Five Bullets 9.22.23
Ed Ruscha, Roadside Picnic & Arctic Monkeys.
Welcome back to Circles in Space.
If you’re new here, read this.
Good morning and happy Friday everyone!
Today’s bullets:
Art: Ed Ruscha’s painting above borrows a sentence from J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise: “The music from the balconies nearby was overlaid by the noise of sporadic acts of violence.” Ruscha said his painting ‘illustrates' themes and ideas in the novel which depicts the regression of civilized man to animal in the concrete jungle of a high-rise apartment building. This work and over 200 more of Ruscha’s are now on view at the MOMA.
Artificial Intelligence: Authors sue OpenAI alleging that the tech firm used their work to train it’s chatbot ChatGPT. John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult & more argue that ChatGPT copies their style and summarizes their work which infringes on their copyright. OpenAI said it uses copyrighted material to train it’s models but doesn’t say which material. The argument focuses on if the works produced by ChatGPT are covered under ‘fair use’. [If you’re curious, I asked ChatGPT to write a short story in the style of Dan Brown.]
Books: Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 science fiction novel, describes a location in North America that was visited by aliens who simply came and went without contacting humanity. The location, called the Zone, is littered with various artifacts left behind by the aliens. Red, the novel’s protagonist, is a stalker - someone who ventures into the dangerous Zone to retrieve the artifacts to sell. The novel inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker. [I learned about the book from audio drama podcast Tanis which also focuses on a strange area of the woods.]
Music: Arctic Monkey’s AM lies somewhere between Black Sabbath, David Bowie and Dr. Dre. The album features rockers Do I Wanna Know and R U Mine, loungey reveries No. 1 Party Anthem and I Wanna Be Yours and dance party sing-a-longs Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High and Snap Out of It. The band’s heavy but sonically rich arrangement features frontman Alex Turner’s crooner vocals, James Cook’s distorted guitar riffs and Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders thumping bass and drums. AM is a cohesive album bringing listeners to dark, late-night alcohol or drug-fueled encounters both on and off the dance floor.
NYC: Historians say the 100,000 migrants who have entered New York City over the past year is not ‘unprecedented’. In 1907, Ellis Island saw 100,000 immigrants in one month. From 1996 to 2001 the city saw on average 112,000 people and in 2011 the number was 95,000. Mayor Adams asked courts to suspend the right to shelter law. Meanwhile, the Roosevelt Hotel is the new Ellis Island.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
Keith
Ed Ruscha's painting led me to read High-Rise, which led me to read the book and wow! What a great and interesting read that delves into a break of human civility and morality.
PS. Love Arctic Monkeys-my partner has been humming their tunes for the last couple of weeks!
Fascinating watching, reading, and listening! Thank you, Keith. I'm going to spend some quality time with this issue: Ruscha's street-level time traveling... the tender stories unfolding at the Rosevelt Hotel... AI's uncanny Dan Brown vignettes... We are all living in such a rapidly unfolding story, aren't we? Still, The Arctic Monkeys are one of those bands that persist in my memory around a difficult-- and yet very sweet period of time. Life is weird and Life is Good.