Moby Dick at San Francisco Opera

We had some world series the other day, so we should have a little opera.  A friend told us we could get senior rush tickets at 11 am of the day of the performance, so we walked down to the opera house and got in line.  We were in the orchestra, row S, for $30 each.  Student rush tickets are only $25.  And there are also tickets for a standing area for $10. 

Moby Dick was commissioned by the Dallas Opera for the opening of its new opera hall in 2010.  Jake Heggie was asked to write it.  He was at the pre-opera talk an hour before the performance.

You may not take pictures during the performance, but digital imaging and human imagination made made the ship and the ocean real on stage.  Particularly cool was the curved stage with 'steps' built into it.  This allowed cast members to be at different levels of the ship.  It also allowed them to be in rowboats (with the help of digital boat outlines and a digital ocean) and the fall overboard - sliding down the curved part of the stage to the floor.  You can see it in this picture below of Captain Ahab (Jay Hunter Morris) taking a curtain call, without his peg leg.

Here's the whole cast.

 

All the parts are male, but they used a soprano to play the 14 year old Pip.  Heggie explained in the talk that 14 year old boys were not the most reliable, would have to be miked, and his voice would be changing.  Using an older female soprano seemed the obvious solution.  

 Here's Heggie after the talk and before the performance. 

I liked the music, but I have no idea how to discuss it so I won't.  But you can judge for yourself in the Youtube video from UC television.  He goes to the piano to talk about Moby Dick at about 29 minutes. 

Is The Election Going To Be Electronically Stolen?

"Why is Mitt Romney so confident?
In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney."

 This comes from a UK Progressive magazine article alleging massive voter machine manipulation across the US in the 2012 Republican primaries and the 2008 and 2010 elections. It goes on:

This goes well beyond Romney’s investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold’s close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate’s son Tagg Romney) insist there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes.

The whole article is here. 

So far, the only coverage I can find on this story is on blogs and political websites, but my experience with the Anchorage Municipal election in Anchorage last April have made me much more aware of the potential for election fraud.  In that election about half the polling places ran out of ballots;  a Fundamentalist Christian political operative sent out emails telling their members they could register to vote the day of the election [which he knew to be false] which resulted in significantly higher numbers of unregistered voters showing up and disrupting the election, and a election officials were told if voting machine seals were broken to not worry about it.  I learned a lot about voting machines and how susceptible they are to tampering.  People were upset when there were no ballots, but most people were resistant to the idea of election manipulation.  I also began to read the Brad Blog, which covers election fraud.  There's nasty folks out there who believe in winning by any means possible. 

But I also learned how - yawn - resistant most people are to these issues. 

The UK Progressive article goes on to cite retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho who investigated voting in his home state of Arizona:

When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to  20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.

Here's a new (posted Friday night) video from The Intercept of Duniho and another plaintiff in the their suit against Pima County discussing why they are suing.




Basically, they are asking for accountability of the voting tallies, to randomly compare numbers of the voting machines against a hand count.  Something, as I understand it, the Anchorage Assembly seems to have agreed to for the next Municipal election.

My concerns, based on what I saw in April Municipal elections, are these:

• Cognitive dissonance - people's belief in American democracy is so strong, that reports of election fraud are met with disbelief.
• People whose party wins, are even more reluctant to want to pursue allegations of election fraud.
• Because the fraud happens on computer chips, totally unseen, people have trouble understanding it.  ("Said Duniho, 'It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.'”]
• Because most Americans are statistically illiterate, statistical evidence of voter fraud means nothing to them. 

 When the Romney votes start coming in a week from Tuesday, how many people are going to just accept the election and how many will be listening to the evidence that I'm guessing will also come in about vote tampering? At the very least, we need to take the charges seriously and have them investigated.  For that to happen, enough people have to get angry enough to write letters and/or take to the streets.  Seriously.  Remember the quote above about how all the voting machine companies are owned by people with a big stake in Republican candidates. 

Thanks to Gryphen who has a video up with an interview with Duniho's NSA colleague Dennis Campbell (and editor of UK Progressive magazine.)

Remember too, this could be wrong.  We don't have collaborating alternative sources.  But it feels worth paying attention to. 

[UPDATE Nov 5:  I've done another, related post - Arguing Over the Biggest Threat to Fair Elections. ]

Fluffy White Cat

Xiongxiong is our friends' senior catizen. A Chinese immigrant to the US.

World Series - Almost Live

He was working his phone with his buddy who was trying to get tickets.  The price at the moment was $500 for bleacher seats on Stubhub.  He said he'd take that for third base, but not bleachers. 

We felt like the accidental tourists this afternoon.  We were on the train from Santa Clara to San Francisco.  All we saw was black and orange.  Our train, it turned out, was ending two blocks from the Giants ball park about an hour before the second game of the world series. 

So it seemed I should walk over to the stadium and check things out before heading for our son's place.

The radio station was handing out posters and then taking pictures of the people holding their posters. 

It felt right - Myron Stephens and then Andrew Glass

I had decided to leave my camera in my pocket, even though we were sightseeing, sort of.  We were at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

Bergamot Station is the historical name for the site on which the gallery complex is located, dating back to 1875 when it was a stop for the Red Line trolley running from Los Angeles to the Santa Monica Pier. Bergamot is a flower of the mint family that once flourished in the area.

The trolly was shut down in 1953 (who needs public transportation anyway?) and eventually the city of Santa Monica converted this into  a big art complex - lots of galleries and the Santa Monica Art Museum. 

But I wasn't going to blog this trip.  Except when we got into the artla gallery this picture caught my eye.  Tim pointed out that this was NOT a blackboard, and the pictures were not taped on it.  It was all painted by Myron Stephens. 








I looked closer.  The tape even has an air bubble.  But there is no tape, just paint. 


Tim pointed out that the chalk was painted with 5 hair brushes.  Part of me doesn't need to know that the artist worked long




and painstakingly to make the painting.  The final outcome is what is important.  And as frivolous as this seems at first, there's something about it.  It talks to me about interpersonal relationships and however old we get, we can get go back into childlike innocence when we make a new connection with a special person.



But there were other works too.


And I really liked these pieces by Andrew Glass.

Can you find the details on top in the whole picture below? Click to enlarge

The paintings had tiny numbers next to them and I didn't keep track of them.  They linked to a price sheet.  The pieces ranged from $1500 to $3000.  Art prices are pretty arbitrary - it depends how close an artist is to people with money and someone who knows how to convince the buyers it's worth the cost.  We are in a getting rid of period, rather than a collecting period of our lives.  But when we've bought stuff it was because we liked it, not with an eye to investment. 

I hope if the artist sees this post, he'll forgive what my camera's done to the colors.  They're sort of close, but not quite.  Here's an excerpt of his artist statement on his website: 

"It is the interplay of materials such as acrylic gels, transparent pigments, alkyd resins and inks that informs this process for me. I am fascinated by the stories they can tell. I want to explore a tactile sensibility, in other words to touch what is on the surface, however still searching for what is lying underneath. With painting, I want to tell a story, uncover and understand what has come before, or is still hidden. This is not only an aesthetic process, but also one that allows me to invent history."

The paintings themselves are available at artla.  

That's Tim in the corner

These two above are details of the painting on the left below.

The door to artla is to the right of the white car at Bergamot Center. 

You can read a September 2012 interview with Andrew Glass here.

[UPDATE:  People who saw this early, might notice I made some changes.  I was confused.  Although I was surprised by the starkly different styles of the chalkboard and then the work below, I clearly hadn't listened carefully to Tim.  Actually, these are two different artists, which makes much more sense. Sorry for any confusion.]

Beach Guard Dog

I ran down to the beach the other morning and watched a guy run into the surf.  I looked up on the beach to see this guy was guarding his bud's clothes while he was off in the surf. 

















And he was out in the water, not worrying about someone stealing his stuff. 

[Video Fixed, Sorry] Baseball And Other Value Sources Of State House Candidate Andy Josephson

My goal was to interview pairs of candidates running against each other with a focus on what their personal values are and how those values might affect the decisions they would make if elected to the legislature.  It seems to me their basic values are more revealing than asking questions about current issues.

I thought I'd start with the two candidates running for the House in my district - the new district 15.

Basically this is Northern Lights on the north, Pine and Boniface on the east, Tudor to Elmore to Dimond on the south, and New Seward, MacInnes, LaTouche on the west. 

I thought it would be fairly easy because I knew both candidates.  I've known Democrat Andy Josephson's father, not well, for a long time.   Dick Traini, the Republican, graduated from the Masters of Public Administration program 25 years ago and had been my student.  He's told me that his education has given him a much broader view of local politics and an understanding of the balance of public and private interests than he would have had.  He's also been my local Assembly member for a long time.  (Assembly is a non-partisan office and Dick has been a registered Independent until fairly recently.)  I've voted for him, though in this race I did contribute to Josephson's campaign.  Dick knew that but he agreed right away to participate. I was able to get Andy's done fairly quickly.  But Dick's Assembly obligations got in the way and we weren't able to schedule a time to do the video.  Before I left for LA I let Dick know I was going to proceed without his video, since there wouldn't be enough time before the election when I got back. 

Andy Josephson

Basically, my idea was to probe the candidates to find out what their basic human values were, where they came from, and how they would affect their legislative decisions.

I wasn't going to edit - I would just let it run as they spoke.  That way there'd be no issues about my trying to make one candidate look better than another.  (It also would be a little slower than the video people normally see on television where there are lots of cuts, where the pauses are edited out, etc.)  I did start the interview and then stopped it and started over as the candidate - who is not used to doing video interviews - got a better sense of things.  He was also tapping the table and causing the camera to jiggle.  I've left out the original beginning.  Other than that, this is just what he said.

I've marked different parts of the video so you can jump to topics you want to hear. Click on the dots on the video bar at the bottom of the video screen.





Basically, Andy Josephson's values are influenced strongly by American culture;  by family, including playing baseball (starting about 2:40); and from friends.  His response to how he would decide on legislation starts at about 5:40 and is worth watching. This includes advice from trusted mentors who have more experience in the legislature than he has, the reality of time and needing to prioritize bills by importance, how it affects his district and what his constituents care about.    I asked how he'd handle demands from his party that conflicted with his values. I also asked if there were any dealbreakers - issues that he felt too strongly about to compromise.

So this will be my experiment on this.  I don't have a problem with something being entertainment as long as it's also substantive.  But when doing political videos, editing raises questions of whether I'm tyring to bias the video, so I've left the video pretty much what he said without editing.

I left out, as I said above, his first attempt at this.  The point was for him to feel comfortable and to express himself as well as he could without spending a lot of time.

I'd also say that he hasn't seen the finished product and thus has not approved or disapproved of it. 

Getting New Ideas From Old Pictures and an Old Poem

Book reviews give us glimpses of different worlds and possibilities.  Here are a couple from Sunday's LA Times.  Two are about old photos and one about old documents of US history.    Here's a quote that caught my attention. 

"Sandweiss believes Cushman made a deliberate choice not to become a professional photographer:  "He chose to stand back from the world of professional artists, documentarians or writers like his first cousin, John Steinbeck, whose circles he traveled on the edge of*.  That's not what he was about."

This seemed relevant to add to the collection of possible explanations of what I'm doing on this blog. 

It comes from a review of  Eric Sandweiss' book of The Day in Its Color:  Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America.  How many collections of photography in people's closets and garages could be curated into historically and artistically important archives?  A lot, I would guess if they landed in the right hands.  What distinguished this collection, apparently, was the a) it's one of the earliest Kodachrome collection, the photographer kept track of each slide, and he apparently had an eye for a wide variety of things.


Also reviewed is Ransom Riggs Talking Pictures images and Messages Rescued from the Past. This is a collection of old photos found by the author that had something written on them.  A glimpse into the stories of people's lives. 

"All nations are places, . . .but they are also acts of imagination.  Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable.  The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting."

Jill Lepore is a Harvard history professor and her book, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, takes a new look at historical documents and offers new interpretations.  For example, she argues, according to book reviewer Julia M. Klein, that Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" written in 1860 is about slavery, more than about Paul Revere's ride.

Among Lepore's other subjects are Benjamin Franklin's frequently misunderstood compendium of aphorisms, "The Way to Wealth"; Tom Paine's brilliant "Common Sense" and mostly tragic life; Noah Webster's initially derided dictionary; Edgar Allan Poe's unabashedly popular, self-parodying horror stories; and the art of propagandistic campaign biographies.

Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmingsc is also covered.  


*. . .whose circle he traveled on the edge of."  I'm not a grammar purists.  I think some dangling participles sound perfectly fine. I try not to leave sentences like this in the blog.  I would have probably rewritten the whole sentence to avoid this awkward way of saying he was on the outer edge of Steinbeck's circle. 

LA Skeletons, Morning Glories, Gingko, Studebaker, And More

As we walked from the bus stop to my Mom's from the airport, and looked at the huge variation of vegetation, invasive species came to mind.  LA is an invasive species incubator.  I don't know if that's true, but so much grows here.  Of course if they stopped bringing in water from Northern California and the Colorado River, probably most things would just die.  (I looked and it is a big problem.  And animal species too.)

In any case, here some parts of the walk that attracted my camera eye.

Wall of morning glories

Health food store juices

I saw these leaves on this tree and I knew I'd seen them.  I mentioned to J I thought there was a bunch of these on the campus of People's University in Beijing where I taught 3 months about eight years ago.  And she said, "gingko"?  I looked it up when we got home and I'm relatively certain that's what this is.  There's a long description of gingko's at an Ohio State website which discretely says the female tree's fruit can be malodorous.  A forum at Chow is more direct:

the presence of a bunch of old (and quite beautiful to look at) female ginkos kept me from buying a house once, about fifteen years ago, just by the smell) (Boy, can you imagine a backyard full o' ginko and durian?!!!!)

RFGS

By Rich Gould-Saltman on Sep 30, 2004 02:30 PM

The campus where I attended college back east is filled with gingko trees, especially in the quadrangle. At certain times of the year, it was like walking into a sewer. Gingko seemed like a perfect name for a tree that was so "stinko."

By Jack Flash on Sep 30, 2004 03:24 PM

you must be referring to Penn. I went there for undergrad and the smell was horrible from the trees!!

By kelly on Sep 30, 2004 07:37 PM

Yup!

I couldn't resist.  The LA Times Sunday edition endorsed Obama for president. 

From Barry Leppan on the Studebakers Drivers Forum:

According to the Hamilton Spectator, the last Studebaker to be built (a 1966 Cruiser, 283 Chevy V8) came down the assembly line on the morning of March 17th, 1966, in Hamilton, Ontario.

However, some of our local Hamilton Chapter members, who worked there at the time, will tell you it was really produced the previous afternoon, March 16th.

It is most probable that the 16th is correct, and the press release and all the TV, etc. coverage took place the next morning, the 17th!

The placard for the car in the Studebaker National Museum reads March 16th, 1966.

Regardless, it brought to an end 114 years of vehicle manufacture under the Studebaker name.

A post at Cars in Depth by Ronnie Schreiber challenges that:

According to what I’ve read, and this seems to be confirmed in a few places, there’s no question that assembly of CKD Studebakers continued after the shutdown of the Hamilton, ON plant in at least two places, Australia and Israel, as those companies used up their last remaining kits and components. There is some indication that assembly in Israel continued through the end of 1966 and possibly into 1967, which would make them the last Studebakers ever that rolled off the lines.

 He's got some Israeli post cards up as part of his evidence.   In any case, the car above is over 45 years old.  I wonder how it passes the California emissions test.

This appears to be either an unripe persimmon or one that is more yellow than orange.  Or maybe it isn't a persimmon at all.

 

The people in the area around my mom's place go in for Halloween in a big way.  These two life sized skeletons were hanging from a three story house.  There is something more than a little disturbing about this.   I'll do some more Halloween stuff before we get back to Anchorage.  

If You Get High Enough, There's Blue Sky

We left Anchorage just after midnight.  It had been another bright, sunny day and I got some leaves raked and flower beds mulched. 








I worked on my Chinese homework, but crashed pretty quickly on the plane.  It was 4:30 am when we got to Seattle.  Dark and wet. 







But before long we were above the clouds, barely.

And then they got closer. 

 

And then we were in them.

 

And then below them over LA.

Tend days or so to visit my mom with a side trip to SF to visit my son and dil.  Despite the clouds, it's warm - high 60s headed for 70 or more.  My eyes are closing.  Later.