January 26, 2012
Musical improvisation (also known as Musical Extemporization) is the creative activity of immediate (‘in the moment’) musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians. Thus, musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music, and indeed many other kinds of music.
Because improvisation is a performative act and depends on instrumental technique, improvisation is a skill. There are musicians who have never improvised and other musicians who have devoted their entire lives to improvisation. Thus, a musicians technical ability is not necessarily related to their improvisational ability, though both skills can complement each other.
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January 26, 2012
The Cavern Club is a rock and roll club in Liverpool, England. Opened in 1957, the club had their first performance by The Beatles in 1961. Alan Sytner opened the club having been inspired by the Jazz district in Paris, where there were a number of clubs in cellars.
Sytner returned to Liverpool and wanted to open a club similar to Le Caveau in Paris. He eventually found a perfect cellar for his club — which had been used as an air raid shelter during the war. The first act to open the club was the Merseysippi Jazz Band.
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January 26, 2012
Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat (for bands from Liverpool beside the River Mersey) is a pop and rock music genre that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll, doo wop, skiffle, R&B and soul. The beat movement provided most of the bands responsible for the British invasion of the American pop charts in the period after 1964, and provided the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, including the format of the rock group around lead, rhythm and bass guitars with drums.
The exact origins of the terms Beat music and Merseybeat are uncertain. Beat music seems to have had little to do with the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s, and more to do with driving rhythms, which the bands had adopted from their rock and roll, rhythm and blues and soul music influences. As the initial wave of rock and roll declined in the later 1950s ‘big beat’ music, later shortened to ‘beat,’ became a live dance alternative to the balladeers like Tommy Steele who was dominating the charts.
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January 26, 2012
Waterloo Sunset is a song by British rock band The Kinks. It was released as a single in 1967, and featured on their album ‘Something Else by The Kinks.’ Composed and produced by Kinks frontman Ray Davies, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is one of the band’s best known and most acclaimed songs. The lyrics describe a solitary narrator watching (or imagining) two lovers passing over a bridge, with the melancholic observer reflecting on the couple, the Thames, and Waterloo Station.
The song was rumored to have been inspired by the romance between two British celebrities of the time, actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. Ray Davies denied this in his autobiography, ‘It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country.’ Continue reading →
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January 26, 2012
Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise. He is the co-editor of ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,’ a volume released in 2006.
Dr. Ericsson’s research with Herbert Simon on verbal reports of thinking is summarized in a book ‘Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data,’ which was revised in 1993. With Bill Chase he developed the Theory of Skilled Memory based on detailed analyses of acquired exceptional memory performance. Currently he studies the cognitive structure of expert performance in domains such as music, chess and sports, and how expert performers acquire their superior performance by extended deliberate practice.
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January 25, 2012
Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 ‘Science’ article called ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,’ co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-gram’s to analyze the Google Book digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time.
In another study called ‘Culturnomics 2.0,’ Kalev H. Leetaru examined news archives including print and broadcast media (television and radio transcripts) for words that imparted tone or ‘mood’ as well as geographic data. The research was able to retroactively predict the 2011 Arab Spring and successfully estimate the final location of Osama Bin Laden to within 124 miles.
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January 25, 2012
The New Beverly Cinema is a historic movie theater located in Los Angeles, California, United States. Housed in a theater which dates to the 1920s, it is one of the oldest revival houses in the region. The building began life as a vaudeville theater, hosting acts such as Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Jackie Gleason.
Later, the theater was converted into a nightclub called Slapsie Maxie’s, named after the boxer and silent film actor Maxie Rosenbloom. In the late 1950’s, the space was converted into a movie theater, with several incarnations. These include: The New Yorker Theater, the Europa (specializing in foreign films), the Eros (a pornographic theater) and finally the Beverly Cinema, a grindhouse (mostly shows exploitation films, so called because they ‘exploit’ often lurid subject matter such as sex, violence, race, etc.) which incorporated live nude dancing. Continue reading →
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January 25, 2012
The ‘Jumpman‘ logo is used by Nike to promote its Michael Jordan-related merchandise, including the famous and successful Air Jordan brand of basketball shoes. The logo is a silhouette of a studio photograph of Jordan performing a ballet move, not an actual dunk as many believe. Beginning in 1985, the Jumpman photo or logo always accompanied ‘Jordan’ branded products, even when the only word displayed on the product was ‘Jordan.’
The Air Jordan III, released in 1988, was the first Air Jordan shoe to feature the Jumpman logo, replacing the ‘Wings’ logo, which had been a feature of the Air Jordans I and II. This model was one of the most popular ever. The Jumpman logo would retain a fairly consistent look throughout the Air Jordan line’s history, except on the Air Jordan VIII, on which it was reminiscent of a peace sign. In 1993-94, Nike ran a series of Air Jordan commercials pairing Michael Jordan with Warner Brothers’ own Bugs Bunny. As a tie-in, Nike created a line of merchandise which featured a spoof of the Jumpman using Bugs’ silhouette, combined with a “Hare Jordan” caption. This led to the film ‘Space Jam.’
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January 25, 2012
Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956) is an American artist. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin. Tomaselli is represented by the White Cube gallery in the UK and the James Cohan Gallery in the USA.
He grew up in Orange, California. He attended and graduated from Orange High School where what he has described as ‘artificial, immersive, theme park reality’ as a normal part of everyday life. The idea of a ‘contaminated’ image – one that is Post-modern in its borrowing from both high and low culture – permeates his work.
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January 24, 2012
Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow (also known as the Colbert Super PAC) is a United States political action committee (PAC) established by Stephen Colbert, who portrays a conservative political pundit on the television series ‘The Colbert Report.’ As a super PAC the organization can raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as wealthy individuals. Speaking in character, Colbert said the money will be raised not only for political ads, but also ‘normal administrative expenses, including but not limited to, luxury hotel stays, private jet travel, and PAC mementos from Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.’
During the January 12, 2012 episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert announced his plans to form an exploratory committee to lay the groundwork for his possible candidacy for ‘President of the United States of South Carolina.’ In the process, he transferred control of the Super PAC to Jon Stewart, renaming it The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC.
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January 24, 2012
The 2010 midterm election marked the rise of a new political committee, dubbed ‘super PACs,’ and officially known as ‘independent-expenditure only committees,’ which can raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as individuals.
The super PACs were made possible by two judicial decisions. The first was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which held that government may not prohibit unions and corporations from making independent expenditures about politics. Soon after, in Speechnow.org v. FEC, the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that contributions to groups that only make independent expenditures could not be limited. Continue reading →
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January 24, 2012
Political money in the United States is often divided into two categories, ‘hard’ money and ‘soft’ money. ‘Hard’ money is contributed directly to a candidate of a political party. It is regulated by law in both source and amount, and monitored by the Federal Election Commission (maximum $2500). ‘Soft’ money is contributed to the political party as a whole. Historically, ‘soft money’ referred to contributions made to political parties for purposes of party building and other activities not directly related to the election of specific candidates. Because these contributions were not used for specific candidate advocacy, they were not regulated by the Federal Election Campaign Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as McCain-Feingold) prohibited unregulated contributions to national party committees.
‘Soft money’ also refers to unlimited contributions to organizations and committees other than candidate campaigns and political parties (except, where legal, to state and local parties for use solely in state and local races). Organizations which receive ‘Soft money’ contributions are often called ‘527s,’ for the section of the tax code under which they operate. The term is generally used to refer to independent, nonprofit political organizations that are not regulated by the FEC or by a state elections commission, and are not subject to the same contribution limits as PACs. Such organizations can legally engage in political activity, but funds from ‘soft money’ contributions may not be spent on ads promoting the election or defeat of a specific candidate.
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