Q Project Night Moves
Lavonda Busing
We often always share photos, videos, and stories about the bikes we build, but not about why we build them. The Ducati GT1000 was a project that when it was completed just felt right. It was the right colors, made the right noises, and when I hopped on it for the test ride, my head went quiet except for the feeling of pure joy I got rolling on in 3rd. It was those couple of seconds, in that moment, that we all find peace as riders. This was the inspiration for night moves.
Fear for darkness is possibly evolutionarily hardwired in us to prevent us from going to places where our eyes cannot detect danger. I also believe, it takes a lot of training to get over such ingrained fear. Of course, fear for darkness varies between individuals, age etc., but I don't believe anyone is completely immune from it. Thats what makes it a potentially apt subject to harness in photography. Tactfully executed images can bring out and show us our hidden raw fears and emotions, which could be even more significant when our rational brains cannot justify them. Fear itself has been a prominent subject in literary and art fields for many centuries. I have interest in experimenting with this area in future. For now, I would like to share an image that is heavily darkened using photoshop to attempt to create an effect. Of course its only a first attempt.
I couldn't agree more! I also think everyone has 'some' kind of unease about the darkness. If you like, you can post your final picture on www.picturesofthedark.com and I can add you to the other pictures. Here's hoping that a lot of other interesting photographers are also interested :)
Marian, you know I've already sent one photo via your project website. And I regret to say I am still not afraid of the dark. :-) But I found this snapshot last night and thought I'd put it in the thread for the heck of it. I love these colors--top floor of a parking deck in Louisville, KY, about a dozen years ago. Good luck with the project!
Most mammals in the Age(s) of the Dinosaurs lived in the ground, or were at least nocturnal. This might explain those "feeler" whiskers on your cat, dog, etc. It's another reason they survived the KT extinction.
As we get older, our minds know that there are more threats--from the simply mundane as decreasing lack of physical agility--to the decades of knowledge that as the night moves along those that are seeking devious opportunities rise to the movement...
Yes, it is evolutionary. Who worries about cemeteries in the daylight? Who gives a great deal of thought over traveling through an alley? But in the nocturnal period, predators and prey go about their movements. Tens of thousands of years imprinted in DNA tell us that there is danger in the night. Some places are safe. Some that are safe in the daylight is not so anymore. Crime statistics reinforce this perception.
I grew up in a small town in the Hudson River valley, about an hour north of New York City. Like most children, I regarded the night sky (or what I could see of it) with extraordinary wonder. I understood that nobody could say for sure what was out there. Little kids are often frustrated by the smallness of their lives, in part because the imagination-to-agency ratio of the average toddler is roughly infinity to one. As a child, you can conjure complex, unbound, spooling worlds, but in your own life, you are largely powerless to make significant moves. Looking up, the tininess I felt was validated, confirmed, but it no longer felt like a liability. If the night sky offers us one thing, continuously, it is a deeply liberating sense of ourselves in perspective, and of the many things we can neither comprehend nor control.
The nocturnal world, of course, also generates its own light, and those deviations can affect dark-sky conditions. The National Park Service cites moonlight, starlight from individual stars and planets, the Milky Way (also called galactic light, or integrated starlight), zodiacal light (sunlight reflected off dust particles in the solar system), airglow (a faint aurora caused by radiation striking air molecules in the upper atmosphere), wildfire, lightning strikes, and meteors as organic sources of evening light. Atmospheric moisture or dust particles can refract or reflect that light, amplifying glow (deserts, for example, are low in moisture but high in dust; forests are the inverse). Air pollution makes it all worse.
In the seventeenth century, under the reign of the self-described Sun King, Louis XIV, tallow candles fashioned from rendered beef or mutton fat were placed in iron-framed glass boxes and strung above the streets of Paris. Lamplighters wandered the districts of the city at dusk, unlocking the boxes and igniting the wicks (mischievous vagrants and the over-served often yanked down and smashed the boxes, a wilding tradition that endures today in cities where inconveniently placed streetlights are often shot dark, presumably to facilitate illegal transactions).
Of course, electric lighting, employed judiciously at night, can be terrifically beautiful. Large-scale light artists like James Turrell, who deliberately seek out areas unmarred by light pollution, manipulate and re-contextualize light in astonishing ways. And sometimes light at night is unquestionably necessary, like the lights that land airplanes, or the ones that warn passing ships away from outcroppings of rock.
Besides being costly and inefficient, too much artificial light at night is also supremely unhealthy for humans. In 2001, two epidemiologic studies published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that exposure to visible light at night was a potential risk factor for breast cancer. Other studies link the reduced generation of melatonin, a hormone stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light, to mood disorders; one, from The Ohio State University, found that chronic exposure to a relatively low level of artificial light at night increased signs of depression in hamsters. Comparable studies have established links between melatonin deficiencies and diabetes, even obesity.
A few weeks before I visited Cherry Springs, I went with a couple of buddies to a sensory deprivation chamber in Brooklyn. Formerly a hallmark of psychological experiments (and, on occasion, deployed as an interrogation technique), sensory deprivation was now being reconfigured as a kind of bourgeois meditation aid: For $99, you could float for an hour in a foot or so of heavily salted mineral water (roughly 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt per tub), calibrated precisely to your body temperature, inside a sealed, soundproof, lightproof, womb-like chamber. The idea was to disappear a little. The stresses and expectations of an accelerated modern life seemed to demand an antidote of, well, nothingness.
That inescapable curiosity was the lone catalyst for centuries of intellectual and spiritual growth. Babylonian astronomy gave us time, later mathematics; astronomy is, in one way or another, central to every foundational philosophy we know. Our instinctive preoccupation with the content of the sky seems tangled up, somehow, with all those other inborn human desires: to know and be known. To feel cowed, sublimated. To wonder and to worship.
The merch table was swarmed early in the night in Baltimore, and there was a sense of anticipation within the small venue on North Charles Street. Fans were openly sharing their eagerness to simply glimpse the group, which has seen some lineup adjustments over the years as Ritsema moved on to focus on his solo project, Suzie, and Night Moves welcomed new members on board for touring and more eventual studio work.
The band took the stage and was met by boisterous cheers. A keyboard bisected the stage, and Pelant stood to the side of it, his hair almost covering his eyes. To his left, Alfano; over to the right side was electric guitarist Charles Murlowski and in the back was Mark Hanson on drums.
An oversize/overweight permit is required when the dimensions or weight of a vehicle(s) exceeds the normal limits permitted by legislation. The following is a breakdown of the weight and dimension limitations. More information may be contained in the appropriate sections of the HTA.
Definition of semi-trailer: A vehicle that is towed by another vehicle and is so designed and used that a substantial part of its weight and load rests on, or is carried by, the other vehicle or a trailer converter dolly through a fifth wheel assembly.
Oversize/Overweight farm machinery, farm tractors, self-propelled implements of husbandry (SPIH) carried on a plated motor vehicle or plated trailer drawn by a motor vehicle are subject to the need for an oversize/overweight permit
The load must not be made up of articles loaded or mounted one behind the other that will create additional length, and any overhang to the rear must not exceed 4.65 m from the centre of the rearmost axle.
The load must not be made up of more than one article. When crossing bridges, vehicles over 45,000 kg gross weight must be operated at the lowest practicable speed. Bridge postings and load restrictions pursuant to Part VII of the HTA apply.
Note: An exception may be made in the case of bulldozer blades. Permits are issued for the movement of bulldozers with blades attached up to, and including, 4.27 m in width. The blade must be angled to reduce the overall width of the load when attached to the bulldozer. The blade must be removed when the blade is greater than 4.27 m in width. Bulldozers with blades attached that are 4 m to 4.27 m in width require a private escort warning vehicle.
The permit issuer may limit the time and particular highway(s) that may be used and may specify certain special conditions or provisions that are considered necessary to protect the safety and integrity of the highways and other road users.
A permit grants the movement of overweight loads on highways under provincial jurisdiction. Municipalities may accept ministry permits or issue their own for highways under their jurisdiction. The carrier must contact the appropriate municipality(ies) to ensure compliance with the local by-laws.
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