Word: roll
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whistles and Whips. Most of Xenakis' ear-jarring music is an extension in sound of the calculus of probability, one of whose basic concepts is Bernoulli's law of large numbers. It says, in effect, that the occurrence of any chance event-the roll of a seven in dice, for example, or the random collision of stray molecules in the atmosphere-is more likely to conform to the prescribed statistical odds with each successive attempt. To Xenakis, this mathematical absolute has profound philosophical meaning: it implies that the changing structure of certain events in life, including the sounds...
Ford, which has been studying the minicar market for just about a decade, took a long time to decide. In 1962, the company was ready to roll with a small car called the Cardinal, but withdrew it within a few months of production because of fears that the market would not then support a new line. By 1966, however, it was clear that U.S. compacts were losing considerable ground to imports. The Falcon, which reached a peak of 493,000 sales in 1961, was down to 163,000 that year-and to even less in 1967. At a meeting...
...ANNALS of rock and roll writing Paul Williams, who was spawned and bred in our very own Cambridge, Mass., holds a special place. The story is of how he dropped out of Swarthmore three years ago to single-handedly set up his own magazine of rock, Crawdaddy!, and went on to establish it briefly in all its tacky splendor as the finest underground publication of its kind...
Williams' writing is strewn with astonishingly true insights which range in scope from one-line revelations about our most major and complex artists (e.g., that Bob Dylan has always been at heart a rock and roll singer who started out in folk merely because there were no other options open to him in his early years) to finicky discoveries about the minutest details (e.g., that the Sergeant Pepper concept of a album as an integrated whole "can be traced back to the end of Between the Buttons"). And, remarkably, these multifarious insights are not stranded and left to fend...
...rock and roll writer always finds himself addressing not a neutral but a highly partisan, opinionated audience. In fact, the main reason the members of this audience even deign to read about rock and roll at all is to have their own strongly held opinions confirmed about all the records and groups in the rock universe. So the rock writer is always under a heavy obligation to explain exactly why he himself likes or dislikes a particular album or group. And the only way he can do so is to invent a theoretical framework within whose terms all of rock...