Five Bullets 8.23.24
Head Hunters, Coulter Jacobs, C.S. Lewis & more
Good morning and Happy Friday!
Another beautiful day here in New York City! Temperatures are warmer than earlier in the week when the weather seemed to mark an early return to fall. But not yet!
This week after reading drummer Adam Deitch’s post on the Headhunters 50th anniversary shows, I revisited the album and gave it a few good listens. Chameleon and Watermelon Man were standards in my high school jazz band but those novice attempts weren’t nearly as funky as this album. Head Hunters was a popular record, a fusion crossover into the mainstream, and I remember finding it among the classic rock albums in my dad’s record collection.
And how about that image on the album cover? Hancock (center) is wearing a mask based on the African kple kple mask with tape head demagnetizers and a VU meter.1
What are you reading, hearing, and seeing?
Five Bullets:
Art: Action Bronson visits Coulter Jacobs’s studio to talk painting and the creative life. Bronson, a modern-day renaissance man who raps, cooks, and hosts a food show, is also an artist. The enthusiasm Bronson has for the medium and for Jacobs’s work is palpable. The Los Angeles born and raised Jacobs works out of his San Pedro garage crafting vivid works which draw from tattoos, cars, motorcycles, and pop culture.
Movies: Slingshot. The logline for this sci-fi psychological thriller starring Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne and Tomer Capone reads: “An astronaut struggles to maintain his grip on reality aboard a possibly fatally compromised mission to Saturn's moon, Titan.” Evidenced by the title and the trailer, the astronauts will use Jupiter’s gravity to slingshot them to the Earth-like moon. I love anything involving space travel, especially if there’s a psychological thriller element. Slingshot is in theaters August 30.
Music: Head Hunters. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking jazz-funk fusion album Head Hunters, Herbie Hancock reunited with his old band at the Hollywood Bowl last week. With Harvey Mason on drums, Bennie Maupin on clarinet and sax, Bill Summers on percussion and Marcus Miller on bass filling in for the late Paul Jackson, the group performed hits off the record with a few from the group’s second album Thrust. In 1973 Hancock was looking to do something different so he drew inspiration from the funk sounds of James Brown and Sly Stone. Head Hunters starts with one of the funkiest riffs ever, with Hancock banging out the riff to Chameleon on his ARP Odyssey before Mason joins him with an equally funky and laid-back drum groove. This is essential listening for all jazz and funk music lovers.
Profile: The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge. Earlier this year, ex-CIA hacker Joshua Schulte was sentenced to 40 years in prison for divulging top secret data to WikiLeaks in 2017. Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2022 profile of Schulte leaves the reader wondering - what was Schulte’s motive? Is he a whistleblower in the manner of Edward Snowden, or a disgruntled employee battling office politics? The profile also illuminates the difficulties with the federal government’s classification system.
Writing: In a letter to a young fan, The Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis gave eight points of writing advice. I wrote a blog post exploring Lewis’s advice.
C.S. Lewis's Advice to a Young Writer
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C.S. Lewis responded to a young writer’s request for writing advice with eight useful and practical points.
That’s all for this week! I sure love getting this weekly list together. It gives me something to work on, explore my interests, learn more and share it with you. If you enjoyed reading, please consider subscribing to get Five Bullets in your inbox every Friday.
Have a great weekend,
Keith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Hunters