Benoit Mandelbrot

Tyondai Braxton's Dead Strings

Georges Méliès: Le Mélomane

This is brilliant...

50,000-Watt Radio Broadcasting? Bah!

"Some ... may recall Top 40 deejays in America boasting of their stations' powerful fifty-thousand-watt signals.  Consider, then, that Radio Luxembourg was seven times more powerful than that, and the [Voice of America], in Munich, twenty times more powerful, aiming to reach Soviet territory."

—From Barry Kernfeld's recent book, Pop Song Piracy

...and here it says 1.3 million Watts:

A short feature on Willis Conover's VOA jazz broadcasts:

N.H.O.P.

Peter Ablinger's "Cecil Taylor"

...from Voices and Piano (1998)

B.B King and Ray Charles

Wifi Networks with Attention-Getting Names...

Lauren Collins mentions some in this New Yorker piece (not available free online).  For instance, "Stop Cooking Indian!!!," "We Can Hear You Having Sex," and "DieTrustfundersDie."

In other news, the New Yorker seems to have pretty much turned into a slightly more thoughtful version of Time Magazine (or at least what Time was a few decades ago).  These days they most just publish fairly short articles on public events.  The lead pieces in the last two issues have been about "Occupy Wall Street."

Sonny Rollins Interview for the PBS Newshour

(Transcript here).  Rollins is in Washington, DC, to receive a Kennedy Center Honor this weekend.  Here are some out-takes that weren't included in the Newshour T.V. broadcast:

His description of Charlie Parker's musical contribution at 4:00 is interesting... seems like he thinks it was about unifying the music with long-range structural connections.

More on Rollins here, here, here, and here.

Joseph Cornell's "A Legend for Fountains"

Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera"

Possible Summer Reading for Rioting Penn State Students?

These studious folks could warm up with Katha Pollitt's recent column, in which she politely suggests that Penn State Officials "Cancel the season. Fire everybody involved in the child abuse scandal," and then goes a step further:

Maybe cancel college football too. In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system. 

...and then perhaps they could spend some time perusing Taylor Branch's widely publicized piece for The Atlantic, which includes the following anecdote involving a former Penn State president:

"I'm not hiding,"  Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.” ... [S]ince signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, [Vaccaro] had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. ...

 “Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

...and finally they could dip into Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus.

Through the Grapevine...

Hendrik Hertzberg at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival

While he was in college, New Yorker political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg reported on the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival for the Harvard Crimson.  (The review was co-authored by someone identified only as R.K.I.).  Read the entire review here.

Among the performances Hertzberg heard were Thelonious Monk with Pee Wee Russell (download the full set here):

...and the Martial Solal trio (listen on Grooveshark here).  He also heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Cannonball Adderley, Nina Simone, and Sonny Rollins with Coleman Hawkins.  But evidently he left after Jimmy Smith's set on the final night and consequently didn't catch the John Coltrane Quartet, who closed out the weekend:

The Newport festival line-up that year was:

It's Official: Publishers Hate Libraries

Penguin is the latest publisher to suspend e-book availability for library users.  According to this report: 

Publishers have become increasingly nervous about the growing use of e-books by library users, who can check out the books remotely without ever entering a library. The concern is that consumers who own e-readers will stop buying e-books and begin borrowing them for free instead.

Naturally, publishers have always wished that people would buy their books instead of borrowing them from libraries or purchasing them second-hand.  But until now, owing to the "first-sale doctrine" (without which libraries as we know them couldn't exist), they haven't found a technological or legal means of preventing this practice (although they have been able to charge libraries much higher fees for periodical subscriptions than what they charge individual subscribers).  Now, with e-books, they can do what they've always wanted to do, because when you purchase an e-book you don't receive anything but a license to use the content subject to various conditions.  Next time you buy a $9.99 e-book for your Kindle or iPad, bear in mind that you might be able to borrow a print copy from your local library for free.


Interestingly, the "first-sale doctrine" has recently been cited as legal grounds for re-selling digital music files...  

Hatchet Jobs on Jobs?

So now, after all the understandable adulation in the wake of the sad, premature death of Steve Jobs, come the contrarians, such as Malcolm Gladwell, who argues in this article that, rather than being a visionary innovator, "Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them [and] he did not like it when the same thing was done to him."  And then there's Eric Alterman, who charges in this column that Jobs "treated the people who actually manufacture Apple products like serfs and hoarded his $8.3 billion fortune to no apparent purpose."  I guess Gladwell and Alterman are taking to heart the 1990s Apple slogan: "Think Different."

New Mosaic Boxed Set... and a Thought on Coleman Hawkins's Dark Ages

Mosaic records will soon be releasing an eight-disk boxed set of Coleman Hawkins recordings spanning the years from 1922–47.  Interestingly, the collection contains none of the sides that Hawkins made while he lived in Europe from 1934–39.  Perhaps there were licensing issues that prevented Mosaic from releasing any tracks from this period, when the saxophonist was in his prime; he made about fifty of them, according to this and this.  Unfortunately, this omission is likely to reinforce the rather closed-minded misperception in American circles that comparatively little of significance occurred in the jazz world outside of the U.S. before the end of World War II.  From reading a lot of jazz history texts, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hawkins vanished from the face of the earth for five years only to reappear out of the blue in New York in 1939 to record "Body and Soul."  Meanwhile, he was happily playing things like this, filmed in the Netherlands in 1935:

Lush Life

Milford Graves on Humans and Animals

"If you pay attention to nature, especially animals, you can learn a lot.  Animals give their offspring a small introduction and then leave them alone.  Humans have a way of trying to take charge of each other, and to try to clone each other.  A dog or a cat doesn't say to their offspring, 'OK, kitten or puppy, it's time for class now—I'm going to give you a test on how to do this or that.'  An animal will say: 'Watch me.'"

The Andy Warhol Authentication Board Closes

This article about the demise of the Andy Warhol Foundation's authentication board underplays the extent of the controversy surrounding the board's actions in recent years.  The board had been "deauthenticating" accepted Warhol works—including one that had been reproduced as the front cover of the artist's catalogue raisonée while he was still alive—rendering them worthless.  For more details, see Richard Dorment's New York Review of Books articles here, here, and here, and also this exchange in the letters page.  For the philosophical context, see Arthur Danto's classic essay "The Art World."

Here's a nice documentary on the whole saga:

Henry Flynt: Violin Strobe

Check out these videos by Benjamin Piekut of Henry Flynt giving a walking tour of lower Manhattan.

Boycott Routledge and Ashgate

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences might consider boycotting profit-driven academic publishers such as Routledge and Ashgate, who aren't affiliated with university presses and publish huge quantities of academic scholarship of highly variable quality—the admittedly imperfect peer-review process seems to be administered even less judiciously than usual—at usorious prices.  Let's continue  to institutionalize a reliable peer-review process for free, open-access online journals so that tenure and promotion committees will respect them and college professors and instructors will be able to keep their jobs without resorting to publishing with presses that charge extortionate prices that neither individuals nor many libraries can afford.  Not that university presses are much better, what with all the $150-plus volumes they're putting out.  Now that I think about it, perhaps we could agree not to buy or cite anything priced at over $100.  A less extreme but more subversive approach would be to include the list price of each volume whenever we cite it in a footnote or bibliography.

Ray Charles... ABC

Bruno Latour

James Wood, Personal Libraries, and the Age of the iPad

In this short essay (not available free online), James Wood reflects on his late father-in-law's four-thousand-volume personal library, doubting whether one's books really say anything profound about oneself, and musing on the emotion-laden task of dispersing a departed loved one's collection.  Though the words "iPad" and "kindle" are conspicuously absent from this essay—perhaps because Woods wished, consciously or not, to present his reflections from a pre-digital perspective—it's hard to avoid thinking that the onset of the age of the e-book is what makes Wood's piece especially poignant and autumnal.

How will we pass on our e-book libraries to our children and grandchildren?  We don't actually own our e-books—we only purchase a digital license—so we don't have the ability to freely lend, bequeath, or re-sell them to others, as we do with "real" books, which we own outright.  And will e-book formats even remain viable in the longterm?  (You can still read a Gutenberg bible today, more than five hundred years after its publication.)  Or will they soon become obsolete, requiring us to repeatedly re-purchase the same books in new formats, as we did with recorded music?

Chick Corea at the Pompidou Center

"Elektric City," from 1986 (note the view of Notre Dame and the Pantheon at 1:30):

Hmmm....

Joan Didion: Money was the Clincher?

It's rare for a serious author to be completely forthright in stating that money is their overriding creative incentive.  But that's just what Joan Didion apparently acknowledged in this interview about her new book Blue Nights:

Didion decided to return her advance to Alfred A. Knopf and abandon the book, which is titled after the long blue twilights of spring. “I thought, ‘I can just give the money back,’” she explains. Her agent and friend Lynn Nesbit suggested that she finish the book first and then talk about whether to publish it. Other friends urged her on. Didion tells me she finally looked at her book contract and saw how much she would have to return. “I could have bought an apartment with it,” she says. So she went back to writing the book.

Here's an interview from 2000:

David Pogue on You Rock

Since recorded music has little marketplace value in and of itself in the age of online file sharing, music  increasingly gets commodified as an adjunct to other, more commercially viable, media.  One consequence is that music sometimes ends up being reviewed in the mainstream by critics who have precious little experience writing about music (and maybe even scant interest in music at all).  For example, Bjork's recent album, Biophilia, was reviewed by the New York Times's video-game critic.  And now comes technology critic David Pogue reviewing the new You Rock, which appears to be the latest development in the convergence of video games and "real" (whatever that means) musical instruments (see Kiri Miller's forthcoming book, Playing Along, for more details).

So, I guess it's almost inevitable that we end up reading gaffes such as the following, from Mr. Pogue:

the You Rock lets you do some stunts you can’t do on a real guitar, like Tap Mode. That’s when you don’t pluck the strings at all. Instead, you play entirely on the neck, as though it’s a weird sort of fretted keyboard.

Hmm... I guess this means folks like Stanley Jordan and Eddie Van Halen are pretty much just chopped liver?

Adieu, André Hodeir

The great violinist, composer, novelist, and critic André Hodeir, who founded the field of jazz analysis, has died at the age of ninety, according to some early news reports.  I wrote about him briefly back in January.

Here is Hodeir's 1952 musique concrète masterpiece, Jazz et Jazz, featuring Martial Solal:

Here he plays the violin, at the age of twenty-one:

...and here is the complete text of his book Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence.

Tom Waits's Vocal Exercises

Start listening at 12:30...

Terry Gross compares Waits's exercises to  Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate (listen here, and see the score here).

A Clarification and Some Further Thoughts About Ornette & Sonny

Interestingly, Ethan Iverson thinks I'm square because I wrote that Ornette Coleman's solo on "Sonnymoon for Two" (on Sonny Rollins's Road Shows Vol. 2 album) contains some corny blues licks.  I thought I was critiquing Coleman for being conservative!  I'd rather Coleman had played something along the lines of this:

(Just kidding... but only barely!)  Corniness is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder, but let there be no doubt that Ornette Coleman is one of the greatest living blues players (read more about it in Lewis Porter's 1994 article or check out the saxophonist's blistering 1958 solo on "Ramblin'" from the Hillcrest Club tapes with Paul Bley).  I just think he didn't have time to find his groove at Carnegie Hall, which isn't surprising—how would you feel, making a guest appearance as a sideman at someone else's Carnegie Hall birthday concert, and walking on stage midway through a song to play with a rhythm section you're not accustomed to?

I wonder whether Coleman's relatively conservative solo at the Carnegie Hall concert (excluding the soulful opening passage which Francis Davis unfairly calls a squeaky reed in the liner notes!) might actually have been the result of the altoist's attempt to adapt—very slightly—to the relatively straight-ahead ensemble.  I'd rather he'd stayed in his comfort zone and let the chips fall where they may.

In my view, some of the most fascinating collaborations between "inside" and "outside" players have been those in which neither compromised.  Perhaps the most famous example is the notorious Cecil Taylor—Mary Lou Williams concert.  But, interestingly, another instance occurred when Rollins himself, during his most experimental phase, recorded with Coleman Hawkins in 1963 (compare Hawkins's opening solo with Rollins's at 5:35):

Herbie Hancock Contains Multitudes...

Herbie Hancock began a recent solo piano recital by announcing that, while he really enjoys playing in a band because he can interact with other the musicians, he also likes playing solo because of all the freedom it allows.  He ended the recital by playing the keytar along with a pre-recorded rhythm track, precluding both the individual freedom and the collective interaction he professes to value.  Very well then, he contradicts himself...

Biophilia: Bjork Combats Music Piracy?

Bjork's new album, which comes accompanied by some snazzy iphone/ipad apps that, according to this review, basically present the music as a snazzy computer game, appears to be the music industry's latest creative maneuver in its ongoing endeavor to endow recordings with non-downloadable enrichment... or, in this case, enrichment that, while downloadable, is wired shut so that it's not easily distributed (i.e. pirated) for free.  

 

Joelle Leandre:

William Parker:

Peter Kowald:

Barbara Dennerlein

Barbara Dennerlein playing the Hammond organ in 1988:

...and a church organ in 2009:

Elaine Brown

A 2008 lecture:

"Child in the World":

Doris Lessing

Rhys Chatham, Jacob Kassay, and Charles Baudelaire

Rhys Chatham performs at a Jacob Kassay gallery opening:

(Chatham's new LP is Rêve Parisien.)

"Rêve Parisien," by  Charles Baudelaire

A Constantin Guys

I

De ce terrible paysage,
Tel que jamais mortel n'en vit,
Ce matin encore l'image,
Vague et lointaine, me ravit.

Le sommeil est plein de miracles!
Par un caprice singulier
J'avais banni de ces spectacles
Le végétal irrégulier,

Et, peintre fier de mon génie,
Je savourais dans mon tableau
L'enivrante monotonie
Du métal, du marbre et de l'eau.

Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades,
C'était un palais infini
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l'or mat ou bruni;

Et des cataractes pesantes,
Comme des rideaux de cristal
Se suspendaient, éblouissantes,
À des murailles de métal.

Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades
Les étangs dormants s'entouraient
Où de gigantesques naïades,
Comme des femmes, se miraient.

Des nappes d'eau s'épanchaient, bleues,
Entre des quais roses et verts,
Pendant des millions de lieues,
Vers les confins de l'univers:

C'étaient des pierres inouïes
Et des flots magiques, c'étaient
D'immenses glaces éblouies
Par tout ce qu'elles reflétaient!

Insouciants et taciturnes,
Des Ganges, dans le firmament,
Versaient le trésor de leurs urnes
Dans des gouffres de diamant.

Architecte de mes féeries,
Je faisais, à ma volonté,
Sous un tunnel de pierreries
Passer un océan dompté;

Et tout, même la couleur noire,
Semblait fourbi, clair, irisé;
Le liquide enchâssait sa gloire

Dans le rayon cristallisé.

Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges

De soleil, même au bas du ciel,
Pour illuminer ces prodiges,
Qui brillaient d'un feu personnel!

Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait (terrible nouveauté!
Tout pour l'oeil, rien pour les oreilles!)
Un silence d'éternité.

II

En rouvrant mes yeux pleins de flamme
J'ai vu l'horreur de mon taudis,
Et senti, rentrant dans mon âme,
La pointe des soucis maudits;

La pendule aux accents funèbres
Sonnait brutalement midi,
Et le ciel versait des ténèbres
Sur le triste monde engourdi.

Domingo, Midgette, and the Definition of "Sabotage"

Evidently Placido Domingo, whose first language is Spanish, and who is not a professional writer, has a better grasp of the English language than Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette. In this review of Washington National Opera's Tosca production, Midgette wrote that Domingo "sabotaged" the performance:

All the performances were hampered, indeed sabotaged, by the conducting. Placido Domingo, appearing for the first time since stepping down as general director, is a wonderful singer. But rather than supporting the singers, his conducting either drowned them out or tripped them up.

And in this letter to the editor, Domingo protested that, "an act of sabotage is a destructive act done on purpose. Her remark suggests not only that I “spoiled” the performances but that I did so intentionally. This is unconscionable." Midgette responded on the newspaper's website without directly addressing Domingo's central point. Indeed, her evasive reply didn't even reference the term "sabotage," which connotes deliberate intent.  It's one thing to say that Domingo's an incompetent conductor, but that doesn't mean his intentions are nefarious.  Midgette should have at least showed a little contrition, no?

Here, Midgette moderates a conversation with several opera-world luminaries:

Thomas Quastoff Sings "Auf dem Flusse"

The score to Schubert's Winterreise is here.  And... this is perhaps not so successful.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

Louis Jordan in 1966, toward the end of his career:

Nikki Yanofsky Sings Cee Lo Green

I think this is one of the best things I've seen her do... much better than all the Ella Fitzgerald mimicry:

1955 TV show featuring Basie, Hampton, Vaughan, Cole, and more...

Carla Bley

Adrian Piper

Blues and the White Critic

"Some blues critics become irritated if even one other group of white people is at a club when they arrive. ... The irony is that the critics themselves are overwhelmingly white, but seemingly blind to their own race when critiquing a club for its own clientele."
       —From Jennifer Ryan's article "Beale Street Blues?" in Ethnomusicology.

John Searle

Timothy Andres Reimagines Mozart

The composer Timothy Andres has recomposed Mozart's "Coronation" piano concerto, adding a postmodern left-hand part.  Read about it and listen here.  The original score is here.

Bob Dylan's Unoriginal Paintings

It seems odd that some folks are shocked (shocked!) that Bob Dylan's current art show is full of paintings copied from widely circulating photographs, given that practically everything he's ever done has been pilfered from one place or another, from his early songs to his autobiography.  (You can view some of the paintings here.)  I guess it's all about the folk process...

Sonny Rollins on Tavis Smiley

Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice

Michael Temple's book about Vigo.

Amazon.com Sweatshops: This Ain't Notting Hill

According to this exposé:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress.

There's a petition here, but surely a boycott would be more effective, especially if it included all those companies that have been outsourcing their Information Technology to Amazon's cloud.

This all seems rather a far cry from the world Hugh Grant's cute little bookstore in Notting Hill:

The real bookstore where the movie was set is closing...

Dick Gregory

Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom

In this review, William Deresiewicz characterizes his former colleague, literature scholar Harold Bloom, as the "Mr Kurtz" of the Yale University English Department. Apparently, the two never met during the ten years they were colleagues. Bloom, Deresewicz writes, "has conspired, with ample help from the media, to make his personality more significant than anything he does, and ... everything he does now serves to keep that personality afloat before the public. Bloom is the story, and more and more, Bloom’s story is the story." And there's this:

Bloom must surely be the most solipsistic critic on record. Harold is, indeed, a world unto himself.
    And as he piles up book on book, it’s only getting worse.

And this: "Bloom, it seems, talks only to himself..."  And also this: "Harold fills up everything with Harold..." And the final twist of the critical scalpel:

Harold Bloom is fond of inveighing against the vulgarity of American culture, but by setting himself up as a kind of literary shaman, he has done his part to vulgarize it.

Oy...

Here's Bloom, interviewed last spring:

Cecil Taylor at 80: Concert Film

From 2009:

Santiago Calatrava

Some of Calatrava's buildings and bridges:

Kimberly Bartosik

Kimberly Bartosik's "Ecsteriority 1"

...and "Ecsteriority 2":

Read Alistair Macaulay's review here.

Kristian Bezuidenhout Plays Mozart's Fortepiano

Of course, in 1790 Mozart wouldn't have had to compete with car horns.  Why don't modern classical pianists ever try playing nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on older instruments?  After all, to play Xenakis on a fortepiano or Brahms on a harpsichord wouldn't be any more anachronistic than playing Bach on a modern piano.  It can't be simply that the keyboard range is too small on older instruments.  On the other hand, Keith Jarrett played the clavichord on the Book of Ways:

Giuseppe Di Stefano Sings "Vesti La Giubba"

The NY Times Intellectual Property Beat: Rohter Needs to Brush Up

Although it's nice that the NY Times has been covering recent developments surrounding intellectual property laws in the musical world, hopefully their journalist Larry Rohter will find time to brush up on some basic principles.  At present, he evidently doesn't understand the distinction between the copyright that protects a musical composition and the copyright in a sound recording.  In this recent article about Europe's extension of the sound recording copyright term, he writes that, if the current law were to remain on the books:

the Beatles’ first hit record, “Love Me Do,” which was released in 1962, could have been treated next year in much the same way as works by classical composers whose exclusive ownership of their music has expired.

This isn't true.  In most nations, copyright on the composition "Love Me Do" won't expire until decades after McCartney dies, and until then it will still be yielding performance and mechanical royalties, etc., so long as people keep playing and recording it.  Only the Beatles's debut recording was set to lose its copyright protection.

And of course, the copyright in "Love Me Do" is owned by EMI, whose parent company, Citigroup, as previously noted here, is in deep financial doo-doo...

Michael Denning on Hardt & Negri

Anita O'Day & Roy Eldridge With Gene Krupa

Lotte Reiniger's Silhouette Animation

An excerpt from a short documentary about Lotte Reiniger:

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926):

Read about the making of The Adventures of Prince Achmed here. 

Laurence Lesser's Amati Cello

Laurence Lesser talks about his almost-four-hundred year-old cello—with a one-piece back—made by Hieronymous Amati in 1622:

 

To put that in historical context—Lesser's instrument was made two years after the Pilgrim Fathers arrived  on the Mayflower at Plymouth, about fifty miles from where Lesser lives today.

David Orr Wanders into the Tangled Web of Copyright Permissions

In this NY Times Op-Ed, David Orr tells of discovering what anyone who's written a book about the arts in the twentieth century knows—the world of copyright permission licensing is quite a can of worms.  Hmm... I wonder how much of the Op-Ed I'm allowed to quote here without paying for a license from the NY Times:

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?

If you ask publishers, the answer varies — a lot. 

 I'm surprised the words "safe harbor" don't appear in Orr's piece.  He might find Susan Bielstein's book a source of solace, if nothing else...  And he should count his lucky stars he hasn't tried publishing a book about James Joyce.

The Problem with Baby Elephants on Live T.V.

The famous appearance by a baby elephant on the British children's television show Blue Peter:

James Levine: Time to Retire...?

James Levine conducts Bizet's Overture to Carmen:

The maestro has hurt his back again and withdrawn from conducting at the Metropolitan Opera this fall.  It's a shame, but maybe it's time for him to move on.  There might be lots of different ways of doing something, but they don't include not doing it...

For all that Levine's a big cheese in his own right, the larger problem is that he's set off a butterfly effect that's causing headaches in the classical music world internationally..

Levine may

Theo Jansen's Wind-Propelled Sculptures

(This video uses music from Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi score.)

Ian Frazier wrote a short profile of Jansen for this week's New Yorker (not available free online).

Benjamin Spock

Jeremy Waldron

Ivesian Polyphony: Three Places in Old England

Simultaneous Beethoven and Webern at the Royal Albert Hall last week:

Read about it here.

Claudette Colbert

In The Sign of the Cross, in 1932:

On What's My Line:

In 1982, aged seventy nine:

Frank Gehry

In 1990:

...and in 2002:

Marzette Watts

Marzette Watts (tenor saxophone); Marty Cook (trombone); Tom Berge and J. C. Moses (drums); Juny Booth, Steve Tintweiss, and Cevera Jehers (basses); Frank Kipers (violin); Robert Fews (piano); George Turner (cornet); Patty Waters and Amy Schaeffer (voices).

The Future for Books and Authors...

Writer Ewan Morrison has come to the realization, as he explains in this short piece, that the book industry is inevitably going to end up being napsterized.  Well... duh!  Do publishers really think they're going to be able to keep their e-books wired shut in kindles and nooks for very long? Pdfs of copyrighted books are already proliferating on file-sharing websites, and .pdfs can be read very conveniently on iPads.

Since authors are increasingly unable to earn a living from writing alone, they're probably going to end up taking teaching jobs, like Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton.  In the last decade or so, lots of critics and journalists have been doing that, such as James Wood, who used to be at the Guardian and New Republic and is now a "professor of practice" (i.e. adjunct) at Harvard while occasionally writing short pieces for the New Yorker.

Writers in the United States have been hit with a double whammy in recent years: not only is there a bleak outlook for the magazine and newspaper industry in the internet age, but the skyrocketing cost of health care has made freelance careers increasingly unfeasible in general.

Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman

A couple of weeks from now, saxophonist Sonny Rollins will release his new album, Road Shows Vol. 2, which includes a widely publicized meeting with Ornette Coleman recorded at Rollins's eightieth birthday concert at The Beacon Theatre last year.  You can preview the entire album on NPR's website here.  And here's the promotional video:

Rollins's and Coleman's twenty-minute rendition of "Sonnymoon for Two" was heralded as the only documented meeting of arguably the two most influential living jazz saxophonists.  It's disappointing.  For the first four minutes or so, Rollins plays a series of short motivic fragments with lots of pregnant pauses, evidently trying to coax some interaction out of drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Christian McBride.  He then announces the un-named guest artist, who doesn't arrive on cue.  So Rollins plays another solo, but it sounds like he's basically killing time with some very simple half-hearted riffs, wondering why Coleman hasn't materialized.

Dexter Gordon

Dexter Gordon in 1973, with Hampton Hawes (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), and Kenny Clarke (drums):

Michel De Certeau

Conyers and Copyright...

Congressman John Conyers wants to revise the 1976 copyright act to clarify whether recording artists can reclaim the rights to their songs from record companies.  Conyers's record on intellectual property issues doesn't inspire confidence—he's against open access for scholarship and he sponsored the Performance Rights Act even though small African-American radio stations opposed it because they feared not being able to pay performance royalties to musicians.

In general, Conyers's heart is in the right place.  Motown Records, which started out in Detroit—Conyers's electoral district—depended for its early success on many brilliant musicians who never reaped financial rewards commensurate with their creative contributions.  But unfortunately he seems inclined to solve problems with intellectual property laws by advocating more copyright regulation, which isn't necessarily what's needed these days.

Here's Motown's Marvin Gaye live in concert (with James Jamerson on bass):

Tom Jones

"It's Not Unusual" (1968):

"Kiss" (1989):

Nicole Mitchell

Trio in concert:

Black Earth Ensemble in rehearsal:

Archie Shepp Concert

Archie Shepp performing in France last month.  Perhaps he ought not to have sung (at 15:40)...

Jayne Cortez

A reading by Jayne Cortez:

With her son, Denardo Coleman:

John Currin

Calvin Tomkins's 2008 New Yorker profile is here.  And here is a 2009 interview:

Ring Lardner, Jr.

Toobin on Thomas

Selected quotes from this profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas, by Jeffrey Toobin.

• "In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court."

• "[Associate Justice Antonin] Scalia told a reporter in 2004 ... '[Thomas] does not believe in stare decisis period.'" 

• "Thomas is humble before his own reading of the constitutional text—and dismissive of the attempts of others, including other Justices, to interpret it."

• "Thomas has a special hostility for government attempts to level the playing field in the political arena. For this Justice, the Constitution mandates the law of the jungle."

Pablo Casals

Steve Jobs: The Auteur Resigns

Interesting that, in this day and age, when the "tech" world is so often said to be be about collective creativity and distributed network ecologies, a company that's on the cutting edge of computer hardware is so utterly dominated by a single individual (for more info, see Gil Amelio).  Maybe Jaron Lanier has a point about all this.  So... whatever will Apple do without Steve Jobs at the helm?