In which I remember the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959

I would have been eight years old in 1959, fifty years ago. The government announced that year, just before Thanksgiving, that some cranberries should not be eaten because of possible contamination. Here's the November 9, 1959, press release:

The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroids of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.

As a result of this announcement a nationwide panic ensued.

I, a highly impressionable and not-too-savvy-about-matters-of-food-borne-news-inflamed-misinformation eight-year-old living far from Oregon or Washington, resolved never to eat cranberries again. It was years, decades even, before I could securely eat any cranberry product. Even now, every Thanksgiving as the dish of red goo gets served, my childhood fears return: those little red round berries could kill me. I've learned to keep my mouth shut about it.

Of course, since then, I've even discovered that I like cranberries - including cranberry bagels (which ought to be an affront to nature, but aren't).

I was reminded of this little shading of my personality by a front page of the Los Angeles Mirror (an evening newspaper) from November 11, 1959, reproduced in a recent LA Times blog post about policemen damaging an LA restaurant because of a typographical error. The massive headline is pure scandal rag. But those pesky contaminated cranberries are front and center a few inches down.


A little research into the subject reveals that this event was an early example of food panic. The genre has gotten rather more sophisticated since then.

If you go to the Times blog you can enlarge the newspaper page enough to read the other stories. But here's the text of the cranberry story to help Mrs. Google run up my hit counter.

Go Ahead and Eat, Say Cranberry Expert

Claims Even Tainted Crop Safe

WAREHAM, Mass., Nov. 11 (AP) - The scientist who presides over the world's leading cranberry agricultural experiment station said today he can see no reason why people should not eat cranberries now and during the holiday season.

Dr. Chester E. Cross of the University of Massachusetts directs the Massachusetts agricultural experiment station to which agricultural scientists of the world come to learn about cranberry growing.

[Sidebar: For tasty cranberry substitutes, see story, Page 19.]

This station is largely responsible for the Massachusetts cranberry production, which this year totals 595,000 barrels or half the world crop.

Dr. Cross points out that weed-spraying has been questioned only in a small fraction of the nation's crop in two Pacific Coast states.

He said he would eat a helping of even the suspected West Coast cranberries with no more concern than he would feel over smoking a cigarette.

He chided Welfare Secretary Arthur S. Flemming for stating Monday that improper use of the weed killer aminotriazole had contaminated portions of the Oregon-Washington crop.

Timing Blasted

He said that Flemming's statement at this pre-Thanksgiving time is damaging to the entire industry and that information upon which it was based was "miserable and meager".

In nearby Hattson (?) the National Cranberry Assn. said that all suspected West Coast cranberries already have been segregated from the market.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government sent 100 inspectors and 60 chemists to all parts of the country to test cranberries for possible contamination.

Few Contaminated

Only limited quantities of berries from Oregon and Washington have been found to be contaminated, the government says. But it is making safety checks on cranberries from all producing areas.

Ambrose E. Stevens, executive vice president of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., said in New York that Flem- (turn to Page 19, Column 4)

The National Cranberry Association is now known as Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., and apparently it survived the 1959 panic thanks to a government subsidy on unsold cranberries. They now sell nearly $1.5 Billion dollars worth of cranberries per year. An early version of "Too big to fail"? Read more than you want to know about the cranberry business here.

Scare Tags: Cranberry Scare. . . 1959. . . contaminated food

Musical Signs

Check out a tuneful restaurant, ride in a fast RV, buy some fancy clothing, enjoy wine with multiple voices, sip some Bachian java or relax in Mozartean elegance.







This is the third of a series. In part one we learned the words trio, forte, cornet, arpeggio, aria and allegro. In part two there was koda, tritono and concerto.

FLAP

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



Copyright © 2009 David Ocker - 121 seconds

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

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


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


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

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

Songs of Pasadena

Weeks ago I posted about Pasadena, a hit sung by the Euro-pop group Maywood. You may want to get up to speed by reading that post before continuing with this sequel.

Later, Ben Harper, one of Mixed Meters' Three Readers, offered up a song by John Paul Young called It's a Long Long Way to Pasadena. JPY is as well known in the United States as Maywood. The link Ben offered has been removed due to copyright - but here's the golden oldie version sung live.

Another of Mixed Meters' Three Readers, Charles Ulrich, alerted me to a much earlier tune known as Pasadena (although it is actually entitled Home in Pasadena because that's how the lyric goes). This one was written by Harry Warren who wrote hundreds of famous songs in the twenties, thirties and forties.

Home in Pasadena was written in 1923 and it was a big hit, first in the U.S. then in England. You can listen to a very early version via YouTube. Charles sent me this different version where the vocalist makes up his own melody in the chorus. (Warning: Pace yourself! There are a lot more listening links coming along soon.)

I looked online for even more songs about this city where I've lived for a dozen years. What I found was a book called The Golden Ear, A Treasury of Songs to Pasadena by Carter Barber. You can read the L.A. Times review. (Same available via Google Cache, here.)

I purchased a copy through some unsuspecting online bookseller. Here's a composite of the front and back covers. (Click to enlarge.)


Self-published in 1985, it seems to be from the "who said what to whom" school of journalism. Largely it details a whole host of mostly unknown songs about Pasadena, the effort to pick a City Song for the centennial celebration in 1986 and the politics and petty squabbles surrounding their inevitable obscurity. The book has the lyrics for 38 Pasadena songs, although Maywood's and John Paul Young's are not included.

Whether Pasadena has an official song at the moment, whether anyone knows what it is and whether anyone cares about a Pasadena song are all whethers about which I don't much care.

Here's Ian Whitcomb, an actual Pasadena resident, singing Home in Pasadena. Since the sheet music is printed in The Golden Ear I was able to determine this is the definitive online performance.





Here's Van Dyke Parks singing Home In Pasadena - with spirit if not with much precision.

Here's Jan and Dean singing Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Here's a five-year old Bulgarian girl singing and dancing to Maywood's Pasadena.

Here's an over-the-top music video of Maywood's Passadena in some other language.

Here's a song called (Let's Move to) Pasadena by the band Modern Skirts.

Pasadena is more than just the name of a song. It can be the name of a band as well.

In England they have The Pasadena Roof Orchestra apparently named for Home in Pasadena. (Here's their Wikipedia page.) This video is Puttin' on the Ritz. (Dig the patina on that tenor sax.)

Here's a band called Pasadena singing their song Realize. (Strangely, they think Pasadena is somewhere in Maryland.)

Here's a band The Pasadenas singing Riders on a Train.

Yeah, that marks the end of this topic.


Tired of Pasadena Song Tags: Pasadena California. . . popular+songs. . . At Home in Pasadena. . . Harry Warren. . . Ian Whitcomb. . . Maywood. . . John Paul Young. . . The Golden Ear. . . Carter Barber

Oil and Water Mix

Click here to listen to Oil and Water Mix right now and avoid all the tedious reading.


Earlier this year I heard a radio broadcast of Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, although the announcer called it Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. The Poulenc had been a favorite of mine in college days. I hadn't listened to it in a very long time. I enjoyed hearing it again.

Soon afterwards, inspired by the Poulenc, I decided to compose some simple, melodic music filled with lots of tonics and dominants. I wrote one little passage, then another and another, not bothering much with any sense of structure. I called the piece "Not Dissonant and Not Complex". Catchy, huh?

When "Not Dissonant and Not Complex" reached about four minutes I was forced to confront the fact that it wasn't very interesting. I hatched a new plan: I would interpolate bits of a completely different sort of music - random sounding notes - into what I had already written.

Thus the idea of "oil and water" was born: two radically different musical styles, each in turn ignoring the other, then cavorting with the other, then battling for supremacy. One type of music is "oil", the other is "water". You can decide which is which.


The word "mix" gets a lot of use in music. Mostly it refers to the result of audio manipulation of some already recorded tracks. I'm using the word "mix" in more of an active, verbal sense. Think of the sentence "Listen to me make oil and water mix."

The entire piece, both oil and water, is carefully composed. Certain sections sound random because I tried hard to make them that way. I adjusted each pitch, rhythm and dynamic to produce maximum variety. No Cageian chance methods were employed while composing Oil and Water Mix. None were needed.

It has already been remarked several times by people who have heard Oil and Water Mix that it seems to wander aimlessly, pointlessly. I do understand this reaction. But in fact the piece is divided into sections and certain melodies are repeated several times.

If you think that following this "formal structure" might be helpful as you listen I have added an analysis of Oil and Water Mix. You can find this on the playback page. Just click here and then scroll down a bit.

It's hardly a rigorous analysis, completely unworthy of a doctoral student in musicology. I had different choices about how to name things - for example - Section Two might actually be just a coda to Section One and Section Three might merely be a slow prelude to Section Four. You might want to listen for the short silence at 5'22" between sections two and three.



Mixed Meters' Three Readers may remember long ago, when I started posting my own short pieces, I lumped them together into a category called Thirty Second Spots. Later I started writing longer pieces for which I invented a new category, Three Minute Climaxes. Eventually I needed a third name for even longer pieces. I called these Ten Minute Breaks. (Think of the word "break" in the sense of a "coffee break".) The actual lengths vary above and below the stated time limits; please don't let that bother you.

Oil and Water Mix, at eleven minutes and six seconds, qualifies as a Ten Minute Break.

I now have composed five Ten Minute Breaks: They are

• Thinking With Other People's Words (click here to listen, click here to read the related post)
• Eating the Desiccant (never posted online because I like it too much)
• Poof You're A Pimp (click here to listen, click here to read the post)
• Formal Introduction (this one has been "nearly" finished for almost a year)
• Oil and Water Mix (click here to listen, you are already reading the related post.)

Of course it should go without saying that I'm not now, nor have I ever been, a doctoral student in musicology.

Oil and Water Tags: Oil and Water Mix. . . David Ocker. . . Francis Poulenc. . . random music

Hidden Meanings

These are carefully cropped pictures of various Pasadena signs. This process reveals secret messages.







And here are two in honor of Halloween.



The last is part of a church name. Sorry, no pictures of pumpkins this year. You can find some here. One of MM's earliest posts concerned Halloween movies.

Similar silly MM photo essays:
Crooked
Musical Merchants
Branches Before Blue
Gloves In the Wild
Fence Shadows
Graffiti Animals of California
Buckets for Babies in Pasadena
HALF GRASSED

This one, Taggers With Spellcheck, also deals with words.

Here's a bonus.



Partial Tags: partial signs. . . hidden meaning. . . Halloween

Hell Mouth

John Adams, the most successful composer, has been my top client for decades. Hey John, thanks for all the work! (I mean, really.)

But he has shown very unusual lack of judgment recently by starting his own blog, Hell Mouth. I think the picture which begat this strange name must have been taken by John's wife, the photographer Deborah O'Grady.

Hell Mouth is starting at a furious pace: he's written five posts, extensive essays, in a little over a week. Here at MM I feel overworked if I do five short posts a month. But I've been at this for a while (4 years last month) and understandably my enthusiasm has waned.

John is a good writer. His skills have been honed recently by his biography Hallelujah Junction. I like his adjectives.

One of John's posts is entitled: On Surviving a First Rehearsal discussing the composition and premier of his most recent work City Noir (actually his third symphony). The public perception of how a piece of music travels from a composer's brain to a concert stage is a complete mystery to nearly everyone - even to some musicians. My job puts me right in the middle of one facet of that process. This explains why a lot of people have no clue about what I do for a living.

John devotes one paragraph to me.

City Noir is so densely layered that I need two full manuscript pages to embrace all the parts. Hell for the copyist, who is nonetheless unfazed, a total pro. David—started out playing clarinet with Frank Zappa. After 24 years knows my intentions nearly well enough to fill out a line that I’ve forgotten to write out.

Very cool.


Later John mentions the first rehearsal of City Noir led by boy wonder Gustavo Dudamel in Walt Disney Hall. I was one of very few people allowed to listen. The musicians had prepared for the rehearsal but none of them could have much of an inkling how John intended their parts to fit together. Loud things came out soft. Soft things loud. It came apart. It came back together again. Somehow Dudamel kept it all racing along - the entire piece. When he conducts, his hair subdivides the beat.

The composer, conductor and all the players were hard at work. Their job was to make City Noir sound correct; they had a very limited time for this. On the other hand, my job had been completed weeks before. I was just hanging out, listening in a manner none of them could afford, following the score as it whipped past.

And I was blown away. A roller coaster with breakneck twists and turns could never be that much fun. It was a simply amazing, mind-blowing thirty minutes of music, as if the spirit of Charles Mingus had somehow gotten into the souls of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was rough. It was raw. It rocked. Most likely I was the only one there enjoying this experience, it was indeed a great time which I shall not soon forget. At the end I just laughed.

Of course, you could never intentionally make an orchestra play like that. You do not tell a symphony orchestra to "Wail". By the second rehearsal the piece was taking its proper shape. Each rehearsal refined the music a bit more. I liked the finished piece as well. It's also a wild ride. But not as wild as that first reading.

Future orchestras, preparing City Noir, will have recordings to refer to so players will know when to project and when to hold back. The one-time unique experience I witnessed, nothing at all like the piece itself, is lost forever.


John also mentions how the players ask him questions - including about the B Double Sharp. I heard a lot about this note before and during the rehearsals. For you non-musicians, a B Double Sharp is a completely theoretical musical notation - it sounds the same as the familiar pitch C sharp. I can't think of a reason it would ever be used legitimately. Any suggestions?

This particular B Double Sharp is played by the Second Violins, Violas and Second Trumpet in measure 183 of movement one of City Noir. I just checked again. It really is in the manuscript - twice. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have just changed it to a C#. The music would have sounded identical and no one would have noticed. Even the composer himself.


Read about how I was reduced to tears by a performance of one of John's pieces.
Read any or all of the Mixed Meters posts tagged "John Adams".




Hell Mouth Tags: John Adams. . . Hell Mouth. . . City Noir

First Sign of the Holidays

Yes, fresh from the land of cryptozoology, it's a Christmas Penguin.


This one was collected by Leslie in Armstrong's Pasadena Garden Center. She reports that they came in many sizes. This is a small specimen.

Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin
Read Stalking the Christmas Penguin 2
Read Christmas in October (it ends up discussing table grapes).


Penguin Tags: penguins. . . Christmas penguins

Million Dollar Sculpture

Wandering around in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday I noticed some sculptures on a building at 307 South Broadway. You can see four of them in this corner shot.


I snapped close-up pictures of each one. Click them and they get bigger. I wonder why these particular subjects were chosen, although many of them are obviously arts related. The building was built in 1918.









Each of the above sculptures have their own buffalo head.


The building is called the Million Dollar Theater. Here's a Flickr photo-set with good pictures of the building itself. There's a Million Dollar Theater Homepage with some indoor shots. More indoor pictures here. And here's a Wikpedia page which reports the name of the sculptor: Jo Mora. Besides these figurative works there's a lot of very neat decorative sculpture as well.


Million Dollar Tags: Million Dollar Theater. . . sculpture. . . Jo Mora

It's California's Fault

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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




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

Maywood Pasadena

This is a picture of Vasily Radaschevsky. I snapped it by surprise at the Pasadena Farmer's Market. There were two other people in the picture but I made them disappear through the miracle of Photoshop.


Vasily is a polychaetologist, a worm expert, and a colleague of Leslie's. He is a native of Russia and lives in Vladivostok, across the pond. He visited us for several weeks this month, traveling to Pasadena from Rio de Janeiro Brazil where he spends a good deal of his time.

Vasily told us about a song entitled Pasadena. He described it as being one of the most popular pop tunes in Russia. Neither Leslie nor I had the foggiest idea of what he was talking about.

After his return to Rio he sent an mp3 of the tune with this description:

This is THE MOST popular song in whole Russia, including everfrozen Siberia!!!

Every Russian dreams to come to Pasadena, even has no any idea where it is and what's about this song! But it is so heart and soul taking that became EXTREMELY popular in my country!

Well, I am the happiest Siberian because I managed to get my feet in Pasadena!!!!

Of course, English is his second langauge (and Portuguese his third) but I think you can get his point.

Pasadena, as it turns out, is an 80's Europop tune by a Dutch group called Maywood, a kind of girl group, a duet. ABBA without the B's. Here's a video of the song Pasadena. Enjoy.

Maybe Pasadena should consider making this our city song.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for the group Maywood. Not too informative. Here's the Maywood "offical" website. More informative. You can find the lyrics to Pasadena with a couple of clicks.

Mixed Meters has had prior brushes with Europop music.

Read One Goldberg Equals Twelve ABBAs.

Also check out Boogie Woogie Worldwide - scroll down to the part about Cheezy-Euro-Disco and M.A.Numminen.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to one of Mixed Meters' Three Readers, Ben Harper, who sent this link to another unknown-to-me work of Pasadena-eponymous musical art. Enjoy.