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)

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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

The Preserving Machine by Philip K. Dick

I've been enjoying a book of early short stories by Philip K. Dick, master science fiction author. These stories, from the early fifties, are filled with mind-bending ideas and less than stellar prose.

The Preserving Machine was published in June 1953. Besides a narrator, the main character is named Doc Labyrinth. The action takes place in Los Angeles.  Dick opens with a description of suburban L.A.

I was standing by the barbecue pit, warming my hands.  It was a clear cold day.  The sunny Los Angeles sky was almost cloud-free.  Beyond Labyrinth's modest house a gently undulating expanse of green stretched off until it reached the mountains - a small forest that gave the illusion of wilderness within the very limits of the city.  "Well?" I said. "Then the Machine did work the way you expected?"

This Machine, the Preserving Machine, is pretty amazing.  It preserves sheet music in a most remarkable manner.  And not just any sheet music, but classical music in particular. 

This is how he came to think of the Preserving Machine.  One evening as he sat in his living room in his deep chair, the gramophone on low, a vision came to him.  He perceived in his mind a strange sight, the last score of a Schubert trio, the last copy, dog-eared, well-thumbed, lying on the floor of some gutted place, probably a museum.

A bomber moved overhead.  Bombs fell, bursting the museum to fragments, bringing the walls down in a roar of rubble and plaster.  In the debris the last score disappeared, lost in the rubbish, to rot and mold.

And then, in Doc Labyrinth's vision, he saw the score come burrowing out, like some buried mole.  Quick like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.

If music had that faculty, the ordinary, everyday instinct of survival which every worm and mole has, how different it would be!  If music could be transformed into living creatures, animals with claws and teeth, then music might survive.  If only a Machine could be built, a Machine to process musical scores into living forms.

This being a Science Fiction story, you know that the machine gets built - and in due course music animals are created.  The above quote might lead you to expect animals based on particular works, like a Schubert trio.  Instead, Dick gives us composer animals.  For example:

After that came the schubert animal.  The schubert animal was silly, an adolescent sheep-creature that ran this way and that, foolish and wanting to play.

Once they become animals, their name is no longer capitalized.  The mozart animal is a bird, beethoven a beetle, brahms an insect, stravinsky another bird.

The wagner animal was large and splashed with deep colors.  It seemed to have quite a temper, and Doc Labyrinth was a little afraid of it, as were the bach bugs, the round ball-like creatures, a whole flock of them, some large, some small, that had been obtained for the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues.

Of course, all these critters escape into the nearby forest and begin to evolve and compete.  Some survive, others succumb.  The Doc feeds an evolved bach bug back into the machine, reconverting it into sheet music which he then performs at the piano.

I listened to the music.  It was hideous.  I have never heard anything like it.  It was distorted, diabolical, without sense or meaning, except, perhaps, an alien, disconcerting meaning that should never have been there.  I could believe only with the greatest effort that it had once been a Bach Fugue, part of a most orderly and respected work.

Had I been writing this story, instead of Philip K. Dick,  the reconverted music would have been very strange but not hideous.  Music as it grows and evolves should try new, unfamiliar ideas, some of which will survive, others not.  Survival of the fittest?  Eventually the musical unfamiliarity ought to fade in our ears, allowing new species to contribute to our enjoyment.  Adaptation and evolution, either of music or animals, ought to be the real reason that they flourish and reproduce.  Of course pieces of music which you never hear will not survive or procreate.

These days classical music already has a fully functional, well-oiled preserving machine - in the form of symphony orchestras and opera companies and classical radio stations only too happy to reproduce the same limited number of works over and over again for audiences eager to hear their favorites one more time.  This machine discourages adaptation but it does a good job of preserving any piece which can claw its way into the repertory.  A new work, which at first might sound hideous, diabolical or alien, will never find an audience if it has to compete against the well-entrenched, machine-preserved herds of beethoven, schubert and wagner animals roaming our cultural landscape.

Animal Tags: Philip K Dick. . . The Preserving Machine. . . science fiction. . . classical music

A Thousand and One RedHeaders

Today Mixed Meters begins its seventh year.   Itchy.  Here's a short post from that first day, September 16, 2005 (also a Friday), entitled In Which David Rewrites the Pledge of Allegiance.  I was terse then.

You might have noticed that the layout of Mixed Meters has changed. The original version had gotten far too complex.  This is much simpler.   I will continue to tinker with the new look as time permits - until I'm bored.

Mixed Meters is proud to announce another, more important milestone: the number of possible RedHeaders has surpassed one thousand.

You ask "What are Redheaders?" They are the red random irrelevant phrases in the yellow box at the top of each Mixed Meters page, just under "Life Is Too Short To Listen To Ugly Music".  A different one is chosen each time the page is loaded.

The script which picks the random phrase each time was purloined from here.  Thanks to whoever wrote that.

Here are the first ten RedHeaders:

TagLine[0] = "Mixed Meters - now with 25% fewer Olympic Promos"
TagLine[1] = "Mixed Meters - produced in a facility that also processes peanuts."
TagLine[2] = "Mixed Meters - now with three rows of stadium seating."
TagLine[3] = "Mixed Meters - now a Party Of One."
TagLine[4] = "Mixed Meters - watching the world grasp for straws."
TagLine[5] = "Mixed Meters - you could get money back every time you visit."
TagLine[6] = "Mixed Meters - still trying to meet recruiting goals"
TagLine[7] = "We admit it - the weather girl*s sweaters are too tight."
TagLine[8] = "Only a few small animals were harmed producing this blog."
TagLine[9] = "Mixed Meters - Similar to the intersection of two country roads."

I've always liked the one about two country roads - not that I know what it means.  Many of them make no sense.  Some are downright embarrassing.  Some refer to news items extremely far out of date.  Many refer to television commercials.  There are in-jokes for musicians.  And pseudo-clever word play.

TagLine[214] = "Mixed Meters - not recommended if your life is like the Springer Show."
TagLine[215] = "Mixed Meters - Breaking the Endless Cycle of Boom and Chuck."
TagLine[216] = "Mixed Meters - Now With Calming Oatmeal."
TagLine[217] = "Mixed Meters - The Felt Hand of Dog."
TagLine[218] = "Mixed Meters urges you to be a pliant consumer."
TagLine[219] = "Mixed Meters - a Whack-a-Mole from Hell."

There's a joke:

TagLine[277] = "Two Muffins are baking.  One says SURE IS HOT IN HERE.  The other replies HOLY SHIT! A TALKING MUFFIN!"

There are quotes from famous musicians:

TagLine[447] = "Never Leave A Wet One On Your Neighbor's Doorknob (Joe Newman)"
TagLine[449] = "It*s Much Better Than The Prefabricated Concrete Coal Bunker (Bonzo Dog Band)"

TagLine[731] = "Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn (Alan Jay Lerner)"

And a short science fiction story:

TagLine[629] = "He had awakened screaming, clutching the transport controls in terror, for so many days in a row that hearing birds chirping and seeing sunlight streaming through the studio window caused him to wonder whether he had somehow transformed into a piano sonata by Beethoven or Brahms."

It just goes on and on.

TagLine[1000] = "Life is too short to read Mixed Meters"

Here's a picture of a dragon fly which I snapped this morning in our backyard. (It should enlarge if you click it.)

TagLine[102] = "Mixed Meters - because no one gives a fuck what I think."

ADDENDUM:  Apparently Google's robots are starting to catalog the redheaders along with the actual Mixed Meters' posts.  Here's a result from someone who searched for the terms "mixed meters in music"

The Lifespan of Classical Music | Mixed Meters
mixedmeters.com/2011/06/lifespan-of-classical-music.htmlJun 12, 2011 – Mixed Meters.
LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO LISTEN TO UGLY MUSIC.
Strange Blog Behavior May Be Caused By Elevated Hormone Levels ...

TagLine[471] = "Strange Blog Behavior May Be Caused By Elevated Hormone Levels"

RedHeader Tags: Mixed Meters. . . Red Headers. . . David Ocker

September Eleventh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The pictures came from here and here.

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

On Labor Day, Think of the Problems of CEOs

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

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

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

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

The four articles are:

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

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

W.W. writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the definition of psychopathy from Wikipedia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Harris asks:

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

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

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

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

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

 Let me repeat the last sentence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other MM rants on similar subjects:

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

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



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

The Peter Schmid Trio

Here are two recordings made this summer by my buddies The Peter Schmid Trio.

The trio is:
Peter Schmid, piano
Cornel Reasoner, bass
Luis 'Pulpo' Jolla, drums

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Work For Food  (339 seconds)

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Too Poor To Be A Whore  (579 seconds)

Recorded at Aphrodita Japonica Studios, Pasadena, California
Produced by David Ocker
Copyright © 2011 - All Rights Reserved

Let us know what you think.


Trio Tags: jazz trio . . . Peter Schmid

Frustration Etude Number One

Here's my guarantee: none of the words in this post will be the F-Word itself.  However, you should be aware that The Word is essential to my subject.  You'll have to think about The Word if you read more.  Now is the time to quit reading if you're offended by even thinking about that particular profane taboo word.  (Yeah.  You know that I know that you know what it is.)

Be warned: the guarantee is limited to written words only.  It does NOT cover the short musical composition, Frustration Etude Number One.  You'll find the listening link below.

I've engaged in a form of f-ing self-censorship by not using The Word directly, only referring to it euphemistically,  because I'm trying to be sensitive to the feelings of my readers.  The Word has previously appeared casually elsewhere in Mixed Meters.  (Click here to see where.) I'm sure it will again.  I'm confident that those people who actually click through to hear my music are strong enough to withstand the onslaught of profanity to come.

I hear you asking, why did I compose a piece where the only lyric is ... The F-Word?

Because I too often find myself using That Word for a particular purpose and I would like to stop using it that way.  The particular unwanted purpose is to scream F*** at the top of my voice as an expression of my frustration.  I only do this in private - like while I'm driving.  Sometimes in the shower.

However, there's a problem with this behavior: screaming F*** at the top of my voice doesn't really salve my frustrations.

So I attempted a very personal compositional experiment.  I theorized that featuring "The Word" in a piece of music would help me give up using it.  Writing music has to be good for something, right?  Maybe it can help me deal with my frustrations.

So far the experiment seems to be a qualified success.  Of course there is no way to test the theory scientifically.  All the evidence is anecdotal.  To be safe I added "Number One" to the title because I expect future doses of this musico-linguistic medication, in the form of other similar etudes, might be required.  I have not composed a Frustration Etude Number Two ... yet.  (Send in some recordings of you or your friends screaming/singing/saying The F-Word.  Maybe that would inspire to compose a second etude.)

Frustration Etude Number One contains The F-Word over 30 times.  This is one of those pieces which I've described as being "my finger in your eye".  It also has a lot of microtonal disonances and untempered intervals.  Whats more, this piece quotes in vain a certain famous American folk melody, one many people might consider sacred or spiritual.  Consider yourself warned.


If you do decide to listen to this etude, you should be very concerned whether other people, for example co-workers or children or Republicans, can hear it.  This is the essence of NSFW - Not Safe For Work.

Click this picture of the rusty thing on a telephone pole to hear Frustration Etude Number One
Copyright © 2011  by David Ocker - 100 seconds

Here's an interesting article on the history and legal aspects of saying THAT word in public.  Some of the stories are pretty funny.



Take a Flying Duck Tags: F-word. . . profanity

Facelike - Part 2

The previous post Facelike - Part 1 showed pictures of some faces I've noticed as they keep tabs on me.

Today, more faces.  These pictures show which faces were produced either by non-human behavior or by human-caused random accident.

The tendency to see patterns (not just faces) in random data is discussed in an article Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise by Michael Shermer. It was published in Scientific American so you know it has to be good. Here's a quote:

Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.

We begin with a kindly tree-bark face, a face-on-Mars face on a sidewalk and an African mask leaf.

 

Now let's look at a Barney-ish dinosaur-head paint splatter, a conspiracy of sunglasses and a leaf in the grass and a tree trunk wearing lipstick.

Click the pictures.  They get bigger.

Here are a couple more tree-bark faces:  Sunburned Bamboo Face, Profile Tree and Scarface.  A previous Mixed Meters "I see faces in trees" post (from way back in 2006) was Make Like A Tree and...

Here's a post from some other blog showing faces in bread.

Face Tags: facelike