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"