I’m having fun listening to The Science of Sound, from 1958. The liner notes are fun also.
I’m hitting the pause button on my weekly newsletter, but that just means that I’ll be using micro.blog as my newsletter, thanks to the cool subscribe feature. Indeed I’ve already begun posting some items of interest that I previously would’ve saved for the weekly issue.
From a fascinating interview about Georgia O’Keefe’s choice of materials, especially papers.
Hilary Hahn plays the Sibelius Violin Concerto — an astonishing performance 🎵
Cabel Sasser: “Some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe.”
Justine Bateman: “Don’t forget, AI isn’t doing this to us. People using AI to eliminate jobs, that’s who’s doing this in every sector. People really understand that concept because it’s happening in their worlds, too. … The idea that you want to use AI to make things easy for us? Go solve the homeless problem. Go use generative AI to clean the ocean. So, is generative AI coming in the entertainment business to make better films? No. It’s to more cheaply regurgitate the past. And frankly, audiences have been conditioned for this; look at all the sequels, reboots and remakes.”
I have a page for my students explaining why I won’t use ed-tech software like Canvas and Turnitin, and I just updated it to add this: Chatbots are fentanyl for the mind.
Dylan's conversion
Conversion to folk music, that is. From the 1978 Playboy interview:
PLAYBOY: Just to stay on the track, what first turned you on to folk singing? You actually started out in Minnesota playing the electric guitar with a rock group, didn't you?
DYLAN: Yeah. The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in '58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.
PLAYBOY: What was so special to you about that Odetta record?
DYLAN: Just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record. It was her first and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Waterboy,” “Buked and Scorned.”
Though with Dylan you can never tell, I hope this is true. (Especially since Odetta and I share a home town.)
Twenty-five years ago I wrote an essay about Dylan that was published first in Books & Culture and then at bobdylan.com — the former of which was a pleasure to have published and the second rather disorientingly exciting. (I got paid in CDs.) I think this is the B&C version.