Word: phonographs
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Already, in 1900, Guglielmo Marconi had worked out the essentials of radio. The phonograph was fast evolving into the basis for a recording industry. By 1912, 5 million Americans a day were attending a new entertainment called movies. New Orleans echoed with the sounds that were jumbling together gloriously as jazz. Denizens of Tin Pan Alley were polishing the wit and jaunty lyricism of the pop song and revamping European operetta into an original American theater form: the musical...
DIED. JEANNE CALMENT, 122, officially the world's oldest person; in Arles, France. Born before the invention of the phonograph, Calment was widowed in 1942 after a dessert of poisonous cherries killed her husband. The tragedy did not slow her down for long. She lived exuberantly, enjoying chocolates, cigarettes and one-liners ("I've never had but one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it"). In 1996, as if to establish her claim to posterity, she recorded a rap CD, Maitresse du Temps (Time's Mistress...
...sure, he asked, that a computer-driven robot will never have feelings, never have a mind? "Because we can program a robot to behave any way we want it to behave. Because a robot couldn't mean what it said any more than a phonograph record could mean what it said." Computers do what we make them do, period. However sophisticated the computer's performance, it will always be a performance...
Collaboration is the lifeblood of the musical theater: Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, Strauss and Hofmannsthal. But posthumous collaboration has had to wait until the advent of the phonograph, motion pictures and the camcorder. Today the late George Gershwin can play Rhapsody in Blue with Michael Tilson Thomas, Natalie Cole can sing a duet with her deceased dad Nat King Cole--and composer Philip Glass can write a trilogy of operas with the French author, aesthete and movie director Jean Cocteau, dead since...
...Claremont colleges, walked into their bedroom and killed himself. His widow's agony and incomprehension, in poems reflecting lost love, all but leap from page to reader's eye. "One Ordinary Evening" revisits a moment of marital intimacy: entwined on a sofa, they listen to Wagner on the phonograph. Then...