Five Bullets 11.15.24
Blitz, Roy Haynes, Uranus & more.
Good Morning and Happy Friday.
It’s another cool (and dry) morning in New York City today with warmer temperatures expected this afternoon. I’ve been enjoying the cool weather by spending time running, journaling and reading in nearby parks.
Brush fires have continued in the city due to drought and the FDNY said they’ve battled nearly 230 brush fires since the end of October, the highest in the city’s history. Inwood Hill Park suffered a blaze which threatened the Shorakapkok Preserve old-growth forest.
This week I’ve been writing a lot lately, fiction, essays, and plenty of note-taking per usual, but I’ve struggled to finish several projects. I’m always trying to improve my project management in my creative practice and I’ve looked to a few different sources to help me think differently about how I approach my work. Let me know what works for you in the comments.
A song that’s stuck in my head at the moment: Love is Too Strong, a searing blues number from Lettuce with Marcus King.
This week’s bullets:
Animals: Mary the elephant learned how to use a hose to shower herself. The new season of the Serial podcast takes a look at how the Orca whale featured in the movie Free Willy, Keiko, was released back into the wild.
Essay: I wrote about the relationship between running and drumming and how developing a steady, consistent pulse in both practices helps me stay focused.
Movies: Steve McQueen’s historical drama Blitz was inspired by a photograph of a boy on a train platform during London’s evacuation under German bombardment in 1940. McQueen built entire scenes around photos from this period, recreating Underground shelters, bomb factories, lively nightclubs, and burning streets. The film has a familiar story but the creative cinematography, sound design and screenwriting equal something much more than just a war film.
Music: We lost two jazz icons this week, drummer Roy Haynes aged 99 and saxophonist Lou Donaldson aged 98. Back in high school, I bought a bunch of jazz and funk CDs and one of those was Haynes’s We Three recorded with Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Paul Chambers. This was my first time hearing Haynes, a master drummer who played with nearly everyone and had a giant influence on jazz even in his 90s. Lou Donaldson wrote, “Jazz has to hit a certain spot…There’s a groove that you’ve got to hit, and if you play enough music around musicians and play a lot in front of the people, you’ll learn where it is.”
Science: Much of what researchers knew about Uranus came from Voyager 2’s 1986 visit but a new study shows that the data was collected during a rare solar event, causing our understanding of the planet to be inaccurate. Voyager 2 captured readings of the planet’s magnetosphere, a magnetic protective layer, in which plasma was curiously absent - a stark difference compared to other planets. We now know that this was due to solar winds which compressed the magnetosphere resulting in the anomalous readings. Our understanding of the universe in which we live evolves day by day.
That’s all for this week. I really enjoy getting this weekly list together. It gives me a reason to explore my interests, learn more, and share it with you.
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