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.

chip carving of three birds on a line of music, with flowers, blue chip-carved frame

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.

Sahasranshu Dash:

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.

Zippy the Pinhead also does not use his smart phone much

A tale of three maples: or, last of the fall color

Red leaves of Japanese mapleGold-red leaves of Carolina mapleRed-green leaves of Japanese maple

Camouflage

Small fluffy white dog napping on a fluffy white blanket

Slow tick-tock of the feeder on its post: the bird has flown.

Late September/Southern Piedmont. Chip carving in basswood, eight panels in a reclaimed window, 19”x32”. This one took awhile.

I have been waiting to post this until I could get good photos of individual panels, but I can’t get the light right, so just zoom in, if you like.

Someday soon, there will be in hell a vast room of web developers starving, emaciated, desperately trying to click the button that says “bring me food” only to have a popup get in the way. Every. Single. Time. For all eternity. Have fun, fellas.

Currently reading, by complete coincidence: Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History by Edward S. Cooke, Jr., and Local Lives: Poems about the Pennsylvania Dutch by Millen Brand.