FIELD NOTES : Jacob Perkins :: From the Cannery, Part 6 : Return of a Fast Food Drifter
On top of the Olympic Range I am skating over snowfields and looking through something I'd only impair to describe as 'fabric' at night. Deep nostalgic chest throbs: the mushroom chocolates were a good choice. There was supposed to be
FIELD NOTES :: No Instructions for Assembly :: Kameelah Rasheed's Photographic Memory
While an Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock this summer, I continued to work on the series Memories: No Instructions for Assembly. This series which has morphed into six evolving iterations - I, II, III, IV, V, and VI is born from my family's experience with displacement and loss. There is limited photographic evidence that my family ever existed. Photographs were lost when we were unlawfully removed from our home in 1998. Some photographs were water-damaged or accidentally trashed before we packed seven lives and accompanying articles into a burgundy station wagon and made our home in a 450-square foot illegal attachment where my grandfather died, alone, nine years prior of stomach cancer. An attempt to conjure my family back into existence, in Memories: No Instructions for Assembly, I weave together orphaned photographs found at garage sales, photos stolen from the Facebook pages of estranged family members, magazine pages, water-damaged images salvaged during my family's 10-year bout with homelessness, and original photography to re-imagine a lost family history. Working in the tradition of the archaeologist and the archivist, I sample as well as reorganize existing materials into a series of images to produce a non-linear narrative that dances between vivid and vague memories. 
FIELD NOTES from Indra's Net "and pretty soon there’s my arm !" with Donna Fleischer
and pretty soon there’s my arm ! :
A Field Notes baedeker
by Donna Fleischer
On assignment in the Exit Strata Field Notes office sans walls. Mountain air and wild clover nitrogen sacs beneath rockshelf. Fertility Wampum. Barefoot through their unseen globules, nodules, atop sandy patterns the width and wavinesses of a snake’s movements, as in many Navaho textile weavings, as are the photograms of Adam Fuss. How I try to mostly (write) now, undulate, corporealize and scrabble across this Connecticut steppe and mountain ridge meadow.
Morning blueberries, raw almonds, coffee, black cat, garter snake, mockingbirds swoop and dip into the small clover clumps; read mainstay poets with field glasses and compass ~ Charlie Mehrhoff, Amy King, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, purple crown vetch and a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace tall from rain, Noelle Kocot, Ana Božičević, Tim Trace Peterson, Filip Marinovich, Tyrone McDonald, David Pontrelli, mountain winds, CAConrad, Anne-Adele Wight, bird squawks, Scott Watson, Bob Arnold, Ariana Reines, Christina Pacosz, Lynn Behrendt, marlene mountain, just can’t name them all ~. My neighbor April just came home in her red Beetle. Its motor purrs. The weather is magnanimous. Here’s the skull of Phineas Gage, poor man, lodged in my brain. I retrieve the railroad tie, place it in the ground, as totem. Who is to know how it all begins, goes forth, stumbles along, falls and crawls back with earthworm writhe to write.
FIELD NOTES: WHAT WE ECHO::Animating in Mississippi: Danny Madden and Benjamin Wiessner
Travel often makes me aware of the many roles that I continually fulfill without realizing them. There are moments in any successful trip that cause the traveler to come face to face with his/her own intentions, hopefully causing the traveler
FIELD NOTES : Architectural Uncanny, PART 2 :: Martin Byrne's Moments of Environmental Opportunity
Every now and again, as I walk around these not-so-pristine streets, my eye will catch something small, some strange forgotten detail on a building facade and it will tell me to record it in some way, sketch or otherwise, in order for it not to be forgotten entirely. Other times, my forehead opens up and things fall out and I'll need a place to catch them.Most often though, the idle thoughts that pass through typically revolve around or revolve in some kind of environment, not necessarily a building, maybe a set of buildings, or a wilderness, none of which exist in the proper sense, and therefore need to find space on a notebook page. The design process that has sort of formed itself within me over the years took a narrative turn while I was working on my master's degree. The sense that buildings and environments needed to be created through the positivist flow seemed to be too limited and cold for my tastes and the only way to find new opportunities in design would be to come at it from the other side. Or from underneath, as the case may be. This lead me towards intuition, accident, error, and then eventually to poetry, though I far from consider myself to be any kind of poet.FIELD NOTES: JACOB PERKINS :: From the Cannery : Part 5, The Long Haul :: Exhaustion, Mistress Mine
Editor's update: our man in Alaska is in the midst of tonnes of tuna...er, sockeye salmon... you get the drift: a lot of fish.
He reports fatigue of the almost unbelievably backbreaking variety, the type that relies on dogged perseverance alone. As has happened to all of us in these simultaneously frustrating and invigorating times, writing falls by the wayside... but in the service of satisfying, seemingly "real" work, wherein the mind enters a nearly zen state and stops getting in the way.
Somehow, to spend a few moments looking, depicting in film or pen and ink doesn't require the same effort as words so a few drawings pepper the spaces between. We congratulate Jacob, his dad, and their team on a banner harvest.
He writes:
I can hardly move right now. It is a record breaking year so far. We've been open for the last eight days straight and will probably not close until the first of August. I can't really relate to you how tired I am at this point but we're almost half way through the season and we are destroying past seasons. I won't sleep for the next two weeks probably. It's been about as many preceding today. If I could write I would, but I can't. One thing on my mind right now: working through it.
FIELD NOTES: Architectural Uncanny :: Poetics and the Built Environment with Martin Byrne
[caption id="attachment_1780" align="alignleft" width="640"]
Byrne's installation, the "Occupiable Sculpture" Digilog Futures, at 83 Gallery (Columbus, OH) http://www.architizer.com/en_us/projects/view/digilog-futures/40226/[/caption]
Day # 5 (1.5)
Wake feeling strangely ok.
This does not last.
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Where do poetics and the built environment overlap? What do we take in, what do we observe? Where are the boundaries where we end and our context begin? Or are these boundaries illusory?
What of these questions when you engage with and build this environment? When the city, the block, the structure, the wall, all that recedes as existent, is your medium? In this mini-series of FIELDNOTES, architect and poet Martin Byrne lets us peek into his mind/journal.
FIELD NOTES : Interrogating Truth:: Poetry and Journalism with Andre Bagoo in Trinidad and Tobago
A Note on Notebooks
Andre Bagoo
AT FIRST, I wanted to keep them separate. After all, they could not be more different. One, plain blue with the words ‘REPORTERS NOTEBOOK’ written on its thin cover. The other, a fancy Italian notebook with a hard cover that looks like brown marble; the kind of pattern you used to find on the insides of old books thrown out by the library. For a long time I walked with the reporters’ notebook on work assignments and saved the other notebook for home; for later; for after the real work of the day was done. Somehow they conspired to get together.In truth, they were meant for each other.
AWESOME CREATORS: The Poetry Society of New York Builds a Festival (and a Dream)
The poetry landscape in New York City can be confusing to navigate, especially given its ever growing diaspora of splinter cells.
Despite the density and scale of creative energy feeding this array, the experience of this fragmentation is often that of participation in one or a number of small groups, working in isolation. Sustaining these communities takes constant effort and commitment on the part of not only those who choose to plant the seed of reading series, magazine, or so on, but also from those who support and participate in these efforts -- and in many cases there is a fine line between success and utter exhaustion, the point at which sustenance seems too dear a price, and in which community feels like a utopian fantasy.
Sometimes, it takes a certain kind of vision -- one that steps back, out away from these stands of trees, to see the verdant, expansive forest -- to help empower a return to joy and belief in our work, and in the strength of our creative community.
If you're here, you know this is a mission near and dear to our hearts. That we exist primarily as a creators community, a network, and a platform for mutual expression, appreciation, collaboration, dialogue, interdisciplinary exploration. Our work is, ultimately, an exercise in the self-actualization of a viable cooperative for growing value. But we know we cannot do this alone, and so we are always searching for allies, comrades in the fight for viable abundance....
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 4 :: Lost and Found
The crew just left after a week of touring through Valdez and the kenai peninsula. Joyous time, a little relieved to rest, but of course we're about to jump into a month straight of intense fishing with absolutely no breaks or
