Five Bullets 2.9.24
A.I., Capote, UFOs & more
Good Morning & Happy Friday Everyone!
Welcome back to Circles In Space for this week’s edition of Five Bullet Friday.
You might’ve noticed that over the past few months I’ve posted essays on books and NYC history in addition to Five Bullets posts on specific topics including journaling and NYC’s forgotten Barren Island.
I’m working towards writing more long-form essays and figuring out a consistent schedule for posting them. As documented in the Five Bullet posts, my range of interests is across the board - from music, to books, to science and much more. I’m struggling with pinning down my ‘niche’ but until I figure that out, I’ll continue covering a wide range of topics.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Would you like to read more about a specific topic or would you rather a random collection of topics?
Here’s this week’s Five Bullets:
AI: Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments profiles Lucian Grainge, chairman of Universal Music Group (UMG). The profile offers an insider’s perspective of how Grainge has navigated the music industry’s ever-changing landscape from 80’s drum machines to streaming to the present existential crises of artificial intelligence.
Music: RIP Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett bass player and music director for Bob Marley & The Wailers. While Marley wrote the songs, Barrett developed the arrangement and produced the band’s lush and hynoptic rhythms. He and his brother Carlton, drummer for The Wailers, got their start playing makeshift instruments before working with Lee Scratch Perry later joining The Wailers in 1969. Barrett’s son, Aston Jr., current drummer and leader of The Wailers, portrays his father in the upcoming movie Bob Marley: One Love.
NYC: New York City is finally getting new side-loading garbage trucks. The new trucks will lift containers placed on the street for larger residential buildings, part of Mayor Adams’s efforts to curb trash bag mounds and rat populations.
TV: Feud: Capote v. The Swans follows the relationship between author Truman Capote and a group of Manhattan socialites called his ‘swans’. The swans cast out Capote after he published La Côte Basque, 1965 which laid bare the group’s personal secrets. The essay was included in Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers, released posthumously. FX’s series is an entertaining look at the enigmatic Capote and his role in New York high society.
UFOs: Nicholson Baker’s How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs covers the current ‘UFO mania cycle’ we’re experiencing now. Baker dives into Leslie Kean’s 2017 New York Times article which published U.S. Navy videos of purported ‘non-human’ craft later backed up by David Grusch’s testimony to Congress in 2023. Baker makes the argument that UFO mania is most likely the result of U.S. military Cold War balloon tests, high-altitude experiments involving monkeys in futuristic protective suits, and the intelligence officers who use the public’s UFO-paranoia to conceal secret weapons research.
This is a little abstract, but one thought would be to pick a theme and then to explore that theme thru your many interests—music, books, science, history. Ie, in one post you could write about your theme thru a music-oriented piece, then another piece thru a historical perspective, etc. just a thought.