Tuesday, October 29, 2019

War of the Worlds(?)

My first exposure to what might arguably be H. G. Wells' most famous novel came when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, in comic book form, an adaptation from Classics Illustrated.  I remember devouring it and others from that series, images filling my head and populating my daydreams, reverberating even now, nearly half a century later. 

In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray.  As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision.  One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway). 

Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes.  While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012.  I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement.  I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection:  Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray. 

Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars).  Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming. 

But we sent an actual heat-ray. 

Sunday, October 13, 2019

The Nature of Evolution

There's a new lcrp collaboration/collection that I'm on:



I was privileged to have my idea for the project -- punctuated equilibrium -- selected by the group and to help with the cover design as well (ideas, not actual art, which was done by another Lines Community artist).  If you're interested in how I imagined PE as a musical idea, my original prompt (and the full collaboration thread) can be found here.  Technical notes are near the bottom of that thread, but can be accessed directly here

This is likely to be my last effort with the lcrp for a while, as I have several musical projects of my own that I want to focus on.  As mentioned in my last post, I hope to consolidate my non-professional creative efforts under Circling Crows, including porting this blog to a host offering better owner's rights.  As part of that process, I plan to revisit my old musical works here and on Soundcloud and collect the ones I like the most into a Bandcamp album, a process I intend to use as a demarcation between what feels like much more formative works and my more recent ones which have felt more authentic and meaningful to me.  I'm also working on a series of pieces for viola, which I plan to organize into an album for Bandcamp.

I do intend to keep an ear cocked to the lcrp; they are an amazing community and much of my new self-confidence as a musician was fostered there.  I doubt PE will be the last thing I do with them, even as I orient myself in other directions.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Twenty Years In

Circling Crows, as an idea, an inspiration, a name, has been part of my life, in various manifestations, since about this time in 1999.  The idea came to me in a hypnopompic vision I had, an image of crows wheeling in a desert sky, revolving black brushmarks against the pale ochre hues of a dusty, cloudless dome.  That image has come to be associated with a series of activities related to art, creativity, music, and the nouminous.

The name Circling Crows was first attached to what I had planned to be a company that would produce a creativity workshop series I designed in late '99 and delivered once in early '00 in New York City.  Together with a handful of graduates of that project, my co-leader and I made a valiant attempt to build a sustainable and scaleable business plan for a training company based on that course, called the 10,000-Fold Path, but could not find a structure that met our resource parameters at the time.  It is in my initial notes for the 10KFP that I first wrote the words Circling Crows.

The steadiest manifestation of Circling Crows has been as a blog, of which there have been two.  The Internet tells me that Blogger started August 23, of 1999, so the first Circling Crows blog seems likely to have existed from about spring of '00, probably as an outcome of the 10KFP.  I believe its content was a largely unthemed mix of stream-of-consciousness, commentary, essays, and poetry.  I maintained it spottily for a few years, perhaps through the mid-aughts, when my irregular posts waxed to full-on neglect and, probably sometime in '06, blog was taken down by its host.  Later, I think in late 2010, for reasons I don't now recall, I was inspired to seek access to the old posts and perhaps to restart the blog and so began negotiations with Blogger to do so.  Although those efforts were ultimately successful in regaining rights to the name, I was unable to retrieve any content; with the exception of a few notes in my journals, those writings have returned to the cyber-ashes of random 0s and 1s scattered across the terra incognita of endless server warehouses.  I've been archiving this iteration.

In the last year or so, I've been increasingly active in reconnecting with the creative parts of myself, especially memories and states that buoyed so much of my childhood and youth.  The latest project to bear the Circling Crows moniker is a consequence of those efforts:  I am now publishing the sonic works I create under that name.  In retrospect, it seems a long time coming; as the image of crows circling in the sky represents a foundational part of me, the vision in which they first appeared is an apt context for the artistic explorations I engage in.  I am already working on the next collections to be shared as Circling Crows.

Going forward, I expect the projects under Circling Crows to expand in number and in kind.  This year I finally splurged and purchased the domain names circlingcrows.com and circlingcrows.org and I hope before too long to point them at something(s) useful and artful, including a porting and consolidation of this blog.  Other projects I hope to fold into what may become Circling Crows Productions would overlap with my clinical practice and some would be new but long-dreamt of directions, such as musical instrument making and collecting.  Time will tell what I have the capacity for, but whatever I accomplish, I will always be tripped to reconnect to my childhood, to wonder, to magic, and to music when I look up and see crows circling in the sky.