Yesterday was one of those early autumn afternoons. You know the ones. The phrase drifted into my head; the image drifted into my browser, thanks to Enoweb. This is one of the four lithographs by the late Peter Schmidt, included with the original (vinyl) pressings of Before & After Science (1977). (You know, this is a very ancient site, as these things go: enoweb’s been online since 1993, and although I like the resources, and the authorial voice, the site looks terrible. It’s about seven years overdue for a makeover.)
I find myself reading about Eno’s “gushing” postcard to Alan Moore, on the subject of Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls (which I really must pick up soon) as reported in the Village Voice, and then there’s this ominous quote from a recent interview BE did with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obris at the Serpentine in July:

“Sometimes I think things are so desperately precarious at the moment that everything else we’re doing is utterly irrelevant, like sitting here talking or going to my studio and making whatever I make, seems increasingly off the point to me. I’ve always been an optimist until recently, and I’ve become very pessimistic recently.
“You know, the Lebanon thing is only a simple example of how suddenly it seems that a lot of states are conspiring to have a war because they all think they’re going to come out of it best. And it’s not a little war that they want to have, they want to have a big war, and I’m saying Israel, America, us, Hizbollah, Iran, Syria, they all see a good reason for a nice big regional conflict, and I don’t really see anybody who has a strong enough interest in preventing them from doing it at the moment.
“So that’s one type of crisis. The other type of crisis is the really big question which is about climate change: this for instance is the hottest July since 1659 in England; 10 of the last 14 years have been the hottest 10 years on record, so this seems to me a really difficult problem as well, in that even if we suddenly all decide tomorrow that we’re going to do everything right, it’s a 50 year ship that’s got to turn, it’s going in a direction and it’s going to be a long time before that direction changes.
“So I’m kind of pessimistic and I’m looking to my daughters’ generation to just burn the lot of us and start again really.”

- which was a little dispiriting. Eno is one of the people I tend to look upon as Definitely Smarter Than Me, and it’s a bit discouraging to find that (at least on that particular day) he’s as pessimistic as I am, and for much the same reasons.
Here’s a Guardian piece, anticipating the first interview marathon at the Serpentine Pavilion. I notice that there will be a second one coming up on 13th/14th October. Must look into tickets…