they can sometimes be aggressive with milder-mannered songbirds.
There is that, but it's a 'cultural' thing, I suspect: they're highly sociable, live cheek-by-jowl in large colonies, so their behaviour probably reflects that — safety in numbers might mean they feel empowered to be more aggressive than such tiny birds would normally have any right to be.
Actually, I think they are quite pretty. Their shades are not as vibrant but have subtleties that are illuminated by sunlight.
I don't think they're 'pretty' as such. They're far from ugly and, yes, I appreciate the subtle patterns, but I'm aware that, my environment being what it is, my sense of the aesthetic is conditioned to find beauty in things that are objectively really quite drab.
The influence our environment … the everyday sights and sounds of our lives …. has upon our aesthetic sensibilities is really quite remarkable.
On the one hand, mine is strongly influenced by London’s urban decay
… but, on the other, by its Georgian and Edwardian architecture … whilst also by the almost Georgian (and early Victorian) London quality of much of Paris … that of Germany … of Belgium and Holland … of Spain … Portugal
Throughout all of them, however, there is that sensitivity to urban decay that appeals: where I like most in any of them are the previously genteel areas that have since ‘gone to seed’ (especially noticeable in Lisbon, for instance) or previously poor areas that have been (semi) gentrified (like Camden in London). It’s that hybrid of the industrial and the organic ¹ … the organic inorganic … that calls to my soul (in a way the bucolic ‘splendour’ of the countryside never has or could ²).
And that crosses … synaesthesia like … into all manner of my appreciation.
I saw Björk in interview once and, when asked where she drew her inspiration from, she replied that it came from the sounds of her everyday life: birdsong, the babbling of the stream at the end of her garden and so forth.
I thought “Fuck off … the sounds of my life are the pop of the photocopier, the clack of the keyboard, the beep of the bar-code scanner, breaking glass, car alarms, police/ambulance/fire-engine sirens, the screams of muggers’ victims, the car horn, car crashes, tearing metal and falling masonry, not that bucolic, tree-hugging hippy crap — where in Hell, does she live!?!”
Years ago … maybe thirty or so … my then girlfriend and I were cycling through a nature preservation zone in Germany when I noticed the tonal quality of the massed crickets, which were incredibly numerous and fantastically loud.
I turned to her and said (translated) “Hark at those crickets … they sound just like the hum of overhead power-lines!”
I was sitting in a friend’s home in Paris one day, when I heard the industrial pail swinging off the crane on the building site opposite clang into something … and thought “That’s a great tone … really nice resonance on the reverb tail.”
Years before that … fifteen maybe … in London … I was in bed one night … well, okay, in the early hours of the morning as usual … and could just make out some music from a party happening somewhere … in one of the other houses in the street. And it was fantastic … some of the best music I’d ever heard. But it was one of the rare … basically unheard of … occasions in my life on which I just didn’t have the get up and go to get up and investigate — besides which, I could just knock on a few doors the next day and enquire about it.
Which is what I did.
I knocked on every door in that street.
I knocked on every door for two streets in every direction.
No-one had had a party the night before.
No-one.
Nonplussed I went back home and wondered what the hell had happened.
And finally … sitting there, listening to the silence … it dawned on me.
What had happened was that I had been listening to Industrial for so long that, to me, everything was music. I’d been hearing the creaks of the house, the air in the radiators, the sounds of cars in the streets, the opening and shutting of doors in the distance, far-away aircraft passing overhead and various other, half-to-barely heard sounds in the night and my brain had turned them into music — the best music I had ever heard in my life!
And I have to say that I am so grateful for it. For, to this day, my preference for the industrial and electronic mean that … where other people live in a world of occasional music against a background of noise and disturbance … I live in a world of constant music — it’s there in the background all the time, from the amazing reverberation of the industrial-sized metal pail banging into something on a building site … to the screams of someone getting knifed in the street.
It informs our senses across the board … I even find the harshness of city life soothing ³
So, I’m aware that my sense of beauty is probably markedly different from that of others.
But, as I said, they have such interesting characters and that makes up for it as far as I’m concerned. There was one little, female I often fed in Berlin that I genuinely fell in Love with and, truth be known, I’d go out of my way to go to the bakery and buy croissants and such, just in the hope I’d see her that day. She was the first one to pluck up the courage to take food from my fingers. A little while later, she was the first to take it from my outstretched palm. Not long after that, she was the first one brave enough to fly up and hop about next to me on the bench. And, naturally, she was the first to dare to fly up to the bench, hop up onto my leg and then fly the short distance to my outstretched palm. It took a couple of months but, eventually, all I had to do was sit on the bench and she’d fly over and perch on my head or shoulder, whilst I got some pastry or other out of the bag and tore bits off it for them all … and wasn’t perturbed when I had to make (for a sparrow) quite expansive gestures to throw pieces down for the others (she’d simply flt back to my head/shoulder and perch there until I was done and put some more on my hand for her).
She was actually quite pretty (for a sparrow) too, but it was her courageous nature and adventurous spirit that really endeared her to me.
I didn’t know there was a “World Sparrow Day”!
I found out about it by accident last year, whilst investigating sparrows for some reason I forget now (probably simply idle interest about how long their lifespan is or something). It was too late to ‘celebrate’ it then, but I made a note of it in my calendar, so that I could raise awareness of it this year 😀
—
¹ Sonically best exemplified by The Prodigy’s album Music For The Jilted Generation, in which there is that analogue warmth characteristic of what went before in the genre but given a distinct digital crunch — it’s a unique sound that hasn’t been replicated by anyone since … not even Liam Howlett himself.
If you haven’t already got it (not as mp3!), you really do owe it to yourself to remedy that and buy it (not as mp3!) — YouTube, Spotify or wherever just can’t do it justice.
² The city is appealingly grubby : the great outdoors offputtingly muddy.
³ If I have a kink, it isn’t sexual … it’s aesthetic — there’s something visceral about a glass in the face that appeals in a way da boyz in da ‘hood never could.
