A few articles that I’ve found interesting this week.
- China
- Did a rapid desertification 6,500 years ago destroy the first Chinese kingdom? I hadn’t come across Hongshan before (an old chiefdom with considerable organisation as opposed to e.g. the Banpo we saw in Xi’an). Does this explain some of the Chinese love for jade.
- The fat man’s belly – great read on Hainan.
- Other
- Why do all records sound the same? – Filling in those annoying gaps in ProTools.
“Musicians are inherently lazy,†says John. “If there’s an easier way of doing something than actually playing, they’ll do that.†A band might jam together for a bit, then spend hours or days choosing the best bits and pasting a track together. All music is adopting the methods of dance music, of arranging repetitive loops on a grid. With the structure of the song mapped out in coloured boxes on screen, there’s a huge temptation to fill in the gaps, add bits and generally clutter up the sound.
- Ten neglected classics – a good book-related exercise to do more regularly, I think. I’d only read one of them, and think there are some good options there.
Really interesting titles, but all of them appear to be more or less immensely dark. I’m finding Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel about a fictional 19th century female botanist more to my liking, but that’s because RL has more than enough darkness and weirdness, and I look to novels for different ways of seeing the world. That Gaskell book was excellent, though (I read it in my teens and loved it).
Tom you had come across Hong Shan before you just didn’t know it, all the jade in our house is Hong Shan. The belt buckle was warring states, just a few decades pre-Han.
here you go
Stoneage shaggers – classic Hong Shan though you won’t see it any of the official docs as the Communist Party would prefer the narrative that China is and always was Han