Through corvid lands

I went on a quick jaunt to Stop & Shop today. While going through the route that I walk to get there, I heard a telltale cawing. Sure enough, the upper branches and roofs have crows flitting about on them. 

This is something I like about autumn. These smart yet somehow humble birds show up in force again. You don't see or hear them as much in summer. This is in part because they break up into smaller groups in summertime and are busy raising their chicks. Crows are altricial, meaning there's a high parental investment in the young. We're altricial too, of course. So are domestic dogs and cats, but that's not so true of wolves and wildcats, so in their case it may be more our influence.

Fughetta

From the book Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite, this is an excerpt from M. C. Escher's acceptance speech for the Culture Prize of the City of Hilversum in 1965.

Bach's music may provide an occasion to say a few words about my work. I had better not expound on the affinity I seem to have discovered between the canon in polyphonic music and the regular division of a plane into figures with identical forms, no matter how striking it is to me that the Baroque composers have performed manipulations with sounds similar to the ones I love to do with visual images.

Allow me to say only that Father Bach has been a strong inspiration to me, and that many a print reached definite form in my mind while I was listening to the lucid, logical language he speaks, while I was drinking the clear wine he pours.

It is sometimes easy to forget that Escher made his prints in the twentieth century. Personally, I'm occasionally surprised to remember that he was still alive when I was born. His work doesn't belong to any of the tendencies associated with modernism. For instance, while his art can have a strange and eerie quality, it's entirely different from the deliberate illogic of surrealism.

So hearing him praise the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and cite it as an inspiration for his own work? Yes, of course. Escher was in a lot of ways a man of the Baroque, and he knew it. But he would have had something to add in any time he was born.

Sturm without drang

We're in the middle of another two-to-three day rain spree. It'll top off our reservoir, which is good. From the forecasts it seems likely to end the balmy period we've been having this week and make things more autumnal. 

It started last night, while I was asleep. I woke up sometime in the dark AM hours to thunder and lightning. Understand, the thunder and lightning aren't what woke me up. My bladder did that. But then I noticed the flashes and the rumble. 

It was actually kind of pleasant. Overall this was just a couple of minutes before I got back in bed and went back to sleep. But there was a certain emphasis. In hazy semiconsciousness, seeing things in a new light.

In the shade

In a lot of older movies and TV shows, you see people traveling around at night and it's odd. "Night doesn't look like that," you think. It's not really dark. The people are walking and driving in lower light, but the sky is still light. 

This is, of course, and effect of day for night filming. The film crew couldn't actually film at night and expect to get a clear image, unless they were filming in a place where there was already a lot of artificial light, like a theater lobby. The effect, especially in black and white, can be a little like ultraviolet photography. It's also reminiscent of walking around in the daytime during a solar eclipse. All an example of how every artform has its little artifices.

And leave show business?

Fredric Brown might best be remembered for "Arena", a man-vs-alien tale that's been adapted into an episode of Star Trek and a bunch of other things, officially and otherwise. He was prolific in both science fiction and mystery.

The Fabulous Clipjoint is one of his mystery novels, the first in a series. In it, young Ed Hunter's printer father is murdered in an alley. Ed teams up with his carney uncle Am (short for Ambrose) to bring the murderer to justice. Along the way, he drinks alcohol for the first time, fends off his sexually precocious younger stepsister, and falls in love with both a hard luck gold digger and the trombone.

So yeah, Brown basically invented Tom Waits.

Sweetness & light

The picture above is an advertisement for Banania, a French chocolate drink made with honey and banana flour. Wikipedia compares it to Nesquik. The picture is also the October illustration in my current wall calendar. 

It can be shocking to realize how visually rich the social environment was in the past. This ad is from sometime in the early 20th century. Again, it's an advertisement, and if you bought the product and forgot about the image that moved you to do so, it would be considered to have done its job. But it's such beautiful artwork, with such care attached to it, that it can hardly be forgotten.

Next something

While the complete death of the internet due to privatization and resource scarcity might still be another decade or two off, with some parts of it yet remaining for those working in the remains of tech sector businesses or living off corporate largess in gated communities with their own intranets and internet connections, enough of the internet already sucks so that we might as well start transitioning now into rebuilding an analog culture, an alternet form of communication. What I propose is that word I just used -the alternet.

This piece, by a regular commenter on Ecosophia, boasts a neat photo of a radioteletype setup. That certainly adds some flavor. 

Moore takes a look forward at things that might arise with the demise of the internet. Of course, if the internet is dying, it's doing so slowly. You have untold millions checking their favorite apps as they walk down the street. But it is true that the medium seems to run on habit now, and arguably addiction. That seems unsustainable to me.

So maybe we will see more growth in offline culture soon. I'd like to think so. As to what this reinvigorated real world would look like, I don't know. One hopes it will have more variety.