Japanese Honeysuckle (tests)

 sprayed with bleach

bleached by the sun

thrift store book finds yesterday

three images from three books i found yesterday. Home Security, Life-Time Books, 1979; The North Woods, The American Wilderness/Life-Time Books, 1973; & The North Woods, The American Wilderness/Life-Time Books, 1972.

Left: 1973  Right: 1972

how to make your own strong room

slow onset events

'cause somethings gotta keep me up at night

all perishes

The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
-Plato, "Apology," Dialogues, 399 B.C.

What is death at most? It is a journey for a season; a sleep longer than usual. If thou fearest death, thou shouldest also fear sleep.
-St. John Chrysostom, Homily, c. 388

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.
-Peter (Ken Foree), "Dawn of the Dead," 1978

All perishes and passes that we see with our eyes. The wealth of this world wanes into wretchedness. Robes and riches rot in the ditch. . . . Their gold and their treasures draw them to death.
-Richard Role (c. 1300-1349), Selected Works of Richard Role

crows and beached buoys

for an installation that i would like to do... on the east coast, somewhere.

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and a sketch i made to work through some of these ideas

night yipping

i woke up at 4:30am last night to the sound of some very loud (close) coyote yipping and howling. this is a sound that i know well, but was frightening non-the-less. i put on my glasses and ran to the window in time to see two coyotes walking south on the railroad tracks outside my apartment - the tracks are about 10 feet down and 20 feet out from my window. from the noise it seemed like there were one or two somewhere else in city calling in response.

not my video, but the sound is the same (sans the waterfall)

post

a dead coyote on a fence near Lipan, TX, via http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenkuhl/95172104/

a photo I took of some catfish heads I found nailed to a post outside Mazon, IL, circa 2001

Recently, I came across this photo of catfish heads I took in high school, which spurred my investigation into the practice of putting dead things on fences. In the case of the coyote, the carcass is supposed to ward off other coyotes that might kill a farmer's cows - in a similar function as Vlad the Impaler's use of impaled enemies to warn off invading armies.

In the case of the catfish heads there are two possible explanations: 1. as a way of displaying your catches (trophies), or 2. a functional and easy way of cleaning a catfish evidently involves nailing the fish's head to a post to hold it in place while it is cleaned - the head is then cut off and left on the post afterward.

Thinking of these references I decided to take to task these odd bits of yellow expanding foam that I keep finding on the train tracks outside my apartment. The intervention is in a large empty lot (almost a whole block large) in my neighborhood.

Adam Farcus - Horns (intervention and photograph) 2011

So, I hope Horns is at once a trophy, a totem, and an (mythical) omen. What is a trophy or totem for is up for debate - fungus, dicks, disease, industry, abject objects...

in Beloit

Stump and Walnuts, Beloit, WI (photograph) 2010

Outer Space (digital photograph) 2010

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Ill-Starred

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nature! (Steuben, WI edition)

a bat that Sweetpea the cat killed

a valley carved by water

bald eagle

bald eagle close up