God We Trust" came from the Invisible Siegfrieds Marching Sunset Boulevard website which also contains a picture of a supposedly all-American-Indian cast of Wagner's Ring and also George Nussbaumer's bank account numbers so you can make a contribution, presumably in honor of Hitler's birthday.

Addendum (4/23/10)

Here's one of several pictures of ISMSB on Flickr.  One Flickr user, Larry Gassan, wrote this about the straggle of Invisible Siegfrieds he encountered:

This had to to be the loneliest subset of devotees I've ever encountered.  The three Siegfrieds, with the fourth inside the mylar-shrouded buggy, complete with loudspeaker, commence Day 2 of their March to the Sea on Sunset Blvd. This is singular, and heroic in the face of overwhelming indifference by the world at large.

Here's another one taken by Mr. Rollers and it seems to show that all the helmets were identical.

As pointed out by MM reader MarK,  here is an Invisible Siegfrieds review from the L.A. Times which uses the one adjective "innovative" to describe the project.  Here's a quote from the article:

Participation was less than expected. “I’m a bit surprised about the low number of 'Invisible Siegfrieds' we were able to recruit,” Nussbaumer said. “About 50 people said they would come, but none of them appeared. I thought that in a metropolitan city we would find at least ten people marching with us, because then the interplay between silence and singing would have been more effective. It’s also a pity, because artists could have had a truly unique and interesting experience.“

Helmet Tags: white supremacist. . . Invisible Siegfrieds. . . Holocaust. . . Adolph Hitler. . . Richard Wagner. . . George Nussbaumer

Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2

Click here to read the first Stalking the Christmas Penguin. It discusses the geographic illiteracy of Americans and answers the question of why God invented wars.


Christmas penguins have appeared in this post, entitled Christmas in October (which includes talk about table grapes). This other post, mostly about Starbucks Christmas music, has a penguin picture too and here's yet another post where you can listen to a MM Christmas 30 Second Spot while looking at Christmas penguins. (Note - MM Christmas music is not recommended for people who actually like Christmas.)

All those posts will explain why my chain is yanked by Christmas penguins. This is especially true when they're shown with polar bears or igloos.




Over just 3 seasons of Christmas penguin watching they've rapidly ascended the ladder of seasonal success. Even Stats, a staid Pasadena holiday decoration store, where I could find no penguins last year, had a beautiful, almost antique penguin sculpture in its main window this year. The penguin has arrived.


Leslie has gotten on the Penguin bandwagon, eagerly pointing them out to me in stores and along residential streets. She seems disappointed if I don't want to bother taking another penguin photo, so I humor her. She wanted me to take this towel shot:


And we have Christmas penguins in our house for the first time. We created this one together. It's made out of refrigerator magnets. (Click here to see past magnet art.)


I also placed a sticker of three penguins next to the Viewsonic logo of three finches on my computer monitor.


Here are a couple more Christmas penguin stickers. Ivy the cat likes to chew on them.



You can see a whole gallery of my Christmas penguin pictures here.

Here's a defunct blog entitled Penguins and Polar Bears Don't Mix.

Penguin Warehouse.

Here's two paragraphs of a 1999 article about Christmas penguins.

A Penguin duet plays Mixed Meters favorite Christmas tune:



ADDENDUMATA:

Thanksgiving Bird - Before and After

View another deflated icon here and here.

Inflated Tags: turkey. . . inflatable sculpture. . . holiday decorations

Flag Day

Mixed Meters advocates a careful re-thinking of holiday celebrations in the United States. Click here to read previous MM holiday-related posts.

The big holidays have become infected with far too much uniformity, too much capitalism and too much mindless over-eating and over-drugging.

Meanwhile there are a host of other holidays which really deserve our attention. They would make good occasions to hang out with family and friends. Some of them happen right about now in mid June.

• The Summer Solstice happens this year on June 20 one minute before midnight. It's okay to celebrate on Saturday the 21st. If you ever wanted to stay up carousing all night, this is the easiest night to do it.
• June nineteenth is Juneteenth and June twelfth was Loving Day. In a country which I hope will have a partially African-American President next January (and in which gays are gaining the right to marry) such celebrations ought to be more meaningful than ever - for all of us.
  
• Bloomsday is Monday, June 16. It's a Mixed Meters favorite because it celebrates a story of modern life told in a modernist style (but with links to tradition) and because it's about a Jewish man who doesn't get nailed to anything. Drinking the sacred wine of Bloomsday, Guinness (which I can't stand), is optional.
  

Please note - none of these holidays are Father's Day (June 15 this year) which is not a Mixed Meters approved celebration. Any holiday for which companies buy media advertisements designed to get you to buy their products is bogus. If you are lucky enough to have a father you should honor him every day.


And that brings us to today, June 14, Flag Day.

Flag Day is usually a celebration only for the "my country right or wrong" crowd. However, I suggest that those of us who want to see improvements in our country should adopt Flag Day for our own purposes.

Flag Day should be a sober day on which we recognize that the symbol of our country has come to represent too many evil deeds committed in our name. Others who see our flag may well think of all the destruction, murder, torture and lying done under the color of the Red, White and Blue. We cannot ignore such associations.

Each time we tell the world that we are "defending democracy" while actually destroying our own democracy bit by bit, the flag shreds, bit by bit.

Here is a short movie - less than 90 seconds - in which I feebly attempt to portray the sorry state of our national emblem with images and abstract music. All the flags were photographed as publicly displayed in Pasadena California.



Copyright (c) 2008 David Ocker

Warning - this video is very iconoclastic. Click here if you're not so sure what an iconoclast is.

Thanks to Paul Bailey for mentioning Loving Day. Also thanks to Tom Turner for reminding me of the meaning of the word iconoclast.

If you're a "my country right or wrong" type, this post at the WFMU blog might warm your ever-loving pea-pickin' heart.



Tag Day: Flag Day. . . holidays. . . Bloomsday. . . Juneteenth. . . Loving Day. . . video. . . David Ocker

30 Second Spots - Jingle Bills

It's become a Mixed Meters Tradition to post some of my original holiday music - this year again based on a tune you'll recognize. What could it be?


It's just the right length for holiday music (30 seconds exactly). It will leave you in a state of unsatisfaction, wanting more; asking for another 5, maybe 10, seconds at least.

Click here to hear Jingle Bills © 2007 David Ocker - 30 seconds

Want more alternative holiday music?

The best Christmas song ever (seriously) - Joseph Spence does Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. There are some other good Christmas tunes here - like by Zoogz Rift.


Another great Christmas song - Santa's Secret by Johnny Guarneri and Slam Stewart.. More tunes in the same vein at that site also. (BTW - Santa's secret is something that he smokes.)

And of course I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas. Doesn't everyone.


CHRISTMAS PENGUINS

I've posted a collection of pictures of Christmas Penguins at this link. Most have not not seen the light of Mixed Meters before. I have more pictures that I will add later.

Mixed Meters is one of the few blogs on the Internet (or anywhere else) to celebrate the elevation of Penguins into the Christmas Zoological Trio - Santa Clauses, Snowmen and Penguins. The Penguins are usually wearing a scarf or Santa hat - and are colored blue as often as black.

Last year's post Stalking the Christmas Penguin explains why Christmas Penguins will confuse the geographically-challenged American public.

Another MM post with pictures of Christmas Penguins. And another. which deals mostly with Christmas music at S'bucks. By the way, as far as I know, Starbucks never played a Hannukah tune this year, not that I expected one. But they did play one classical piece (just one) - Fur Elise by LvB. (That's one more classical piece than they play the rest of the year.)

Last year's Mixed Meters Christmas Music: two 3-Minute Climaxes - Jingle Bulls and Jungle Bells.


Santa, Snowman and Penguin Tags: Christmas Penguin. . . 30 Second Spots. . . Jingle Bills. . . Christmas Music

Days of Infamy

December 7 ("a date which will live in infamy") has to move over to make room for new days of infamy. Click here for a Google search to see how the term is being used. Clearly 9/11 is in second place in the Day of Infamy pantheon. The day Gene Robinson was consecrated an Episcopal bishop is gaining ground. Clearly it's getting easier to make a day infamous than it used to be.


News reminders about the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor reminded me that I had visited Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor on our trip to Hawaii in September 2007. The NOAA ship (the Oscar Elton Sette) that Leslie traveled on was docked there. Her equipment needed to get on board. I went along as a schlepper.


Here are two composite panorama shots. The top one is looking west into Pearl Harbor from the NOAA ship. Here is a page about the attacks that happened on this side of the island. (The Arizona was on the other side.)

Below is the lab in which Leslie worked. You can see NOAA diver Amy Hall with Leslie behind her. The two panorama pictures are the same size but the harbor is big and open while the lab is small and cramped.


Ford Island is usually off-limits to the public - not that there's much to see. Visitors are ferried out to the Arizona Memorial by boat. Here's the Memorial.


Here are some of the historic buildings on Ford Island. There is a plan to restore these buildings (they need it) and make them a Pacific center for NOAA. (Click here.)





All the pictures get bigger when you click them - especially the panorama shots. Many of the pictures were taken from a moving truck.

Infamy Tags: Pearl Harbor. . . Ford Island. . . NOAA. . . Day of Infarmy