Bravo!

Although it’s been sporadic for him as he is no professional, my dad has always sculpted as his creative outlet. His best work being from the time period after we lost my mom. His chosen medium are various woods, but when I had an interest myself, he would show me carving techniques in soap bars and create initial sculpture(s) in clay before attempting to remove material on the final workpiece. I only made a couple things in wood, but I got more into charcoal drawing and music and didn’t explore the third dimension much more (until I got into modeling on the computer for practical/machining purposes). I imagine CAD design and 3d modeling programs likely had an impact on the interest in physical sculpture in general.

Yeah, young folks are moving away because they’ve been indoctrinated in liberal college institutions and lured by a gay communist urban agenda to destroy rural America and bring about the decline of Christian conservative values! Nothing at all to do with capital consolidation and market monopolization resulting in reductions of diversified local markets and diminished job prospects! Increased cultural exposure due to accessing instantaneous global communications and social media? No way that has any influence in the decisions people make about what cultural environment they’d prefer to raise their children in. SmallTown USA is the best place to escape all the scary ideas that exist in the world, like equality among gender and race, and socializing the excesses of the private. Who would want to live in that kind of world?!

Now you have to make a giant guitar for him too.

Wood shakes Wood(s).

Not to mention corporate news. It’s impossible to find anyone else discussing particular events or raw video or even live streams without wading through what seems like thousands of every damn news channel with their talking heads and editors about any topic. I certainly understand why it’s important to have news easily accessible, but it kills me that I used to be able to find news media critique and videos of happenings from everyday people, and I just can’t anymore, at least not without serious digging. Obviously the rise of other video platforms plays a role, as does the need to ensure accurate information for specific things, like a pandemic or climate change, but I can’t help but see just how homogenized and corporatized it’s all become.

This isn’t to say there aren’t great channels out there that meet my needs, I just miss being able to type a keyword in and finding regular people, not trying to game the algorithm, not trying to make youtube a career, just getting their voices out there.

My wife is like this. We’ll be on a walk and she’ll stop mid sentence to walk ten feet into someone’s yard and grab a four leaf clover. She does this all the time and we have a huge collection of them, and that’s with us usually giving them away to people we pass further down on our walks.