A sunny morning here in the North. So. Much. Light. It still doesn’t get dark. Not outside my head, at least. Today, a dip into (formerly) popular culture.

WORK

Goethe’s final words: “More light.” Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry: “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candle light. Neon. Incandescent. Lights that banish the darkness from our caves, to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier’s Field. Little tiny flashlight for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and foot-candles. Light is metaphor. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet … Rage, rage against the dying of the light … Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home. Lead Thou me on! … Arise, shine, for thy light has come.” Light is knowledge. Light is life. Light is light.

—Chris Stevens (character on the television show Northern Exposure)

WORD

foot-candle. noun. A unit of illumination equal to the light of one candle at one foot away. Superseded by lux and lumen. Or, considerably less common, a candle literally shaped like a foot, like this classic example produced by G.E. in the thirties.

“The reason Shirley Temple hadn’t made a movie in Technicolor until [1939] was that the Technicolor company insisted that 1,000 foot-candle lights be used to get proper exposure on their film. These incredibly bright lights produced so much heat that the staff at Fox thought a child Temple’s age would be hurt working under such conditions.” (IMDB Trivia)

“The unit of measurement used to calibrate such statements is the intriguingly named foot-candle; direct sunlight ranges from 5,000 to 10,000 foot-candles and moonlight is equivalent to 0.02 foot-candles. Yet it is only when brightness levels are reduced to 0.003 foot-candles that the human eye is finally defeated and can no longer distinguish any feature in its surroundings. A moonlit night will provide plenty of illumination for the nocturnal wanderer, although he or she may find the world altered in unexpected ways.” (James Attlee, from Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight)

WEB

1. Some truly striking photos by Salar Kheradpejouh.

2. I’ve never seen anything like Jonty Hurwitz’s anamorphic sculptures before. Also on his site: mathematical painting, perspective sculpture, dimensional layering and other terms of art I don’t understand but whose artifacts intrigue me.

3. Bic is creating a universal typeface by averaging handwriting samples from people all over the world. You can take part. Sounds like the ultimate “design by committee” kind of activity to me. But I can’t dispute that the average faces algorithm resulted in some beautiful images, so who knows?

4. “People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they’d rather be in pain.”.

5. Today in 1871 Marcel Proust is born. He’s known, of course, for his seven volume, 4000ish word novel In Search of Lost Time AKA Remembrance of Things Past. Like many, I’ve read only around 2/7 of it; unlike many, I’m ’fessing up. From a 1912 letter in which Proust discusses his gargantuan novel:

“I should have liked to have published it as a single whole, but it would have been too long. They no longer publish works in several volumes. There are novelists, on the other hand, who envisage a brief plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous. I hope that by the end of my book what I have tried to do will be understandable; some unimportant little event will show that time has passed and it will take on that beauty certain pictures have, enhanced by the passage of the years.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader A. observes that one’s “Bacon Number” traditionally means connections in which one is an actor linking to performing with other actors. True enough. But I think everyone should have bacon and Bacon Numbers, so expanded the criteria to include personal connections. The Bacon² number should be based on actually eating bacon with one’s connections.

• Combining the “Entoptic Phenomenon” photography technique featured a few days ago with these Parkour Motion Photos could be interesting…

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: http://katexic.com/clippings/.