alt Hacker NewsAccidental Aesthetics and Romance of Power Wires
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As an American, I'm reminded of Henry Farney's 1904 painting "The Song of the Talking Wire"
This recalls a time I was driving the Desert Road in Aotearoa/NZ at dawn. As I got to the top of the hill the sun came up in line with all the power lines and they glowed like golden spider webs off into the distance. I'd never thought that power lines could ever be breathtakingly lovely. This was one time they managed it
Even the most casual anime watcher is bound to notice the frequent appearances of power lines. Some folk at Tumblr have been collected them at a dedicated Powerlines in Anime page. Contributions welcome!
I've never thought power lines or any overhead cable infrastructure looked either aesthetic or romantic. I do seem to recall there was one utility or country that made their large power pylons in the shape of different animals or figures, which I thought was making the best of an unattractive necessity.
Power lines and pylons are superficially the same all over the world, but differ in details we subconsiously remember. The power lines in DayZ felt like home.
The Barenaked Ladies have a song that mentions power lines in a somewhat romantic way: https://genius.com/6365258
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there were transmission towers that went through about 200 meters away from my house. During the winter when we got freezing rain I could hear them crackle slightly. All the other infrastructure was buried, the transmission towers were the only overhead lines.
That last photo looks like the alleys in Fargo, ND up until recently when they buried the lines. I miss the aesthetic of the power lines. It gave the alleys a character that was different than the streets.
Lain mentioned, me happy.
Nice read but hard to resist the "X but in Japan!" jokes.
There's a point in the biopic Crumb where they point out how, in R. Crumb's time, all comic book artists had uniformly been ignoring the "urban clutter" of power lines and utility poles and that kind of stuff in the skyline, but Crumb would consciously put them in, and fill up the page with those details, and that sort of unapologetic realism was one of the compelling things about his art.
I've always liked to see power pylons receding in the distance on a grassy plain, or over a forest. It makes me flash back to my youth. There was an abandoned railway a short distance from my house, that had become overgrown with vegetation; butterflies and hummingbirds frequently visited the wildflowers there. It was a great place to go for a stroll in, even with our dog accompanying. Off in the distance, a power pylon loomed over this serene landscape, a kind of reminder of our civilization and technology, and how situated it is in the embrace of nature.
If that kind of aesthetic tickles your fancy, the video game Flower (2009) has moments like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game)
Somewhat relatedly, I have another dog whom I was taking for a walk, and we both watched a flock of geese fly real low. One of the geese caught a power line and was instantly killed, dropping to the ground after a loud pop. The smell of electricity and literal cooked goose were in the air. My poor dog was so traumatized that for some weeks afterward, she would cower whenever she saw power lines, birds, or even airplanes.
Power lines are a reminder of man's ability to generate electricity.
It's funny when an article takes a stand against an unsourced group of random anonymous people on social media.
Anyway, (not just) Japan has a long history of art with a juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern. The prints are talked about in the article. This might be what a lot of subsequent anime's aesthetic is based on, as we also see stuff like Goemon Ishikawa XIII (a throw back to 16th century) in the Lupin III anime (which is set in contemporary times). It's a trope all its own.
Even in modern art, we see power lines as a focal point of art, as in Arthur Dove's work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488540
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Now imagine if you were able to see the ultraviolet corona discharge emanating from the wires due to the high voltage, as some animals can.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/12/animals-...
The story man was glassy-eyed
He told me about the power lines
And in subarctic caribou eyes
The metal wires burst into life