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As Dave Barry is wont to say, The Singing Neanderthals would be a good name for a rock band, but it's a book by cognitive archeologist Steven Mithen, arging that language and music evolved from a common ancestor. He calls that ur-communication "Hmmmmm" (holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic).
Via The Well-Tempered Blog who got it from Bloc de Musica.
Here's something you probably never even knew existed: music librarian humor.
Via my favorite cousin Miranda Anabelle.
John Atkinson sent me a link to Time's Rick Rubin interview. I can see why JA liked it—Rubin's production philosophy reminds me a lot of the way JA edits and records.
What they have in common is that they only work on projects they want to be involved in and, once they commit, they bring out the best in their collaborators by trusting them to work hard at being themselves.
I really dug Rubin saying that writing is a hard, painful slog, but that without it, you've got nothing.
On Saturday night, Don Fiorino, Mark Flynn, Chris Jones, and Stereophile’s Bob Reina came together, within the walls of Merkin Concert Hall, as Attention Screen. I sat in the audience, watching and listening as these four men exchanged ideas, made music. I'm not going to say it was beautiful. I'm not going to say it was interesting.
What do these words mean, anyway?
It certainly wasn't right, and it was the farthest thing from perfect. It was too loud, it was too long, they made too many mistakes. Sometimes the conversations went nowhere; sometimes the conversations didn'…
That's pretty much what David Hewlett said. As a result, he made A Dog's Breakfast for less than a million—it's a long tail thang.
Robert P. Crease's article on the importance of letters between scientists in helping us appreciate the evolution of ideas planted the thought, but Adam Kirsch's review of Robert Frost's notebooks really has me wondering: Now that we communicate so much through email—and revise our drafts without saving them—will future scholars have to judge us only on our published copy?