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Love this account of taking one of the first photographs in history.

Everyone is acquainted with the beautiful effects which are produced by a camera obscura, and has admired the vivid picture of external nature which it displays. It had often occurred to me, that if it were possible to retain upon the paper the lovely scene which thus illumines it for a moment, or if we could but fix the outline of it, the lights and shadows divested of all colour, such a result could not fail to be most interesting. And however much I might be disposed at first to treat this notion as a scientific dream, yet when I had succeeded in fixing the images of the solar microscope by means of a peculiarly sensitive paper, there appeared no longer any doubt that an analogous process would succeed in copying the objects of external nature, although indeed they are much less illuminated.

Not having with me in the country a camera obscura of any considerable size, I constructed one out of a large box, the image being thrown upon it by a good object glass fixed in the opposite end. This apparatus being armed with a sensitive paper, was taken out in a summer afternoon and placed about a hundred yards from a building favourably illuminated by the sun. An hour or two afterwards I opened the box, and I found depicted on the paper a very distinct representation of the building, with the exception of those parts of it which lay in the shade. A little experience in this branch of the art showed me that with smaller camerae obscurae the effect would be produced in a smaller time. Accordingly I had several small boxes made, in which I fixed lenses of shorter focus, and with these I obtained very perfect but extremely small pictures; such as without great stretch of imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist. They require indeed examination with a lens to discover all their minutiae.

In the summer of 1835 I made in this way a great number of representations of my house in the country, which is well suited to the purpose, from its ancient and remarkable architecture. And this building I believe to be the first that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.

- Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the Artist’s Pencil, Henry Fox Talbot, 1834

via Pandaemonium 1660–1886, Humphrey Jennings

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You know how, when you leave your car in the sun with the windows closed, and then you come back, it’s hot and stuffy and feels like a sauna?

I love that feeling.

Maybe because I run cold in general, maybe because it reminds me of my childhood growing up in LA. Who knows. My wife and kid hate it; I love it. 🤷

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Saw Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza last night. It was great. But the one act of theirs I’ll never forget was from over a decade ago: Lara Jacobs’s Balance Goddess in Amaluna. Didn’t feel like a circus act at all; it was quiet, meditative, haunting. Started simply, balancing a few palm ribs on each other, but by the end of it, she’d constructed an elaborate maze of them, from tiny to massive, perfectly and impossibly hanging in midair, defying all known physics. Otherworldly. One of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.

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Daaamn. Reading Meditations, this jumped out at me:

Thou must hasten therefore; not only because thou art every day nearer unto death than other, but also because that intellective faculty in thee, whereby thou art enabled to know the true nature of things, and to order all thy actions by that knowledge, doth daily waste and decay: or, may fail thee before thou die.

To paraphrase:

Sure, hurry up and do stuff before you die, but that’s not enough. You’ll run out of strength and get dementia way before that. So hurry up even more!

Hoo boy. This is not the chill, everything’s fine, don’t stress, Zen style Stoicism I was promised. 😆

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