Mixed Meters Visits Occupy Los Angeles

I was in downtown Los Angeles several times this week and I happened to walk past the Occupy Los Angeles encampment - our local version of Occupy Wall Street, still going strong after nearly two months. 

Naturally I took a bunch of pictures.  The first one shows a few forlorn tents up against the massive north edifice of Los Angeles City Hall.  The main camp is on the south side.

The whole affair had the feel of a homeless tent city - but from the sixties.  I saw guys playing hackie-sack.  Men were drumming.  Flyers were handed out - the one I got denounced the Fed.  There was a meditation tent, an art school tent, a library.  There seemed to be some sort of communal kitchen.  I heard talk about drugs - and, once, I smelled marijuana.

But mostly I saw signs.

 

 

 

 

Some signs were organizational, like the one advertising a protest at the upcoming Rose Parade.  Others signs (e.g. "Fuck the Lakers") had uncertain relevance.

 

 

The face of Anonymous (i.e. the Guy Fawkes mask) was in evidence.  Remember people - this is a copyrighted image of Time Warner Inc.  If you buy a mask, the corporation gets royalties.  And copyrights are what big corporations use to control our culture.

 

There were many people, like myself, taking pictures.  These people, like myself, were obviously not protesters.  Some were newsmen.  Others, like myself, may have sympathy for the causes of the Occupy movement - if for no other reason than these protests have managed to eclipse the Tea Party from our national news.  And the Occupy movement has managed to get the message that corporations are not people into the corporate-controlled media.  That's a huge success.

I do wonder why they set up shop in front of a government building instead of a bank headquarters.  I do believe that their in-your-face protest will do more good for left wing values than anything else could do at this moment.  The one percent will make concessions only when they become afraid the situation will get out of their control otherwise.

 

As I walked through the encampment I heard a man with a bullhorn telling a helicopter several blocks away to leave.  He made some other cracks.  He had been corrupted by his little bit of power: control of the P.A. system.  Power had gone to his head.  I took some pictures of him.

He called to me through the bull horn saying "How you doin' cameraman?"  I responded.  He kept questioning me about my motives, asking who I was working for and whether I had sworn an oath to the Constitution.  After a while I started video recording.  His compatriots begin chanting "Who the fuck are you?" apparently to him, not to me.  A good time was had by all, I guess.  Fortunately the other protesters of Occupy L.A. were not allowing absolute power to corrupt anyone absolutely, especially this guy.

Watch for yourself:

Today the Mayor of Los Angeles announced that protesters must be gone by Monday.  Stay tuned to your local news media to find out if there will be pepper spray in the future of Occupy Los Angeles.

---

Here are some links:
Occupy Los Angeles
Occupy the Rose Parade

Mixed Meters covers past Rose Parades:
Burn in Hell at the Rose Parade
Left Behind after the Rose Parade
On the Beach at the Rose Parade

I don't make a habit of taking pictures of people and I post those very infrequently.  This post is apparently an exception.  Click any picture to see an enlargement.


Occupy Tags: Occupy Los Angeles. . . Occupy Rose Parade. . . Occupy Wall Street. . . protest signs

Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months

I have excuses: I've had things to do. There were things that needed to get done first. I did them. They received priority status. I have other things which still need to be done, which also have priority, but I finally managed to carve out a little time to create some music. I really needed that. And I kick myself because carving out a few hours is not THAT difficult. Once I do it I think "I could have done this sooner." because I enjoy doing it. Then my inner nag says "You should do this more often." and I tell my inner nag that it "should" shut up.

Anyway, I wrote a 30 Second Spot. This one is 46 seconds long. Eventually, after about an hour of work when the piece was pretty much finished, I realized that I needed to save the file. This was a problem because I didn't have a title yet. I decided to call the music exactly what it was: my thoughts about starting to write music again after a long hiatus. I worked with the words. The title kept getting longer the more I tweaked it. The final title is not great.

My actual thoughts are not in the title; the title does not tell you how I feel. The music tells you how I feel. My thoughts come out though the music. Or maybe they don't. Maybe there are no thoughts, no ideas, in this music. Maybe there are no thoughts or ideas in any music. Maybe thoughts and ideas can only be expressed in words. That's a thought.

One of the funny things about a piece like this is that I can spend an hour writing it and then three or four times as long removing excess notes: decomposing (yes, it's the punchline of a bad joke). "Polishing" is a better word. I wait for a few hours or overnight, then listen carefully and focus on any spot which sounds "wrong" to me.  Every piece, even a short one like this seems to feature a Problem Spot - a moment that simply doesn't feel right no matter how much I futz with it. "Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months" had such a conundrum measure - but I eventually found a happy solution.

The other thing about this piece is that I dreamed the opening. I occasionally dream short melodic fragments. I find myself singing them as I awake.  Mostly they evaporate into the fog of regaining consciousness.  Sometimes I can get them written down. I have a small "dream journal" of melodies which I'd like to use in a bigger piece someday.  (Another plan that'll probably never happen.)  "Twenty Balls In My Fingers And I'm Not Done Yet" was such a dreamed tune (one with lyrics as well) which did become a 30 Second Spot.

But this dream was different.  Instead of waking up with a melody, I awoke to a sequence of single digit numbers, somehow knowing that they were supposed to be a tone row: 1 0 8 2 6 1.  Zero?  I used my little row to begin the piece, then I repeated it with some non-strict elaboration.  Then I lost interest. And the piece wasn't even half finished.

I suspect that even the speediest readers, if you've gotten this far, have spent more time reading this than they will spend listening to Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months.  And if you try to figure out from the music just what I did think about writing music again after two months of not writing music, you probably won't know what to say.  It's impossible to express music in words.  That's why it's music.


Click to hear Reflections On Not Having Composed Even One Note For Two Months
Copyright © 2011 David Ocker - 46 seconds

Thought Tags: David Ocker. . . 30 Second Spots. . . reflections

Russian Bestiary

This is the final post of the "Leslie's Russian Pictures" trilogy. Part one Leslie and Vostok or part two Leslie and Vladivostok are just one click away.

This chapter is devoted to animals.  What better animal to begin with than a marine worm, Leslie's passion and ultimately the very reason she made her trip.  This cute little Russian critter, named Hydroides ezoensis, is a fan worm.  The big black eyes are all in your imagination.

In the first set you'll see Leslie making friends with a fluffy feline, a hungry horse hoping for handouts from inside the car (notice its nose reflected in the rear-view mirror) and a disinterested, unfenced bovine.

Here are two pictures of skeletons taken at the natural history museum of the Institute for Marine Biology in Vladivostok: a segment of whale spine and a whole seal. 

This is another marine invertebrate collected by Leslie's colleagues:  a live amphipod named Pleustes incarinatus.  I think it looks like a football helmet.

Here are several more marine animals - two dried-up old stars, a picture of a crab advertising seafood for sale and a good looking octopus which, not long after the picture was taken, became dinner for a pack of hungry biologists.

Two terrestrial invertebrates: a cricket with front claws designed to dig in dirt and a corpulent green caterpillar.

And we end our pictorial visit to Russia with a ceramic peacock and a little orange pixie.

You may enjoy other Mixed Meters' articles about Russia (which have more words and fewer pictures than this one):

• Ilf and Petrov "Someone needs to ask whether our incessant chase after the almighty dollar is really worth it."
• Theremin's Bug "the next time you accidentally walk out of the store with an item you picked up, thank Leon Theremin for the alarm which reminds you to pay."
• Sergey Kuryohkin, Pianist of Anarchy "when happenings were happening in the U.S. their creators weren't known for extreme musical stylistic variety in the way Kuryokhin seems to have embraced so naturally."
• Testimony - memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich "if Shostakovich knew how to keep his mouth shut and only ventured to tell his stories when he knew death was near, who among us can blame him."

Don't forget, the pictures enlarge if you click on em.

Russian Fauna Tags: Russian Fauna. . . travel photos

Leslie and Vladivostok

This is part two of the series showing Leslie's travel photos from Vladivostok, Russia, where she spent the last few days of her trip.  Part one was pictures from the Vostok Marine Station.  Part three is pictures of animals.

First off, a picture of Leslie and her fellow biologists, Vasily Radashevsky (on the left) and John Chapman.  Vasily works at the A.V. Zhirmunsky Institute of Marine Biology, Far Eastern Branch, where Leslie and John both gave talks during their visit.

Leslie knows I like abstract and textural photos.  Here are a few of those.  The first two were taken at the Institute building, which is in the shape of a ring.  The others include railway electrical insulators and some rusted metal.

 

Vladivostok is a bustling seaport, currently undergoing extreme renovations for an upcoming political summit.  The building in the foreground of the next picture (with the sign) is a funicular railway.  The second shot shows one of two large suspension bridges under construction. 

Here's a street with some historical buildings.  The sign on the green building reads "supermarket".  Then a brilliant, golden onion dome on a church.  The third picture shows a statue of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.  That's something you don't see very often in the United States.

Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Transsiberian Railway, which, according to Wikipedia, is 9289 kilometers in length.  Here's a picture of John and Leslie standing in front of what must be the penultimate kilometer marker - 9288.   I believe the double-headed eagle is the standard of the Russian empire.

Remember, click the pictures to see them bigger.

Vladivostok Tags: Vladivostok. . . Russia. . . travel photos

Leslie and Vostok

While I stayed home, Leslie recently traveled across the pond on a worm collecting expedition.  (More pictures are here and here.)

By "pond" I mean the Pacific Ocean.  She flew to Vladivostok in eastern Russia and then traveled by car to a little marine station called Vostok.  There she and her colleagues spent three weeks collecting and identifying marine invertebrates 

Here is a picture of the Vostok Marine Station taken from a small boat by John Chapman.  John is an amphipod & invasive species expert from the University of Oregon.  I think the picture looks like a model train set.  Apparently some Russians take summer vacations in this area which is reminiscent of New England.  (See a satellite view of Vostok Station in Google Maps.  You can explore from there.)

Across the bay is this small village. (You can click any picture for an enlargement.)

In the foreground you can see John and two of his Russian colleagues digging for specimens.

Here are pictures of Vasily Radashevsky, the Russian polychaete expert in charge of the expedition, and of John Chapman, up to his knees in seawater.

And here is Leslie in her own natural habitat, behind a microscope, putting names to critters most of us never encounter.

The project was sponsored by the North Pacific Marine Sciences Organization (or PICES) a consortium of six countries around the northern Pacific, which also held their annual meeting about the same time in Vladivostok.

Here are a couple photos of life at the marine station.  No, he's not doing what you think he is doing in the first picture.  In the second picture, the bottle of clear liquid holds a Korean sweet potato vodka.  Leslie brought me a bottle as a present - but I haven't tried it yet.

I had asked Leslie to take lots of pictures.  She took well over a thousand.  I will post another couple dozen in two more posts, one with pictures of Vladivostok itself and the other of various animals she encountered.

Here are pictures of two Russian monuments which she saw - their significance is unknown to me, but both clearly have marine themes.  In the first one "Livadiya" is the name of a city not far from the station.

Vasily Radachevsky has appeared in Mixed Meters previously - in the post Maywood Pasadena (about a song called Pasadena which is very popular in Russia, sung by a group called Maywood) and in a video called Going Coastal.  Also he discusses the vital issue of whether a polar bear will eat a penguin here.

Vostok Tags: Vostok Marine Station. . . Leslie Harris. . . Vasily Radashevsky. . . John Chapman. . . marine invertebrates. . . PICES

Pasadena Bestiary

Today's pictures of Pasadena's urban bestiary include

• pair-bonding parrots
• a cat with a rat
• some koi reflections
• a mockingbird on a pole
• a petrified mountain goat

Click on 'em and they should enlarge a bit

Previous Mixed Meters posts involving animal pictures
Pasadena Fauna
Graffiti Animals of California


Animal Picture Tags: parrots. . . koi. . . cat and rat. . . mountain goat. . . mockingbird

The Art Jarvinen Email Project

The one-year anniversary of the passing of composer Arthur Jarvinen was earlier this month.  To mark the event I have compiled a collection of his writings, specifically his half of available email correspondence.  Where would I get such an idea?  Why, from Art himself of course.

In October of 2008, he sent me this email message:

One of the potential projects that I am starting to compile data for would be a compilation of one-sided correspondence. We have the Cage/Boulez stuff, which is pretty dreadful reading - unless you're overly enamored of both of them.

Apropos blogs and comments, I do sometimes post comments. But I am finding myself more interested in personal dialogues, conversations between two individuals. It has struck me that it might be worthwhile reading, and an interesting creative endeavor, to pull together a slim volume of e-mails, but only from me, without the letter that triggered the reply. Might work, might not, but it's an idea I'm toying with.

With that in mind, I am sometimes now saving certain e-mails I compose, and even using my reply as a situation in which to address things that are on my mind.

I discovered that passage after his death in October 2010. I don't know whether he pursued the idea himself – it was never mentioned again. Nor, of course, do I have any idea what subjects he himself would have chosen. What I do know is that we can honor departed friends by doing those things which they themselves would have done.

This archive of Art's email begins in late 1997 and covers nearly 13 years. The final message was written the day before he died. He writes about day-to-day issues, about his work and about holiday celebrations. You'll find musical essays, story-telling, simple poetry and mass concert announcements. He talks about his music, about his emotions and about his challenges. I have occasionally edited very slightly in an effort to keep all the words Art's own. The subject matter is sometimes perfectly obvious. Other times the context will be completely obscure.

The following people, besides myself, have contributed Art's writing to this document: Gloria Cheng, Jim Rohrig, Christopher Garcia, Robert Jacobson and Zona Hostetler. If others care to contribute messages they once received from Arthur, this document can be expanded in the future. Please select passages of interest and submit them to me. Include the date of each to preserve chronology.

Although this may be an attempt to fulfill Art's own idea, this document can never be what Arthur himself would have made of it. In fact, it serves a completely different purpose. It is now our memorial to him.

And maybe, as time passes, these messages will serve to introduce Art to people whom he never met. Reading this collection might be a little like looking through a shoebox of someone else's unlabeled snapshots. If these small glimpses into the life and thoughts of one particularly creative, complex individual make you curious about the personality behind it, I urge you to seek out those other works of his in which he tried his hardest to communicate ideas to others … his music.

Download the Art Jarvinen Email Project.  (pdf format, 32 pages)

---

Mixed Meters memorials to Art Jarvinen over the last year can be found here, here, here, here and here.  All Jarvinen related Mixed Meters posts, past and future, will appear in this list.

Thanks to Robert Jacobson for the two pictures.

Email Tags: email. . . memorial. . . Arthur+Jarvinen