Well, I could have just used this Wren Song. But I expect it’s some sort of European wren. All wrong. Tempting anyhow. Next time.
Beware the Belsnickel
Started out this morning to re-carve my “angry wren” carving only to decide I wanted to do more with it. (The present half-life of my satisfaction with my carvings is maybe six months. He has these little hairy feathers… right here…) Wound up down a rabbit hole (wren hole?) trying to figure out how to transcribe a Carolina wren’s song in musical notation, and eventually bought this book, which I guess I can justify as a business expense. This, meanwhile, was my attempt to write it down.
Can’t remember the last time we got snow in December.…
Another shot at a carved version of illuminated music: trying to work within a folk-art motif while making the illustration realistic enough that it isn’t merely kitschy. The music is the chorale from Bach’s cantata for Advent, “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben,” but you may know it by another name.
Raleigh has approved new limits on “amplified sound.” I will note that the leaf blowers used by my neighbors’ lawn services regularly violate these limits: when there are two of them going at once, as there often are, the noise inside my workshop is over 80 decibels. I don’t imagine that counts.
Unlike traditional state legibility—birth certificates, voter rolls—biometric systems encode political belonging directly into flesh. The fingerprint is not evidence of identity; it is identity. This represents a fundamental shift: from reading documents about bodies to reading bodies as documents. When manual laborers lose fingerprints to construction work, when elderly citizens’ irises cloud with cataracts, when disabled individuals cannot position themselves for scans—these aren’t technical glitches but political exclusions. The system renders them unrecognizable to the state itself.
This is not a theoretical problem, nor even a particularly exceptional one. I cannot use the fingerprint-recogntion feature on my phone, because my index fingerprints are usually too rough or worn down from using sandpaper.
A tale of three maples: or, last of the fall color
Camouflage
