LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - one year later

I stumbled across an events list for the San Francisco Opera's Ring Festival and I was reminded that just one year ago Los Angeles was in the throes of a similar event.

Apparently San Francisco, much more savvy about the place of opera in our culture, has avoided some of LA's sillier Festival features:

• In San Francisco there are apparently no marches to the ocean by helmeted, singing Wagner fans beginning on the same day (starting nearly at the same place) as marches by helmeted neo-Nazis waving swastikas. 
• By all accounts no San Francisco County Supervisor has introduced a resolution suggesting that Wagner does not deserve to be honored by a county-wide festival.  Nor have the Supervisors there had to co-sign for a huge loan to keep the opera production afloat.  
• I am unaware of any demonstration by Lyndon LaRouche supporters outside the opera house in San Francisco.
• And San Francisco has no lavish comic book-inspired production of Wagner's operas to sink it into $6,000,000 of debt.  (Has LA Opera paid that off yet?)

I wonder if San Francisco Opera has opened a beer garden outside War Memorial Opera House like the one last year outside the Music Center?  Endless operas can make a guy thirsty.



As better and better topics kept presenting themselves, I devoted nearly every Mixed Meters post for about three months to various aspects of Ring Festival LA and Wagner's legacy.  (See the end of this post for a complete list.)  Readership dropped as a result.  Apparently opera fans are not interested in contrarian views about their sacred music.  And non-opera fans are not interested in anything about opera. 

But, as it says prominently on Mixed Meters, this is a blog about me, David Ocker.  Even I wondered why I spent so much time obsessing about an event that was terribly easy to ignore.  And, if nothing else has changed in Los Angeles because of the LA Opera Ring, at least I gained some insight into my own emotional responses.  Unless you're my personal friend there's no reason you should care.  Even then, it doesn't much matter.

My motivations for all that effort can be sorted into three categories: my musical background, my Jewish background and my Los Angeles background. 

My Musical Background

My musical education - formal and otherwise - was always focused on the future of music, music as a forward looking thing.  I have always been intrigued by novelty, by the desire to know what happens next.  Even in high school I was constantly looking for new and wild things to listen to.   Eventually new music became my career - even if it wasn't my own music.  While I agree that there is much classical music that is beautiful, I recoil at the notion that it is somehow intrinsically superior music.

Unsurprisingly, there's an awful lot of music which I don't like.  I have strong opinions about music.  In particular I dislike a host of 19th century music and an awful lot of opera.  As such, Wagner is the quintessential music I would like to avoid.   In the context of my musical background, Wagner, probably the most unavoidable historical composer ever, is the prototypical example of everything I hate about music - endlessly long, crude-oil thick, college-lecture boring, evangelically sermonistic, narcotizingly stupefyingly heavy and musically irrelevant to the future.

My Jewish Background

I'm not a religious Jew but I am Jewish both socially and culturally - my parents got that much through to me.   When I was a kid the Holocaust was not particularly a big deal in our family.  Still, the incredible importance of the subject was somehow hammered home to me.  It was something that we were supposed to remember, "never forget".  "Who could forget?" I wondered.  I concluded that forgetting during my lifetime was not possible.

While my parents strongly encouraged my musical interests, they pointedly didn't listen to Wagner.  They told me that Jews didn't "do" Wagner.  The one time in my life when I saw my parents protest anything politically was at a symphony performance.  I was about 10 or 11.  They got up, along with other Jewish people, and left the concert to avoid hearing a Wagner overture.  Besides this one event I never once saw them attend a protest meeting, write a letter to the editor or get upset about politics.

Holocaust survivors in Israel didn't want to listen to Wagner.  They had good reasons.  Whatever those reasons were, they are the same reasons my parents taught me about Wagner's music.  In my opinion a County-endorsed public Wagner festival starkly represents the very act of forgetting the things which should not be forgotten.

My Los Angeles Background

While I still regard graduate school advice that I should move to New York as misguided, it would have been useful for me to experience an actual, intense creative new music scene someplace while I was still young.   But I had the notion that such a community could be created right here in Los Angeles.  After all, this town is big and has musical talent and media and patrons and foundations up the wazoo and it has had periods of intense creative activity in other fields - for example modern art or pop music.  I spent a lot of my youthful energy trying to make new music in Los Angeles happen.

Over the decades I've concluded that I was wrong: a Los Angeles new music scene patterned after my own dreams just isn't possible.   Sorry, it won't happen in LA.  (Please, prove me wrong before I die.)  The serious new music that Los Angeles wants to focus its attention on is almost always created elsewhere.  "Elsewhere" in this context mostly means Europe.  This pattern began even before Stravinsky and Schoenberg and continues to this day.  Sometimes audiences are happy with East coast music.  "Elsewhere", "Europe" "East Coast" all begin with E.  What does that mean?  

The Los Angeles of 2010 Ring Festival did not turn out like the one I imagined in 1976 when I took up residence in Los Angeles.   In November 2008 I was surprised by just how badly things had turned out in this regard when I read Plácido Domingo's announcement that

"Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles."

Can you imagine my disappointment?  Not only was a forward-looking music scene not going to happen here, but Domingo, an icon of music from Elsewhere, was announcing that we would henceforth define Los Angeles musical life around four boring operas based on medieval German mythology composed by a self-promoting anti-Semite who died more than 125 years ago.  What has that got to do with the future of any thing?  I can't think of anything less representative of Los Angeles.

Here's Plácido's quote in context:

More than a century ago, composer Richard Wagner conceived his epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen as a festival event that completely engaged the city of Bayreuth, Germany. In 2010, LA Opera will join forces with more than 50 cultural and educational institutions in Los Angeles to stage Ring Festival LA.  “Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles,” said Plácido Domingo, LA Opera’s Eli and Edythe Broad General Director. “The presence of so many of LA’s cultural, educational and civic leaders clearly demonstrates that the city’s creative forces can be brought together through a cultural festival — in this case, a festival based on LA Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

Can Plácido really have thought that a festival centered on the Ring could define the cultural history of Los Angeles?  Not even all of Los Angeles - could he have possibly thought that the Ring would define the history just of music in Los Angeles?  Even just serious music?  Apparently so.  I am still infuriated by the thought.

Aside from my distaste for Wagner's music and Hitler's complicity in Wagner's legacy, the idea that music in Los Angeles - where I've lived well over half my life and don't expect ever to leave - could be defined by Wagner and his music is simply despicable.  Domingo was talking long term - he used the word 'history' after all - not just for the few weeks of the festival itself. 

Reading that quote was maddening, exasperating.  I wondered how could they could have the gall to even think thoughts like that.  While it's true that opera is relatively unimportant in Los Angeles, let me remind everyone that he was also suggesting that RFLA would be the biggest thing since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival - which was a massively big deal.  Fortunately that part of his plan turned out to be purely hot air.

I assume that Plácido is paid an awful lot of money to guide Los Angeles Opera.  Local opera fans seem to adore him.  He draws extra paying customers when he sings.  Moreover, the patrons of the opera must trust his judgement because they take his advice.  Indeed, part of his job is to help define what serious music in Los Angeles will become over time.  And the vision he brought us was "Bayreuth on the Pacific!"  It's simply shameful.

Compare his vision of Los Angeles - supported by millions upon zillions of dollars - with the vision I thought I might have a chance of creating back in the Los Angeles of the 70s and 80s.  Do you think that confronting the disparity of those images might still make me upset?  Don't bother to answer, I'll just tell you ... yes, it did.  A lot.  

And, frankly, there was nothing I could do about it except bitch.  So what did I do?  I bitched.

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As a final wrap-up of the subject, here's a list of the articles (plus teaser quotes) in which I bitched about Ring Festival LA:

1. November 21, 2008 Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. "this festival, as it was announced, will be far from representative of the arts community as a whole. In fact it is elitist in the extreme." 
2. July 16, 2009 Mike Antonovich and Ring Festival L.A.  "requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent."
3. July 21, 2009 Wagner with an Asterisk "This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring."
4. February 17, 2010 A Windfall of Musicians "The combination of some of Europe's greatest musicians with two local music enthusiasts, Peter Yates and Lawrence Morton, turned L.A. into the bloodiest cutting-edge music scene anywhere for many years."
5. March 24, 2010 Wolfgang Wagner (1919-2010) "'Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East."
6. April 5, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Begins  "If you really speak about the festival's significance to the culture of Los Angeles, I'm afraid Plácido's statement has The Big Lie feeling about it"
7. April 20, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Meets Hitler's Birthday  "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."
8. May 29, 2010 Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring Cycle In One Second  "the work of one California composer who, almost 50 years ago, dealt conceptually with the problem of Wagner's Ring."
9. June 9, 2010 Composers of the Nazi Era "And if some music is good, I suppose it follows that some other music is bad, degenerate.  This attitude is the beginning of a slippery slope.  At the bottom of that slope you will find the story of how the Nazis used and abused music. "
10. June 16, 2010 Kenton Wagner "If there is a Hell (which I personally doubt) Richard Wagner is there being forced to hear this album over and over for all eternity."
11. June 17, 2010 Wagner Inspires Pop Music "Apparently, someone, somewhere thinks every popular musician in the whole world during the last 150 years somehow owes their musical style to Richard Wagner.  What a sad world it would be if that were true."
12. June 20, 2010 Wagner Invades Poland "The comparison of Wagner's Ring to an opiate is apt."
13. June 26, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish "as Ring Festival LA "leader" Barry Sanders said "We're not putting lipstick on a pig in this thing.""
14. July 9, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi "Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant.  The elephant is Adolf Hitler."
15. July 18, 2010 Hitlerdammerung "Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities."
16. August 15, 2010 A Modest Proposal For Replacing Placido Domingo at LA Opera "With the Ring in its rear view mirror Los Angeles Opera could decide to now set itself the goal of really creating a defining moment in Los Angeles culture.  The first thing it would need to do is thank Plácido for his services and send him packing. "
17. April 8, 2011 Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments "Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money."
18. June 7, 2012 LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - two years later  "By remembering Hitler when we perform Wagner, we give ourselves the best chance for preventing recurrences of such despicable and immoral behavior."

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A good deal of this post was reworked from private email correspondence with my friend John Steinmetz, who prompted me to explore the reasons for my emotional reaction to Ring Festival L.A. Thanks, John.

Still Angry One Year Later Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . Los Angeles Opera. . . Richard Wagner. . . Wagner's Ring

Testimony - Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

I knew about the controversy when I started Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich - as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov.  This book, with an extra long title, was published in 1979, four years after the composer's death.

(Here's some music, Shostakovich's last string quartet, to listen to while you read.)

It wasn't until I finished reading that I did more research.  Turns out that the controversy is a big one - but only for people in the dull-as-dust world of musicology.  To them, deciding whether this book really is the memoirs of an important 20th century composer (or not) has become a humongous article of faith.  For the rest of us, it should be no big deal.

My personal impression is that I was indeed reading the voice of a real composer.  It reminded me of bitch sessions I myself have had with composers - although none nearly as famous as this one.  After a drink or two, while sitting with trusted friends, out come stories about colorful but incompetent performers, dottering inscrutable professors, wonderful still unfinished pieces, unflattering unfair reviews and encounters with a sexy harpist or horny fellow composer or two -- successes, failures, life.

Unlike this book, however, most composers reminisce in small bits.

Testimony represents 276 pages of Shostakovich's first-person narrative.  It is very much stream of consciousness.  Improbably, Volkov claims to have created it from notes taken by hand during one-on-one conversations during Shostakovich's last years.  He says the composer refused to allow tape recordings and insisted that it not be published until after his death.  Volkov maintained that the manuscript had been approved by Shostakovich himself but provided no direct proof of that.

Yes, Volkov's story is a mite suspicious.  Given the circumstances, he must have done an awful lot of "editing".  But I'm okay with that.  Shostakovich had good reason to be suspicious that people were looking over his shoulder.  Telling the truth could have gotten him into trouble.

Testimony revealed Shostakovich as secretly opposed to certain political currents in the Soviet Union - most notably Stalinism.  This upset Westerners who insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer.  This also upset Soviets who also insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer.  No one could agree on what sort of devoted Communist composer Shostakovich actually was.  Did he really mean what he says in this book?  Had he been hiding his true feelings all along?  Are there secret messages composed into his music?

It's hard for us freedom-of-expression types to understand the times through which Shostakovich lived, when uppity creative artists could be taken away in the middle of the night and never be heard from again.  Afterwards people were too afraid to ask what might have become of them or even mention their names.  Shostakovich had good reason to fear this might happen to him.  One of the reasons he gives for dictating his memoirs is to preserve some memory of people who did disappear.

Here are the first few paragraphs of Testimony:

These are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally they'll lie through their teeth - but that's their business.

One must speak the truth about the past or not at all. It's very hard to reminisce and it's worth doing only in the name of truth.

Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses. And I do not wish to build new Potemkin villages on these ruins.

Let's try to tell only the truth. It's difficult. I was an eyewitness to many events and they were important events. I knew many outstanding people. I'll try to tell what I know about them. I'll try not to color or falsify anything. This will be the testimony of an eyewitness.

Of course, we do have the saying "He lies like an eyewitness."

Here is a video showing Shostakovich in 1975 about the time of his interviews with Volkov.  He talks at the beginning and again at 6'40".  He was in poor health and seems nervous.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Dmitri Shostakovich harbored a certain ill will about some of the difficult conditions under which he lived.  In order to survive, Shostakovich adapted his music to the political conditions and demands of his time, writing pieces celebrating the Russian revolution or adapting to "just criticism".  He may have survived, while others did not, thanks to his name recognition outside the Soviet Union plus the fact that Stalin liked his film scores.  If he harbored secret personal opinions, he also knew better than to speak them in public.

Of course the Soviet Union was not the only 20th century society in which artists knew which things they were supposed to say in public.  I've written about the experiences of composers during the Nazi regime.   Even in the United States, during certain periods, composers have been expected to toe the political-speak line.  You can read Aaron Copland's 1953 testimony before Senator Joe McCarthy's Senate investigating committee.  Copland denied being a Commie, of course, but his Lincoln Portrait was still removed from a concert celebrating the inauguration of President Eisenhower.

So, 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.  Some of his stories are pretty good - especially when he tells how Soviet musicians tied themselves in knots to please their musically unsophisticated dictator. 

But, in the end, you can only feel sympathy for Dimitri Shostakovich.  Here are some quotes from the last few pages:

No, I can't go on describing my unhappy life, and I'm sure that no one can doubt now that it is unhappy.  There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great joys.  It was gray and dull and it makes me sad to think about it.  It saddens me to admit it, but it's the truth, the unhappy truth. ...

No, every new day of my life brings me no joy.  I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my friends and acquaintances.  Many of them were famous and talented people, who told me interesting things, instructive stories.  I thought that telling about my outstanding contemporaries would also be interesting and instructive.  Some of these people played an important role in my life and I felt it was my duty to tell what I still remembered about them.

But even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one.

I have thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man.  But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified.  Not one of them had an easy or a happy life.  Some came to a terrible end, some died in terrible suffering, and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine.

And that made me even sadder.  I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.  I'm not exaggerating, I mean mountains.  And the picture filled me with a horrible depression.  I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time.  I tried to drop this unhappy undertaking several times and stop remembering things from my past, since I saw nothing good in it.  I didn't want to remember at all.

And so, in this book, I read that at the end of his life one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century could find nothing whatsoever to smile about.  Should I believe this?  I think so.  The reason is simple: because Shostakovich makes the same point elsewhere - in his music.   Here again is the link to his last string quartet, number 15, written the year before he died.

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The website Shostakoviana includes an even-handed introduction to the Testimony controversy entitled A Manual for Beginners.  There's a lot more beyond that.  You're welcome to it. As controversies go, it's far less interesting than wondering who really shot Bobby Kennedy.

The Time Magazine cover is from July 1942.  You can read the article about Shostakovich in that issue.  This was that unique time when the Soviet Union and the United States were friends.

The photo of Shostakovich playing the piano while an obviously retouched Stalin looks over his shoulder comes from Testimony.

Other tangentially related Mixed Meters articles:
Aspics of Shostakovich - Dmitri Shostakovich, Johnny Green and things floating in jello
Schoenberg in Hell - Schoenberg's demeaning final years
Stravinsky, On the Cover - another Time magazine cover of a composer
Ten Most Influential Classical Composers - actually eleven, according to me
Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

Testimony Tags: Dmitri Shostakovich. . . Solomon Volkov. . . Testimony

The Squirrel in Mike and Lynn's Aviary

Last weekend Leslie and I traveled to the East Bay so Leslie could participate in BAYMAC. That stands for Bay Area Marine Aquarium Conference, a gathering of reefers - people whose hobby is salt-water aquarium keeping.  In spite of what I might have thought at first, "reefers" refers to the ocean reefs where the many fascinating plants and animals originate.

Curious little marine beasties often hitch rides hidden inside corals and other things as they travel from those far-away reefs to their new homes in suburban aquaria.  Eventually these animals grow larger and mystify the eager reefer.  Experts must be called upon to identify the unknown critters.   Leslie is such an expert.

And so it was last Saturday, in the cafeteria of Chabot College in Hayward California, that Leslie spent many hours seated below a sign reading (I kid you not) Spineless Marine Life Visual Identification Booth.  Hundreds of people shuffled to and fro, looking at high-tech lights, glass tanks, small corals from which mighty reefs might grow, sea-water mix, jars of live copepods and who knows what all else.  You can see pictures here.  Some of these people brought Leslie crap from the bottom of their tanks and asked her "What is that little thing crawling around inside there?".  Leslie is someone who knows the answer to that question.  She knows because she's an expert.  According to Leslie the word of the day was detritivore.

I made the trip with her so we could spend some time with our friends Mike Boom and Lynn Morton.  Mike obligingly loaned Leslie the microscope, video camera and monitor for her presentation.  I've known Mike since before he gave up playing the oboe to devote his life to being a mushroom-hunting, underwater-video-making computer technical writer.  Lynn met Mike when she was a ballerina. Here's a picture of the two of them together.  It clearly shows their relative distances above sea-level.

You can watch Mike's videos at Laughing Eel Underwater Video.  Unlike some people (e.g. me) who carry all their video equipment around in one pocket, Mike travels the globe with hundreds of pounds of dive gear, video cameras and computers.  The results he gets are pretty spectacular.  Here's another picture of Mike taken while hunting for edible mushrooms near their home.

Lynn has turned the backyard of their house into a veritable outdoor aviary where dozens of wild bird feeders, many positioned right in front of windows, produced a constant flurry of colorful activity.  This fascinating "bird television" impressed both Leslie and me a lot.  The birds give Mike and Lynn's cat ample opportunities to stalk and the bird feeders give the local squirrels ample reason to hang about, waiting for a dropped seed or kernel.  I made a short video of one patient squirrel.  It proves that I do not carry a tripod in my pocket.  Last night I composed some music to go with it.  You can guess what comes next.

The Squirrel In Mike and Lynn's Aviary  © 2011 David Ocker 138 seconds

Detritivore Tags: reefer. . . Laughing Eel. . . Mike Boom. . . Lynn Morton

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute is a piece of my music.  You don't have to read about it.  Just click here to listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute right now.

Bernie Madoff might be the biggest crook in the history of the world. He created a ponzi scheme masquerading as a Wall Street brokerage house which stole as much as $20 Billion and might have been going on nearly 40 years. He was arrested in 2008 when the recent "George Bush" recession made it impossible for him to keep robbing Peter to pay Paul. Madoff realized that the jig was up and confessed to his sons.  They turned him in.  Six prior investigations by the SEC had failed to notice that anything was wrong.

A Golden Parachute is severance pay for corporate executives.  When a CEO is fired they often receive such a payout.  This is irrespective of how well they did their job.   Here's a list of the largest-ever golden parachutes.  It includes Angelo Mozilo (who was accused of insider trading during the recent mortgage bubble; he got $44 million), Michael Ovitz ($130 million for working just a few months) and Michael Eisner (who collected a $1 Billion bonus for making Disney strong enough to control U.S. copyright legislation.)

I don't know whether Bernie Madoff had a formal golden parachute agreement with his company.  If he did it wasn't worth the paper it was written on because after his conviction he had to forfeit all his  wealth.  Since he knew full well that what he was doing was illegal it's doubtful that he expected to retire with the same level of comfort and splendor in which he lived.

Still, Bernie Madoff lived the good life while he could.  I've seen estimates that his fortune was around $800 million.  He lived in a New York penthouse.  He created a philanthropic family foundation and gave money away to charities.  After his conviction he was sent to prison in North Carolina.  He'll be eligible for parole in 2139 (when he's 201 years old).

America likes its criminals.  We often celebrate their stories with works of art - mostly movies and television shows these days.  Jesse James, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde - the list of hero/crooks is a long one.  Makers of such entertainment must cover their ass morally by making sure the bad guys die at the end (or at least go to prison).  Of course to be popular these stories must have a great deal of action including chases, gunplay, daring heists and sanitized love-making.

In comparison, Bernie Madoff's story is a yawn.  In this age, when the "greed is good" philosophy is no longer even slightly controversial, the tale of how one boring guy in a suit sat in an office and quietly stole a pile money beyond the dreams of even the most avaricious thief, might actually sell lots of movie tickets.  Bernie Madoff Gets Rich could be just as popular as the movie about Facebook.

The plot of the Bernie Madoff story will seem familiar to opera fans.  It's Faust by Charles Gounod.  Bernie plays the part of Faust himself (although his victims might think of him more as the Devil).  In the beginning Bernie/Faust, of his own free will, makes a deal with Mephistopheles and is rewarded with riches and other perqs.  But the deal is good only for a limited time only.  After that, the devil claims the hero's soul and sends him to Hell. 

Being sent to Hell is Faust's own golden parachute.  And Bernie's too.  These days many of us don't believe in a actual physical post-death fire and brimstone eternal torment.  Being sent to prison in North Carolina for the rest of our natural lives, however, is a pretty darn good substitute. 

I wonder how many Americans would make the same deal with the Devil that Bernie made: trading a few years in prison for decades of wealth, influence and notoriety.

Listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute © 2011 David Ocker - 149 seconds

Here's a WSJ article about what Bernie's life is like in prison.  He is Inmate No. 61727-054 at Butner Federal Prison

There are many variations of the Faust legend - not just operas. Read more about them here.

Madoff Tags: Bernie Madoff. . . white collar crime. . . Faust

30 Second Spot - Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

Click here to listen Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

© April 24, 2011 David Ocker - 45 Seconds

Modern Tuesday Tags: 30+Second+Spots. . . David Ocker. . . microtones

Skyping With Tom Brodhead

Here is a short video with my music featuring my friend Tom Brodhead.

© 2011 David Ocker - 141 seconds

Last month Leslie and I had a conversation with Tom via Skype. Tom introduced us to his new cat Charlie. The talk lasted nearly an hour. For 8 minutes or so I used the point'n'shoot in my pocket to take some still pictures of Tom's image on the screen.  Charlie made himself scarce while I was taking the pictures.

People who know Tom will recognize that his personality is a combination of high intelligence and high intensity, sometimes perilously so. He uses his hands when he talks and has an expressive face.  All of this means that he makes a good photo subject. I thought the pictures were pretty interesting - if not always in good focus.

Later, while I was wondering what to do with them, I read a hint which makes it easy to import a group of still shots into my video editing software.

Suddenly, an idea was born: I would create a video. compose music for it and entitle it Skyping with Tom Brodhead because that's what we were doing.  Each still is accompanied by music in a different tempo.  The result is wacky - but not that wacky. It's hard to tap your foot to it.

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Tom appeared in a previous Mixed Meters post: The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin. The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin is another piece of mine. Tom suggested the title accidentally.

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My desk has appeared in this previous video: Desktop Stilllife

Skyping Tags: Tom Brodhead. . . video. . . desktop

Oily Sheen

Some of the video shots which I make with the "point-n-shoot in my pocket" just demand to have music added to them.  This is one of those.

It was a rainy day in Pasadena.  I was walking along Lake Avenue where I encountered a large puddle at the entrance to a super market parking lot.  The puddle had formed because of a stopped-up drain.  On the water's surface there was a little oil from which light reflected.

As I filmed,  a car passed through the puddle and then someone walked right in front of my camera.  The car created waves which are what the piece is really about, I guess.  I edited the person's legs out completely.

Oily Sheen © 2011 David Ocker - 139 seconds

One of my previous video pieces was filmed on the same block, across the street. Here's that one as well:

(Sometimes I Feel Like A) Newspaper In Traffic © 2010 David Ocker - 99 seconds (click the title to see the original post)


Another Mixed Meters "oil and water" reference is my "piano" piece entitled Oil and Water Mix. No video there, just music.  That piece is 666 seconds long.

Oily Tags: Oily Sheen. . . water video. . . oil and water

Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments

Here's a quote I read a long time ago in a musician's union newspaper.  To me it seemed obviously true.

Play for the masses, eat with the classes.  Play for the classes, eat with the masses.

In other words, a musician who creates for an elite audience (the classes) should not expect to get rich.  But a musician with millions of listeners (the masses) could earn a lot of money.  Here's a list of the 10 richest musicians.  (Number one was a Beatle once, number two is a Country and Western star.)

These days even the richest musician doesn't have a Billion Dollars.  Few creative types accumulate that much wealth - J.K. Rowling just barely makes the billionaire list.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg qualify.  (Here's a list of ALL the world's billionaires.)

A fundamental tenant of capitalism is that the people with the talent and passion for making money are allowed to gather as much of it as they can.  Once they have it, they're free to do anything they want with it.  Some choose to support arts institutions.  Museums (a category which includes orchestras and opera companies), even the ones nominally supported by public money, would perish without big chunks of private cash from people with money to burn.  Nothing new here.  This has been going on since the invention of rich people.  Top down funding of the arts is a fact of life.

Here in Los Angeles, one name dominates art philanthropy - Eli Broad.  In his career he has made not one but two piles of money, first in real estate and then in finance.  He's number 173 on that list of the world's richest humans.  These days Eli spends his time giving his money away in the realms of science and education as well as art.

Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money.  Here's a New York Times interactive map showing locations of his munificence in L.A.

• He gave millions to rescue MOCA.  
• He was instrumental in getting Disney Hall built.   
• His dollars seeded the now largely forgotten L.A. Opera Ring cycle and festival.  
• He donated money for a building at LACMA which is named after him.
• He funded a performance space in Santa Monica which is also named after him.   
• The ultimate Broad art museum is planned for Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.  

Last year the New York Times described Eli Broad:

Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad. Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Recently the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Eli Broad in which he discussed his art patronage.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Eli Broad is not known for being effusive, not even when talking about one of his greatest passions: collecting contemporary art. The billionaire philanthropist generally seems more comfortable talking about museum buildings than about the artworks that go inside them.

Since the arts community in Los Angeles will undoubtedly feel the effect of Eli Broad's money for generations to come, I feel like it's a good idea to pay some heed to what he talks about.  (Remember, at Mixed Meters quotes are always in purple.  All the following quotes in this post are directly from Eli Broad.) 

His stated motivations for collecting art and building museums surprise me.  I guess I expected him to mouth nostrums about the transformative power of art or pablum about making great art accessible to everyone.  I couldn't find anything like that, although it's doubtful he would actually disagree with such common wisdom.  Instead he talks a lot about hanging out with artists. Here's a quote from an interview with Charlie Rose:

I enjoy contemporary art because it's the art of our times.  I love the artists.  I find it invigorating to spend time with artists.  They have a different view of society than most business people do.

The next three quotes are from the Times article.  

My first career was in public accounting, ... so if I look at a spreadsheet I understand it quickly.  Numbers are hard and fast.  But it's a very different process looking at a work of art or visiting with an artist.  It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

The reliance on numbers makes me wonder why Eli doesn't seem to have much interest in contemporary music - which, of course, is also "the art of our times".  Music is constructed largely out of numbers - rhythms, intervals, scales are all reducible to numbers.  But understanding a spreadsheet (i.e. money) and understanding a symphony (i.e. art) require different forms of perception.   I also wonder whether he finds it invigorating to hang out with composers.

He's clearly a practical man.  When asked how much he has spent on his art collection, he replied:

I don't know the exact number, whether it's $200 or $400 million, but it's probably closer to the latter.  If you ask me what it's worth, I've heard numbers that approach $2 billion, which blows my mind because I'm seeing all that happens then is that our insurance costs go up.

By any measure, he's a great success.  Here's how he described what it means to be a "successful" collector:

If I had to do it over again, I would buy some of the great work that I saw people like David Geffen buy several years ago for what I thought was an awful lot of money - like the Johns 'Target' he had.  I was too disciplined then.  I didn't have the money. ... Well, I had the money, but I wasn't prepared to spend $10 million for a great painting. ... To be a successful bidder means you're willing to pay more than anyone else in the world.  I don't know if I would call that a success.

This L.A. Times article gave impressions of what Eli Broad's vision for art in Los Angeles really is.  Clearly it involves two things: the actual monetary value of the objects which he has acquired combined with placing those objects on display for others to envy and enjoy.  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. 

Eli Broad has used his money to serve the community of Los Angeles according to this vision.  Los Angeles ought to honor him in some way for that service.  In olden days great men, generally war heroes, were honored with statues astride a horse.  These days government doesn't have money to commission statues - even if there were artists who could recognizably execute such a piece.  Instead of art, governments have resorted to renaming streets or intersections after deserving gentlemen.  Los Angeles could honor Eli Broad by renaming Broadway, all twenty-some miles of it, after him.  It wouldn't cost a penny.  We would just start pronouncing the street name differently.

But great men of contemporary Los Angeles, those with sinful quantities of money, want more than a street name.  They want art museums with their names attached.  These days hardly anyone would remember Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, J. Paul Getty or Henry Huntington were it not for their eponymous galleries.  Decades hence who will remember Eli Broad except as just another one of those old rich guys who could afford to buy himself an art museum?

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Here's an article listing other living billionaires who own their own art museums.

Here's an L.A.Times article about similarities between Norton Simon and Eli Broad.

Here's a timeline of art history - mostly museums - in Los Angeles, 1927-1999.  It contains this fascinating tidbit:  

1951 The Los Angeles City Council decrees that modern art is Communist propaganda and bans its public display, but the ordinance has little effect.

A related MM post about art collecting: Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things

Related MM posts about rich people:

• House and Wooster and Income Disparity
• Prostitution, Obscenity and California Politics
• In Which Wealth Has Its Privileges

The one previous MM reference to Eli Broad which also mentions monuments.

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Here's a tribute to Eli Broad which I found on YouTube.  It's a music video which features a singing Eli Broad lookalike.  There are no credits or any indication of exactly what the reasons for this particular encomium for Mr. Broad might be.  The tune is hackneyed and repetitive but still somewhat Randy Newman-esque.  Watch for yourself.

Here's a Flickr page with still shots from this production.

There are other related videos: an invite to Eli's birthday party and a behind the scenes video from same:

Enjoy.


Broad Tags: Eli Broad. . . art collectors. . . art museums. . . monuments

Aspics of Shostakovich

I was in my early thirties when I first encountered anything served in aspic.

I had gotten a job doing revisions to a large symphonic piece for orchestra and jazz ensemble by the composer John Green.  He was better known as Johnny Green.  Every day for about a month I'd trudge over to Beverly Hills to work in his music library housed in a backyard outbuilding.  Occasionally I was invited to the main house for formal lunch, usually prepared by the composer himself.

One day lunch included a salad with some sort of vegetable floating in jello.  I had no idea what it was. John's secretary helpfully informed me that this was "aspic".   I was not impressed with my first encounter with aspic - although I tried hard to sound like I was.

Today, while reading Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov), I read a passage about aspic (on page 30).  Given my mental association of composers with aspic I could not help but have a desire to share Shostakovich's comments.  I'm pretty sure they have lost something in translation.

A man dies and they want to serve him up to posterity.  Serve him, so to speak, trussed up for our dear descendants at the table.  So that they, napkin tucked under chin and armed with knife and fork, can dig in to the freshly deceased.

The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly; they're burning hot.  So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them - the best form of gelatin.

And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down.  The nose, say, is served separately, or the tongue.  You need less gelatin that way.  And that's how you get yesterday's classic as freshly cooked tongue in aspic.  With a side dish of hoofs, from the horse he used to ride.

I'm trying to remember the people I knew without the gelatin.  I don't pour aspic over them, I'm not trying to turn them into a tasty dish.  I know that a tasty dish is easier to swallow and easier to digest.  You know where it ends up.

A page later this paragraph seems to better explain what Shostakovich means:

It's so unfair.  People suffered, worked, thought.  So much wisdom, so much talent.  And they're forgotten as soon as they die.  We must do everything possible to keep their memories alive, because we will be treated in the same way ourselves.  How we treat the memory of others is how our memory will be treated.  We must remember, no matter how hard it is.

In light of some of the historical events of Shostakovich's life (notably the Great War and the Stalinist Purges), the need to remember those who were killed or simply disappeared would have been a duty of the highest importance.

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Here's an interesting article about Johnny Green where I found the picture of Johnny's Oscar ceremony badge which identifies him as "Musical Director and Shmuck".  He was a super-talented, super-loquacious, super-egotistical fellow who always wore a carnation and most likely would have enjoyed wearing a badge marking him as a shmuck.  He once told me that if he had been Italian his name would have been Giovanni Verdi.

The book Testimony suffers from a certain controversy about the authenticity of the great composer's memoirs.  I won't know for sure until I finish the book, but I don't think the dispute will do anything to challenge the book's overall insight into what life was like for a world-class Soviet composer.

The L.A. Philharmonic is producing a series of concerts devoted to composer Thomas Adès called Aspects of Adès which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Aspics of Shostakovich.

Tags in Aspic: aspic. . . Johnny Green. . . Dimitri Shostakovich. . . Testimony

House and Wooster and Income Disparity

House is a soap opera.  Of course it's not really an "opera" in the musical sense nor is it sponsored by a soap company.  It is an episodic weekly television drama which details the continuing experiences of a group of characters as their lives constantly evolve and revolve.  Each episode hangs on some inexplicable medical mystery which, inevitably, gets explicated.

The title character, the drug-addled miscreant genius Dr. House, is played by Hugh Laurie.  Dr. House the character is an American but Hugh Laurie the actor is English.  You'd never know it from watching the show.  Laurie's ability to imitate American speech is, at least for me, the most interesting aspect of the show.  (Okay, you figured it out - I don't particularly like House.)   

Over the last few months, several times a week, Leslie and I have spent some of our quality time watching the series Jeeves and Wooster, an English television production from the early 90s based on the characters and stories of P.G. Wodehouse.  Jeeves, the talented, discreet Gentleman's Gentleman, is played by actor Stephen Fry.  (When I first saw Fry as Jeeves I thought he was too young.  Now I'm 15 years older and he seems just the right age.)  Bertie Wooster, the young, carefree, rich, puffin-headed bachelor, is played by Doctor House, I mean by Hugh Laurie, using his own genuine English accent.

Leslie and I both adore Jeeves and Wooster.  We regret they only made 23 episodes.  The action happens in the 1930's, mostly in England, occasionally in New York City.  There's a steady stream of gorgeous architecture, lavish apartments and hotel-size estates.  There's another steady stream of gorgeous vintage automobiles.  The costumes, especially the men who run around about half the time in tuxedos, are also, well, gorgeous.  Nice theme music too.

As adapted by Clive Exton, P.G. Wodehouse's plots are no less predictable than contemporary television, but they are much funnier.  Most revolve around someone wanting to or not wanting to get married, pretending to be someone else, breaking and entering in order to steal some insignificant object, or attempting a hare-brained scheme for getting rich or out of debt.   All of them involve Bertie bumbling his way into embarrassing social difficulties from which he is, in the end, coolly extricated by Jeeves.

Wodehouse's characters fall into clear categories.  The upper-class women include Bertie's domineering Aunts and domineering marriageable women friends and even a few school girls in training to be domineering.  The upper-class men include a host of Bertie's ineffectual neer-do-well friends (who repeatedly say things like "Isn't she the most beautiful woman you've ever seen, Bertie?"), a few crusty older men who repeatedly threaten Bertie with bodily harm and even a few schoolboys who repeatedly cause mischief.  The lower class characters include waitresses, constables, butlers and other valets, con artists and rich American businessmen. 

These parts are brought to life by some fine English actors.  It's disconcerting when certain continuing roles are played by different actors in different seasons.  And not one of them comes close to the quality of the American speaking accent which Hugh Laurie does in House.  Probably English television audiences don't notice the difference.

Of course, the real weight of every episode is carried by the two principal actors, Fry and Laurie.  Their marvelous performances consistently convey the ridiculous in the most sublime fashion.  Here's a great example of the two of them together.  In this clip Bertie tries to sing a current popular tune (which you'll recognize) but typically must rely on the help of his ever-so-tactful valet to finish the job.

Did the world of Jeeves and Wooster ever really exist?  Most doubtful. I think Wodehouse was doing a fine job of writing parody. These days it's impossible to judge what bits of this television series might fairly represent those historical times. Two things come through from the scripts, however. First, there were distinct differences between English social classes.  There was also a great inequality in the distribution of wealth; certain people were fantastically wealthy. According to this, in 1936 53% of the total wealth of England was held by just 1% of the population.

Today, in the U.S. during the time of House, we strenuously deny that class differences exist.  We're told that anyone can get filthy rich if they're talented and driven and lucky enough.  To prove this, the media shows us a handful of super-wealthy people (think Oprah) who serve as inspirations to the hundreds of millions who will, most likely, never get rich.   However, like Bertie's England, America does have an incredible inequality in the distribution of wealth.  According to this, in 2007, 43% of total wealth in the United States was held by just 1% of the population.   (For more on America's financial inequalities check this out. Or this.)

While the upper-class wealth of Bertie Wooster's time would eventually decline over much of the 20th century, the wealth of the American elite today is climbing steadily.  Maybe that's why we perceive the English wealthy as idle slackers and the American wealthy as greedy over achievers.  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.

I think that the U.S. of 2011 needs our own P.G. Wodehouse.  We need an author or television producer who can parody the amusing day to day lives of super-rich people.  Why shouldn't there be a television show to make it clear how people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett who have billions of dollars aren't close to being capable of muddling through their own lives, or even to mixing their own martinis, without the help of a faithful, discrete, patient, intelligent servant such as Reginald Jeeves?  I propose that such a show would make many less-than-wealthy Americans more accepting of the obscene disparities of wealth in our country and of their own place in the financial hierarchy.

You know, if we can't do anything else about the problem of the ultra-wealthy, at least we should be able to have a good laugh at their expense.

Wealthy Tags: Jeeves and Wooster. . . Hugh Laurie. . . House television show. . . P.G. Wodehouse. . . income disparity

Ghosts of Vesuvius

Last fall I attended an LA Philharmonic performance of a large work for chorus and orchestra - Graffiti by composer Magnus Lindberg.  The interesting text was created from inscriptions discovered on walls of the buried Roman city of Pompeii.  These have remained unchanged since molten lava engulfed the city way back in A.D.79.

Later I saw Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino on a stack of Leslie's books.  I thought this might be a good way to learn more about the graffiti of Pompeii.  I just finished the book.  I was wrong.

I should have paid more attention to the subtitle of Ghosts of Vesuvius:

A new look at the last days of Pompeii, how towers fall, and other strange connections.

Ghosts of Vesuvius did tell me just a wee bit more about graffiti in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Plus there was a lot of other fascinating information about Roman life, history, customs and technology.   I learned, for example, that in Rome there were eight-story apartment buildings with plate glass windows and sprinkler systems.  Roman inventors were working on steam-powered ships. And sunken Roman galleys have been found in places like Brazil and Venezuela - but scientists have not been allowed to study them closely because some people don't want Christopher Columbus challenged as discoverer of the New World.  Lots of stuff like that.

Clearly Mr. Pellegrino knows a good deal about many subjects.  Among the more surprising discourses I found in this book were:

• how volcanos may have fostered the first life on earth, 
• the history of the universe, starting now and working backwards to the very beginning,
• how the catastrophic Vesuvian explosion affected early (and probably current) Christian thinking about eschatology and the apocalypse,
• the sinking of the Titanic, which the author had previously studied up close in a deep-sea submarine and then written a book about.

The last relates to one of the celebrity endorsements on the back cover:

"Very interesting and compelling reading.  A killer.  Makes me want to do a movie about Pompeii." -- James Cameron, award-winning producer and director who has optioned screen rights to Ghosts of Vesuvius.

No, James Cameron is not crazy.  Ghosts of Vesuvius would make a great blockbuster movie very much in the mold of his movie Titanic.  That's because of two riveting sections of storytelling in which Pellegrino relates, in minute by minute detail, two horrendous events of sudden human immolation.

One, of course, was the explosion of Vesuvius, where humans caught in the hot lava were completely vaporized in a fraction of a second.  But he also finds personal stories.  Using scrolls encased in lava - on which the burnt ink can now be distinguished from burnt parchment through the miracle of Photoshop - we learn the story of a freed Roman slave girl named Justa who was trying to avoid being returned to slavery by conniving lawyers. 

The other was the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.  Pellegrino was one of the scientists who, in the months after the attack, studied how the towers fell.  He has documented some of the surprising twists of horror and luck endured by the victims of that attack.

In both stories there are moments where complete destruction is found side by side with items that have barely been touched.  Tables set for upcoming meals remain just as they were while only a few feet away walls crumbled and fell.  People inexplicably survive the massive explosions, comparable in strength to nuclear bombs, by accidentally finding themselves inside "shock cocoons": spots where some trick of the crumbling architecture and explosive physics offers a shell of protection from certain death. Had these individuals been standing a few feet away, death would have been certain.

Ultimately, Ghosts of Vesuvius is about sudden destruction: a huge asteroid carving out the Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico destroying the dinosaurs; a volcano in 1628 B.C. obliterating the Minoan civilization and giving us our legend of Atlantis; the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; an earthquake and its tsunami.  In each of these and many other cases, there was some morning, probably a beautiful morning, when life simply came completely to a halt.  There was no warning whatsoever.

And when such catastrophe does happen again there will probably be no way to prevent it.  A few lucky people might survive.  The rest of us need to enjoy each beautiful morning as it happens.

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You can visit the ruins of Pompeii via Google Street View.

Here's an Italian website devoted to the excavations and another at the Field Museum.


Immolation Tags: Ghosts of Vesuvius. . . Charles Pellegrino. . . World Trade Center