FIELD NOTES :: MARTIN BYRNE, Part 3, Take 1 :: To and From San Francisco, or; In-between Indeterminate Inebriate Islands
Architect Martin Byrne returns with more environ-poetic process notes
FIELD NOTES: WHAT WE ECHO::Perpetual Creation—Collaborative Momentum
This week Danny and I passed the three month mark of our journey across the United States. Three months in, the goal still centers on journeying outside of our selves. That task complicates itself at every turn, but the motion
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 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 : 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.
FIELD NOTES: Jacob Perkins, From the Cannery : Pt 3 :: Exxon Oil Spill
Pushing off the dock in Kodiak with a solid three weeks of work behind us, the small cannery we called (temporary) home, Alitak, lies behind a hundred miles of fog and snowcovered peaks. We set off on a thirty hour run north, to an equally small town, Kenai, for the salmon season on the Cook Inlet.
I'd like to tell you about jigging for cod over this time, on a small boat in high wind and waves, but I find myself interested in showers, and their locations, scarcity.
FIELD NOTES : JACOB PERKINS: From the Cannery, Pt 2
Straight from Kodiak -- our second installment from poet and artist, Jacob Perkins.
Here's an excerpt from PT 1 - to contextualize the images and drawings below. More words are incoming... he's on a fishing boat in Alaska, after all!
"Myself, I am Alaskan born. Summer is the season of the sockeye. For others it is re-shingling, re-siding, decking, painting, some kind of hometown gig you begrudge seasonally, out of that season. For me it is sockeye, and a gillnet, and a boat.
Whether or not you’re leaving your medium; the palette, the sound equipment, the studio, the computer; or if you’re lucky enough to bring them along, one thing is clear: summer is time to get down to some hard work, psychologically, ideologically, literally."
[caption id="attachment_1544" align="alignleft" width="612"]
A 45 pound Lingcod we caught in Kodiak[/caption]
EDITORIAL :: NEW SERIES ANNOUNCEMENT: "FIELD NOTES"
"None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense."
- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
“...writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.” ― Doris Lessing
