time-grayed cabins
“Years pass by and leave things unaltered. The same narrow, red roads run through cotton- and cornfields. The same time-grayed cabins send up threads of smoke from their red-clay chimneys, doorways, and china-berry and crape-myrtle blossoms to drop gay petals on little half-clothed black children.”
—Julia Peterkin (1880–1961), “Ashes,” from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.
Silent darkness
“Kildee sat in the doorway and looked out at the thick, black night. His muscular hands shook helplessly and clutched at the rough board step. His strength had left him. He felt weak. Shaken. Afraid. The darkness came up close. It filled his eyes and ears and nostrils. It slipped past him into the fire-lit room. The fire still burned. There was no other light to be had. But darkness filled the corners. Silent darkness. Black, dumb darkness. It told nobody what it was, or what it was doing. It was like death. It came. It went. Nobody could keep it away. Nobody.
. . . If God was mad with him for plowing Green Thursday, why didn’t He strike him with lightning and kill him? That would have been easy enough. But to burn a baby—it wasn’t square.”
—Julia Peterkin (1880–1961), “Green Thursday,” from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.
a red sunset
“The sun was going down.
Far across the cotton field it shone red. As Killdee lifted serious eyes to look at it, his lean, gaunt, black face saddened.
The sun that set in Baby Rose’s grave was red, just like this sunset. Red like the fire that burned her tender baby flesh and killed her. He never saw a red sunset without thinking of little Baby Rose.
Now as he thought, his tired eyes filled with tears, and through the tears, the red coppery glow glistened, and flashed and gleamed mockingly before him.”
—Julia Peterkin (1880–1961), “Teaching Jim,” from Green Thursday: Stories by Julia Peterkin, first published in 1924.
The Mystery Of The Chernobyl Reactor “Shining Cloud”
“On April 25th-26th, 1986, the World’s worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). . . . At 1:23 a.m. the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor’s heavy steel and concrete lid.
As fire, smoke and steam raged from the shattered reactor hall building, residents of the nearby city of Pripyat, standing atop the tallest apartment building in the city, spoke of a beautiful “shining cloud” pluming from the shattered reactor.
What was this “shining cloud?” How did it come into being?
In order to understand, one first must examine this excerpt from Chernobyl plant operator Alexander Yuvchenko, who was one of very few control room operators on duty that fateful day to survive the accident. . . . Yuvchenko stated: ‘From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionization of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful.’
To better understand this bluish light, one must first understand Cerenkov Radiation. In 1934, while he was studying the effects of radioactive substances on liquids, Pavel Cerenkov noticed that water surrounding certain radioactive substances emitted a faint blue glow, which is now termed Cerenkov radiation.
Cerenkov Radiation comes from particles traveling at a speed greater than the speed of light in the medium in which they are moving. Electrically charged particles emit Cerenkov Radiation, and in the case of the Chernobyl accident, an intense flux of high energy electrons emitted by the molten, naked core ionized the surrounding moist air and steam droplets belching from the reactor hall after the explosion, and caused them to glow light blue, as plant operator Yuvchenko observed.
No known pictures of the “shining cloud” have been published, as the accident occurred when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and all controversial media deemed damaging to the State was censored, seized or destroyed.”
—Mark Motz, posted at Smooth Operator, www.smthop.com, just yesterday.
“You could look at it forever”
“Film is such a potent medium that its greatest artists were often astonished by the power of their own creations. “You could look at it forever,” Hitchcock said of one of his own compositions. Hitchcock created forms so eloquent they could bridge the gap between a warped genius and a mainstream audience; his screen world of polished surfaces, neurotic tension, concealed meaning and latent menace seemed vaguely familiar to most of us, if only from our dreams.”
—Hal Crowther, “Movies, Mules and Music,” from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.
Tommy Thompson
“I remember watching him and thinking, if I had to describe a Shakespearean character, it would be Tommy. He was big then, and he had that kind of Falstaff quality to him—red hair, and a red beard. He was amazing looking, and the word that comes to mind is probably charismatic. You looked at him, and you had to look back, because he had such a presence, he just exuded this personality.”
—original Red Clay Rambler pianist Mike Craver, on the father of the band, Tommy Thompson. Quoted by Hal Crowther in “The Last Song of Father Banjo,” from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.
Black and white
“The truth—which we’ve always known—is that race as an exclusive category is pure (or impure) fantasy in America. Black and white are words of pride and racist convenience, not scientific observation. They describe artificial tribes, and they’re a sorry legacy from slavery and its hideous offspring, Jim Crow.”
—Hal Crowther, “Who’s Your Daddy?,” from the collection Gathering at the river: notes from the post-millenial south, LSU Press, 2005.
a phenomenon that begs to be investigated
“In antiquity, around the Mediterranean basin the color blue did not exist. Historian Michel Pastoureau explains that people saw it—the Greeks and Romans were not visually impaired as some historians have suggested—but they did not perceive it as a color, nor did they have a specific word for it. Even the sea and sky, so blue in that part of the globe, looked white, gold, or red to them. For Olafur Eliasson, the 39-year-old Danish installation artist whose main media are light and color, cultural blindness like this is a phenomenon that begs to be investigated.”
—Veronique Vienne, from the article Optical Magic, Metropolis magazine, May 2006.
visual cocktails of ivory, chalky, icy, creamy, milky, and pearly lights
“One of [Olafur Eliasson’s] most recent pieces is a direct attack on the universality of the white cube (The Light Setup). Installed at the Malmo Konsthall, in Sweden, the 16,145-square-foot exhibition was set in an empty hall illuminated by 1,500 fluorescent lights behind giant screens—some on the walls, some on the ceilings—programmed to deliver different shades of white light, each affecting the way people moved across space. ‘I developed a system that allowed me to take a spectrographic reading of the exact quality of the white light in different parts of the world, at different hours of the day, and during different seasons,’ Eliasson explains. Much like a perfumer mixing high-tech fragrance notes replicating natural ones, he was able to create visual cocktails of ivory, chalky, icy, creamy, milky, and pearly lights, debunking the idea that there is such a thing as “pure” white.”
—Veronique Vienne, from the article Optical Magic, Metropolis magazine, May 2006.
Double Sunset, 1999
A yellow corrugated iron disk lit with floodlights mirrors an actual sunset in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
—from Optical Magic, an article on installation artist Olafur Eliasson, by Veronique Vienne. Metropolis magazine, May 2006.