Porcupine Tree – “Feel So Low”
Lightbulb Sun
A few of my friends in college were hugely into Porcupine Tree, and while I didn’t catch the fever, this song and a few others have been in regular rotation for ten years now. “Feel So Low” is a just a melancholy melody with no pretensions.
World Map by Pietro Vescontes, 1321
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.
Surveyors’ encampment
Light keeper at Coast and Geodetic Survey camp, Alaska c. 1923
Heliograph, c. 1911
The War Of The Worlds is, most importantly, a book about the dangers of complacency. While Wells’ imagination and knack for a rolling narrative are worth applauding any day, the book is not at its heart a heroic adventure. Like The Time Machine, it is a warning. In that book he caricatured the erosion of humanity’s most important qualities; in this one, his message is more direct: the road of complacency leads to destruction – destruction of the literal and immediate variety.
Raising the Fawn – “Drownded”
The North Sea
While parts of this album stray into the falsetto melancholy of bands like Aereogramme and For Stars, the meaty guitar and willingness to extend their songs into epic territory (at 11:11, this is the longest on the album but not by far) make Raising the Fawn a bit more exciting. “Drownded” covers a lot of ground, or water as it were, and while it leaves plenty of space to breathe, it never gets boring and the songwriting is just plain solid.
Dinosaur feathers (National Geographic)
