An interactive guidepost (photo left) near the crest of Mt. Lowe in Angeles National Forest acting as a view finder to assist in locating downtown Los Angeles (photo right). 02/10/2024

I last wrote in October, in New Mexico. Since then it has been the crossing of Arizona, nights in truck stops, nights in the quiet of a pull off on a dirt road in the lightless desert, some passing friends and a few naked plunges in the Colorado at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Some crying at the wheel, and screaming. Reminiscences of my time on the Pacific Crest Trail as I coddled my transmission through Cajon Pass. Stopping to crush some sagebrush in my hands and rub it on my body. Thinking about The Grapes of Wrath and unironically blasting “California” by Phantom Planet two times in a row as I made my way down to the greener pastures of coastal Southern California.

A train crossing the Colorado at the border between Arizona and California

The past 6 months, somehow, have been Los Angeles. The joy of discovery, mania, perplexity, and then malaise. An impossibility of capturing, or locating, the place, other than perhaps in the occasional picturesque diner or donut shop, the shadow of a palm tree, the streetlights of Western Ave stretching ad infinitum to the sunset-scorched horizon as viewed from up on high at Griffith Observatory.

A fog of hot days and job applications and nowhere to be. Sweating by a weedy patch of the LA river writing bad songs on guitar leaning on the hood of my van. Drinking far too much, too often alone. Also some ups; great live music and the hint of a future community, discovering the unironic joy of the very nerdy sport of disc golf with my friend Mike, some writing for the LA special issue from the New York Review of Architecture. Then a new apartment (a room in a large artist loft space within a former Pabst brewery and only accessible by not one, but two ladders) and finally, spurred by being nearly completely broke, a new job (construction manager). Mediocre dates, some better ones. Nice solemn walks scented by jasmine. Eavesdropping on conversations in Spanish, not understanding, but appreciating the cadence, the texture, of a new language. Nice, quiet beer over a book at one or the other of the two pseudo-European hip cafes I like. (In America, we use European as adjective for the rare bar where there's actually good, affordable wine and you can sit outside. As we all know a shockingly high bar). Smoking more cigarettes to fuel nights spent attempting to make friends in this new place. At some point, Death Valley.


A family wandering in the “Devil’s Golf Course” of Death Valley


Joseph and Charlie smelling the chaparral ( Larrea tridentata, aka creosote bush) in Grapevine Canyon in southern Nevada

And sweet friendsgiving Thanksgiving in Nevada with my college windsurfing buddies ft. my first wobbly attempt at windsurfing in like 7 years. A Christmas drive across country (2500 miles in two nights, an audiobook of Whithering Heights, three red bulls). One Taco Bell after another.

Back West for the rest of winter, fiddling with my keyboard, my banjo, my guitar, “I’m going to really try to make music.” etc etc. A couple weeks where I was trying to write short stories. Then I bought sign-painting brushes. Too many commitments I will fail to uphold, and a real reckoning with my own failures. An astonishing amount of TV as neural numbing agent. A week where almost all I listened to was “These Days” by Nico (and written by Jackson Browne) on repeat.


These days I'll sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

My new home visible across from the neighboring railyard, the smokestack acting as landmark for the former brewery complex turned artist live-work space dubbed "The Brewery"

An shot of the factory floor in its heyday, shown to me by my roommate Jacob. We can see our loft in it, that tile floor is our floor, the distinctive light fixtures our light fixtures. No remnant smell of the ghost of beer, though, and probably for the best.

More of too, too many beers alone. The beers had the company of nostalgic TV programs (X Files). Anything to not be myself for a while. The undoing of my mind, undersleeping, then oversleeping, all fluctuations within the base chemical cycling of alcohol to coffee with nicotine as bridge. I blame it on the 9-5, or this excessive drinking, my mind coming apart. But it's really something more fundamental and damning. It came on slow, then ramped up. My thoughts were erratic, strange, and alarming. The prolonged self-induced numbing turned into a fracturing, a disintegration. It ended with me checking myself into the ER, convinced I was losing my mind. I was told I was fine, with a 500 dollar bill to show for it. Not that this really calmed me.

Desperate, I quit drinking, quit cigarettes, quit coffee, quit Instagram, quit everything, basically. I left my phone in a drawer and drove to the desert.



The arm of your friendly neighborhood hypochondriac as he awaited a complete and permanent mental dissociation which never fully arrived.

In Joshua Tree, getting baked by the sun, filming the light on the rocks and myself moving around, jumping, yelping. Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Human Figure in Motion” (1887). Or something like Bruce Nauman, simple existence as creation. Reading The Goodby People by Gavin Lambert (second I’ve read of his about various characters of LA, the first, Slide Area, set in the 50s and this second one, in the early 70s, both great, and part of my self-made series of reading fiction set in my new home of Los Angeles) in one sitting, on a large, sandpapery-yet-comfortable rock. Slowly, a returning to a more stable condition thanks to the sun locating me. It and the rock, my anchors.


Stomping around the desert


A sunset walk, reading an information plaque about deep time and the evolution of desert flora somehow making me uncontrollably weep. This was followed by an unbelievable feeling of peace, of acceptance, and of love for everyone I saw, a deep empathy for the world.  No way to write about this without sounding "woo woo" but it was real. I've been slowly improving since this intense awakening. I’ve been trying to hold onto it as long as I can.

I've been doing this, i.e. holding onto reality, by avoiding my phone. I am seeing that though alcohol certainly played a large role in my unease, the damn phone is probably just as bad. When not looking at my phone or the internet, I've:

• Read Speedboat by Renata Adler and liked it. It didn't move me, perse, but was well written and had some real hitters in terms of interpretations of interpersonal relationships in the modern age. Also, just a fascinating capsule of the life of a (tired) extremely cosmopolitan New Yorker in a different age and specifically capturing a sort of removed mental state achieved through a sort of cynical gaze from ones' own life which may feel familiar to some of us.

• Spent time in the sauna. The things which have most helped me, been most relieving and life affirming, are physical ties back to the body; laying in the sun, stretching, meditative body scans (I’ve been listening to this one a lot.) The sauna particularly has been my savior. It is simultaneously social and reverent, quiet and intense, profoundly of the body and yet brings about a sharp mental alertness. It also makes me feel my humanity in a deep time sort of way, soaking in heat being such a time-honored social practice: badstu, onsen, banya, sweat lodge, temascal.

• Gone to the movies alone (a really wholesome, lovely and treasured activity for me which is a perfect blend of nostalgic childish joy and bygone ripened bachelorism. Think The Moviegoer). Most recently, Civil War. I thought Ex Machina was an extremely well crafted, thought provoking, and entertaining movie. I distinctly remember being excited to see what else the director would do. Somehow I’ve missed two of Alex Garland’s since then (but by the reviews, might not have missed much). I finally saw Civil War last night, and I’d describe it exactly the same. Just a really good movie, the first I’ve seen in theaters in maybe a year that's really delivered.

• Listened to, and attempted to write, music. This week I've really been loving Colour Green by Sibylle Baier. A collection of bare, haunting songs, discovered by the son of an unknown 1970s folk singer, which were burned to CD by him as gifts to family members. According to Wikipedia lore, he gave one to J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. who encouraged the Orange Twin record label to release it, which they did thankfully. The first track, "Tonight," is particularly great.

Apologies for this fairly monotonous listing, but it has been helpful rambling away here as a reminder of good things to be had off the screen. Its pull is strong. I've been playing online chess on my phone which I justify as a less toxic activity than doomscrolling but which still fuels the insidious power of the device. Just the object of the phone, checking it, holding it, has a sort of addictive magnetism which disturbs me.

Right now, though, I am feeling light and hopeful. I just got back from Galco's Old World Grocery in Highland Park. An old, linoleum-floored store full of special sodas and bygone candy bars, I come here for a feeling of wholesome comfort. The check out girl carries kind eyes in a humble, self-possessed sort of way, and the last time I was in the older gentleman who probably owns the place talked to me about red peach jam, and how the red peaches are grown in France with grapes intertwined into the trees because they are a late season fruit and can be harvested at the same time. But they don’t keep well, which is why they are made into jam. All of this with Danny and the Juniors' "At the Hop" (1958) playing from the crinkly loudspeakers. What’s a better cure for depression than chatting with the kindly and idiosyncratic elderly? Plus, you can try fun treats like the “Idaho Spud.”




!!READER PARTICIPATION!! A COLLABORATIVE LIST POEM

In wrapping up this ramble, I thought it’d be fun to ask you, my dear reader(s), to participate in fieldnotes. I’ve been making list poems every day of notable events, memories, feelings, of the day. I thought it might be fun to make a collaborative one! If you feel so moved, email me a single line (could even be a single word) of something notable in your recent flow of experience. For example, a few days ago I woke up to an absurdly loud crowd of parrots. So I might write:


The screeching din of parrots on a cool Altadena morning


These various moments will be strung together as a list. For example:


pine needles, the drone of a nearby lawnmower, the smell of a vaguely familiar perfume, sun spots beneath closed lids, a turmeric-stained wooden spoon,


Please feel encouraged to submit multiple entries to the list, if you feel so moved! And send along if you’d like me to include your first name, initials, or retain anonymity in the byline.

Speaking of collaboration, for those of you in the Los Angeles area, I am contemplating putting together a little rambling club for those of us who love nothing better than ambling about aimlessly exploring. Like the rambling clubs of 20th century Britian, I'd imagine it to be of a socialist bent, perhaps as a semi-curated platform to discuss the politics of space. In short Book Club + Walking Group + Art Project. Would you join the L.A. County Ramblers? Space Walks? The Space Walkers? More soon!



SOME PHOTOS OF LOS ANGELES AND SURROUNDS


In the past I've really felt color photography was far superior to grayscale, but I am coming back to it as you can see. I've been feeling so over-saturated lately, is part of it I think. I think it is also because I read Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald and was really taken by it and its sparing use of low-quality photos from his long fugue-like walk through European history.

I usually end these emails with an apology for, yet again, rambling in a diaristic and self-indulgent way about nothing in particular vs. presenting a few interesting tidbits I've come across with brevity (and levity) which I think is my ultimate goal. But I think this is just what my fieldnotes are, typically, if I am being honest. Why am I subjecting others to them? Exhibitionism? A sounding board? Juvenile ego-fueled self-aggrandizement? I think, primarily, accountability...To try to write a bit, such that eventually these might not be embarrassing anymore because they actually WILL have a clear structure. And to risk the embarrassment of candid over-sharing as an in-road to real connection with others. And that I might have some external record of time passing for myself, which feels extra important in the timeless summer here in LA.

Anyway, I will part ways with a poorly curated smattering of photos I made on recent walks around LA. Until next time, my friend!

AN ALGAE COVERED POND AMID FIELDS AND A STAND OF TREES OVERTAKEN BY KUDZU IN MISSISSIPPI. It’s a cool day in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am taking the day to rest and reflect. As of yesterday, I’ve been traveling across the country for a full month. As you’re probably aware, I’m attempting to make a documentary loosely about water and the built environment; how we live with water. I’ve been putting my trust in spontaneity; my “research” has been guided by what I stumble into as I travel. And In many ways I’ve been rewarded for this non-method; strange and beautiful conversations with people I’ve met by luck, arriving to landscapes, events, neighborhoods, always at what feels like just the right time, beauty and wonder each day, everything like kismet. To dislodge oneself from the internet in some ways aids magical thinking and the feeling of always being in the right place at the right time (vs. my default mode of obsessive research) and I’ve been luxuriating in this feeling, embracing unfiltered reality. I think perhaps its because I’ve just got out of academia, where most of my research was of the “remote sensing” variety—learning through other people’s writing, through observations on the internet (Google Earth vs. actual site visit), absent from the physical world— that I am particularly motivated to sacrifice these ways of knowing in favor of unguided wandering. A dérive across America, a materialist method (of the marxist variety) of research to the extremes, one might try to justify. But I haven’t been justifying. In fact I’ve been trying to avoid any explanation of my work. I’ve been absolutely allergic to any sort of plan, method, any hypothesis. God forbid an Artist Statement. Perhaps to my detriment. When someone asks me what my documentary is about I tense up, admit my absolute lack of direction with an embarrassed shrug. The good thing about water is that its such a broad topic and so approachable that usually people are excited to share their perspective and offer encouragement (with the sole exception of a painter, an MFA student, who really gave it to me at one of my favorite dive bars in New Orleans in the wee hours of the morning for not having any real perspective, a “lazy” and “extractive” approach to making work). She has a point re: extraction, especially. All art and knowledge production requires some sort of extraction, though we might loathe to acknowledge this fact. Which is the very reason I’ve been so hesitant to claim any specific ground (or in this instance, waters). I want to be like an earnest and unknowing child, observing without prior judgements, open to new stories and paths of experience which might take form along the way, taking nothing with me but my own learnings and lots of footage to cut into some coherent narrative later on. Of course, even my existence in any of the places I’ve been traveling and observing has been reliant on significant extraction of a different type: destruction in the form of tanks of gasoline…another topic entirely but I’ve been imagining this as my last Great American road trip, each one of these tanks of gas hopefully in the the twilight of my reliance on automobiles. What would be reasonable? 100 more tanks in my lifetime? 1000? I’ve been loosely planning to live in LA for a while as the end point of my cross-country trip, which might complicate this goal, it being the apotheosis, in megalopolis form, of U.S. car culture (yes?) Narrative, then, has been a primary question haunting me as I drive. The narrative of this project. The narrative of my life. My “career.” Legibility. Sense of place, of time. I try to write songs. I try to write nonfiction prose. I try to make photos, sketch. A documentary film. I look back on my design work from the past three years with a removed and apathetic gaze. Maybe it is okay to go through life without a hypothesis if you have a method. (i.e. a songwriter doesn’t necessarily need to have a uniting theme to their songs, say). Or its okay to switch mediums if you have a hypothesis (an artist interested in a specific topic might make photos, paintings, essays, diverse mediums as tools to approach a singular goal). I’ve never stayed long enough with either subject OR medium for either to grow into a discipline. (a telling word, discipline). It feels telling, too, that for the first time in my life that I’ve had real funding to support my work I find myself wandering aimlessly without a clear goal or outcome and unable to articulate the project, if there even is one. A COTTON FIELD AND IRRIGATION DITCH ALONG THE ROAD OUTSIDE CLARKSDALE, MS. EACH FIELD FELT SO CHARGED WITH SOMBER HISTORY AND MEANING, A MILLION BRIGHT POINTS LIKE A HORACE PIPPIN PAINTING. Don Quixote, what many herald as the first modern novel, is a story about a man who goes mad by reading stories. A man with an average, novelistically illegible life chooses to live under a self-delusion to bring to his life a sense of purpose, a projection of an invented reality onto the world around him, often in direct confrontation with the “real.” Doesn’t any narrative, any story, require this same form of magical thinking? Rather than having ““swept the world's admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence” as Mark Twain (another self-dubbed name, another fiction more real than the reality of Samuel Clemens) put it, I see Cervantes as having hit on a much deeper, existential problem, a problem both central to literature and extending beyond it to all of cultural meaning. I read Don Quixote as a brilliant critique of the human condition, a nihilism with a chuckle at self-invented meaning as both futile and our only hope in a fractured, morally subjective world. I can’t decide if it is tragic or hopeful. What does it mean that on his deathbed, Don Quixote renounces his false name, even his lady love, the unseen Dulcinea del Toboso, again becoming Alonso Quixano, the simple hidalgo who kept a library of chivalric romances and dying alone as his “true” self? Don’t we all wish, like his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, that our protagonist might meet his Maker as the great “Don Quixote”, even if he no longer believes, or maybe never truly did, in the fictional world he created? I used to think our obsession with “titles” had some thanks to the career-mindedness and increased specialization under industrial capitalism, and of a post-cinematic world. Scientist, Artist, Entrepreneur. Actor, Conservationist, Writer. Petroleum Engineer. Gluten Free Specialty Bakery. Chief Executive Officer. Post-Hardcore Sludge Metal. Multidisciplinary Designer. Content Creator. But here we have a story from the early 1600s. By reinventing himself as the protagonist of his own life, isn’t Don Quixote doing what all of us do constantly? We are absolutely saturated by stories– cinema, photos, branding, biographies, resumes, social media; now it feels that to build some sort of artistic (or otherwise) legibility, you must choose your narrative wisely. If Don Quixote chooses to be a knight errant, what am I choosing to become? And does it matter if he knew he was pretending or not? I think of other great spinners of self-myth, populist leaders; Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, etc etc. Perhaps dramatic examples, but demagogues point to the insincerity of self-image, identity, of stories. This is the thing I have been resisting, I think. To declare any “title” feels at best like a collapsing of my self into a narrow and flattening simulacra, and at worse an ego-driven self-serving tool which might erode the few core beliefs and symbols I still maintain as my “truth” or “true self” through a gross simplification which consumes the complexity of reality. A house of mirrors. But by resisting a legible (both internally and externally) self identity is a dangerous game— in attempts to avoid being typecast by the world I might loose any hope at the very authenticity I’m chasing. Instead of simply writing about my trip, my work, I am now writing about writing about my work: always I am removed. These are not “fieldnotes” as I had planned ( a nice paragraph about the Gila Wilderness here, a diagram of a slot canyon there, say) but further tantrums of a lost soul, further neurotic, inherently self-indulgent and pathetic ramblings. A CONVERSATION AMONG STRANGERS ABOUT A HORSE IN DOWNTOWN CHATTANOOGA.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the narrative structure of a quest. In short, it is the pursuit, across space and time, of an object. Its quite the popular, perhaps the eternal, narrative device. We love the simplicity maybe, the panacea, the silver bullet. Related to the quest: I’ve often felt similar feelings to those outlined by Agnes Callard in the recent New Yorker piece, “The case against travel.” Travel, in the fully commodified experience it so often has become, is repulsive, at its worst, and horrifically boring at its best. I, and many of my ilk, might try to avoid these “consumer” experiences abroad in favor of some “authentic” reality. Even this instinct, though we might trace to concepts of the “exotic” and the colonial origins of tourism from within the British Empire. And, then, even people who drive the horrid homogenization of the world through their obsession with “comfort” or “security” still desire a “safe” version of “authenticity.” (Perhaps you are staying in the more "authentic" Mérida and trying to learn some Spanish phrases and looking down on those tourists walled in the all-inclusive resorts of Cancún. Yet you both arrive, searching for something, to Chichén Itzá). And so I think maybe the answer is to travel with a purpose. The pursuit of knowledge. To learn ways of conserving water, say, to help us as we approach a fatalistic tipping point in global climate change. Or some other fabricated narrative. A DRAINAGE DITCH BEHIND SOME HOUSES IN JACKSON, MS A quest, then. But what is my object? And how could any travel research possibly be non-extractive? Missionaries had a purpose. As did the conquistadors. Even my tentative new name for my practice “Field Works” harkens back to the “golden age” of exploration, the bookish adventurer I so idolized as a child: Alexander von Humboldt scribbling notes on some inhospitable and impossibly remote peak in the Andes, fighting the wind for his sheet of parchment, Darwin waking in his cabin on the HMS Beagle, uncharted islands on the horizon rippling into a kaleidoscopic green in the crown glass letting in the pale morning light onto the worn wood floors where hand-scrawled maps and notes lie spread out from a late night of work, Indiana Jones packing his gun and his whip and donning his hat after giving another well-attended lecture to his star-struck students. So what drives an adventure, without a grave to rob, or new lands to chart? (I hope you read the irony, here.) For some, its found in the collection of other things– aging blues artists for music ethnologists like Alan Lomax in the 1960s, say. Or its the photographs– for the professional photographer and Instagram influencer alike, typically the more rare and difficult to attain the better. What was Thoreau, really, but the first cottage-core influencer? (again, irony, yes. But I also remember an artwork at the National Gallery which put reproductions of Thoreau's cabin and the Unabomber's cabin side by side...Googled quickly, I believe it may have been James Benning's Two Cabins, but not positive). For the academic, it is to do “research." Are any of these ethical imperatives? How much good must come of synthesized knowledge to be worth the costs? How do we make work without becoming the bullshit we've long criticized in the salad days of one's creative practice? TWO YOUNG MEN STANDING IN A BOAT CLOSE TO SHORE IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER IN VICKSBURG, MS A RESTROOM AT A TRAILHEAD IN BIG BEND STATE PARK, NEAR THE BORDER BETWEEN TEXAS AND MEXICO All of us are driven, to varying degrees, by a desire for more, a hunger…it is this blind, embarrassing and undirected ambition fueling me across the limbo of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways in search of MORE: more purpose, more community, a better place to call home. I’m trying to embody the experience, at the very least: To really be, fully, the ethical gray that is a roadtrip across the United States in the time of extreme global precarity, to admit to myself that my own placeless and Sisyphean ego drama is rooted in the same cosmopolitan bourgeoisie artist identity I frequently scorn, to accept that any chance at escape from this identity crisis might not require either a Quixotic leap into the deranged world of ambition-Capitalism (LA is a good place for this, I hear) or further decent into a rejection of prevailing norms (give away my phone, go WOOF at an organic farm in Oregon) which becomes, like Thoreau or Kaczynski, its own form of White man ego-yelp and self-delusion, but instead could, like a seedling, grow from a slow and steady building of community, of empathy, of hope. Perhaps its not this impossible choice of a) join a community of fellow Quixotes in a lifelong playdate of agrarian anarchism, or b) learn to accept and even cherish the violence of our world, drive a big truck, and buy stock options. It is simply to try to be a little better each day. To try to make friends. To share, earnestly, to practice kindness. To try to buy less plastic (but not beat yourself up when you eat an entire pack of Corn Nuts, a bag of Zapp's Voodoo chips, a Heath bar, and a Coke in one 100 mile stretch crossing West Texas). To be able to hold and inhabit both worlds— the fictions we need to make to participate in our current world (i.e. a legible "career," a sense of self not founded upon self-flagellation, even, dare I say it, a Roth IRA) and the truths which might build a better one (that our daily life relies on unimaginable suffering worldwide and is ushering in the 6th mass extinction on Earth), is maybe all I can do "authentically" at the moment. I drive my car many miles each day and see things of beauty. I don't know have a clear narrative for my life and I know I want to make something beautiful and try to end or abate some small sufferings with my short time left here. I wouldn't wish this writing I've just scrawled on anyone and yet I will send this email anyway. I fear the power of stories and feel a strong urge to capture them. I might paint Rocinante on the side of my van, even knowing that I'll later regret it.  ◬

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well and feeling centered and engaged with the world. I’m writing, primarily, to share some news (hm…a “newsletter?"):

1. This email is the last thing I am doing before I start on the road for my travel research! As in, I leave today! First stop is the mining areas of West Virginia where mountaintop removal mining has radically altered the landscape, with, of course, significant and dramatic implications for the built environment and water resources. Then to Asheville, NC, then Raleigh, then Charleston, SC, (all to visit friends, primarily) then further afield, in the generally Southern direction. Currently deciding if I go all the way down to Miami (for obvious city-water related connections) or pivot West before the Florida panhandle. (Thoughts? And again, if you live somewhere in between Maryland and Florida, or between Florida and Los Angeles for that matter, reach out! I’d love to see you. And, truly, probably intended to reach out but have been above-averagely avoidant in planning this trip.)

If you haven’t heard about my travel research project: I was awarded a generous travel fellowship upon graduation, and pitched in the application to study water infrastructure and water scarcity’s impact on urbanism/ city life. Then, in a hubristic and potentially regrettable bolt of inspiration, I bought a camcorder from the web and decided I would make a documentary (despite my complete lack of filmmaking experience and slim knowledge of water resource management). I am tentatively calling it WATERWORKS. You can read a bit more here.

1. The name change. In short, I’ve decided to hang out my shingle! I am pleased to introduce Field Works, an experimental design and research company of which I am sole proprietor. The past month, I’ve been thinking a lot (constantly) about the type of work I’d like to do, and how one might practice design and design research both full-time (i.e. make money) and ethically. I still don’t have the answer, but I know one thing: I care about studying and improving how we live and make our way through the space around us, and I want to try to keep doing it as long as I’m able. On the name (in a small nutshell): I see a disjunction between how we study and design our living infrastructure, in the “studio”(i.e. inside, separated) and the material reality of the world we live in. Whatever the scale, from a piece of furniture to an urban plan, good design work begins and ends with observation and exploration outside the studio— in the field. I’ll be doing a lot of “field work” on this road trip, and I hope to continue making such observations wherever I next land. And so this newsletter, formerly Broken Fences Almanac, will now be fieldnotes, the newsletter of Field Works.

Is Field Works a proper design practice? A form of conceptual/ social-practice art? A way for me to cosplay my childhood dreams of being an adventurer/explorer/ scientist? I suppose the answers to these questions are in its reception (i.e. if I get any clients). Really, it's just a way for me to construct legibility in my own life, a structure in which to concentrate my diffused and disparate passions (history, research, writing, photography, building things, design) into a shorthand which I can use to explain what I am doing with my life and not sound crazy (maybe?) And, an even slimmer maybe, get paid for it?



fieldnotes is a change in name only. This newsletter will retain much of the same form (sporadic, rambling) as Broken Fences Almanac, just hopefully with a bit more legibility, and over the next few months, will serve as a log of my travels and discoveries along the way.



A (fledgling) website for the practice can be found at www.field-works.org



I’ve also, against my better judgement, made an Instagram @field__works



Finally, I've got a new email: ben@field-works.org



I’ll go ahead and sign off here. Thank you, so much, for reading this little bulletin. Writing them certainly helps me to get my head around things, and it means so much when some of you reply that you enjoyed reading. A more fun one should be coming soon that isn’t just life updates, and I promise from here on out they will feature more fun/ fascinating/ hopeful observations and tidbits and less existential neurosis! ◬

BROKEN FENCES ALMANAC_006

WANING CRECENT MOON
JULY, 11, 2023

The face of West Rock after a cool rain in April. I haven't written you, the generous signer-uppers for this newsletter, since October. I apologize, if anything to myself, for I really hoped this might be a regular practice, one oriented towards fostering consistent connection in what feels like an increasingly fragmented world. Fragmented, at least, for me. I recently, on a late night research spiral, came across the Wikipedia entry on Schizotypal Personality Disorder. (Is there a word for hypochondria but specifically for psychological conditions? Just googled: Phrenophobia?). Alongside the characteristic difficulty maintaining close social ties (hmm…), the entry listed another telltale symptom of SPD as  “the preoccupation with seeing themselves and/or the world as strange/ odd.” But the world is strange, I thought. Not that I think I have a personality disorder per se, (or, not this one, at least) but my feelings of recognition with the obsession with strangeness did give me pause. Is it possible that our current milieu of social media, texting, the infinite scroll (what we might collectively call “internet brain”), the 9 hours a day I spend in a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned office, the absurd quantity of cars, of consumer goods, of trash, is strange, yes, but not quite as strange or unbearable as I experience it? One has to wonder what mental distortions one is peering out of. “No!” I think, “It is equally strange as it is terrible.” (Convince me it’s not, please?) Thus: It’s Not All Bad. This has been a sort of mantra I’ve been saying to myself lately. My negative thinking has gotten to a place where even a hike in the woods won’t bring me peace— all I can see are the various invasives covering the forest floor, hear the drone of the highway nearby, remember that this is all second growth, a weed patch, really, in comparison to the ecosystem richness of the Chestnut old growth forests prior to the European invasion of North America. A tiny weed patch where the remaining fireflies, songbirds, and deer must cling, the only oasis in the fecund mat of human development that stretches from here, in D.C., without a break all the way to Hartford, Ct. But a handful of wineberries, glowing like little lanterns (the Italian for raspberry, not coincidentally, is lampone) in the sunlight: It’s not all bad.

Quality Moss in Woodbridge, CT



RECOMMENDED ENCOUNTER: FAR-LOOKING



BROKEN FENCE: ROBIDA COLLECTIVE

Illustration by Vanilla Chi for Mold Magazine If Robida Collective sounds familiar, its because I mentioned them in my last newsletter. Since then, I sat down with them over Zoom for an interview for a piece on their practice for Mold, which I procrastinated on finishing for, I kid you not, 6 months. It is now, finally, published, so I am including it below, follow the jump to Mold for the rest :) INHABITING THE MARGINS WITH ROBIDA COLLECTIVE: THE YOUNG DESIGNERS BUILDING COMMUNITY IN A RURAL VILLAGE ON THE SLOVENE-ITALIAN BORDER In the mountains of the Natisone River Valley, nearly on the border between Slovenia and Italy, lies the small village of Topolò. That’s its Italian name, anyway. In Slovene the village is called Topolove. To Robida Collective, a group of primarily young academics and architects who call the village home, the two names matter. As one member, Dora Ciccone explains, “Topolò is very related to the Slovenian border community, which is a minority in Italy, so we have a special care for culture, for languages.” Most of the group met in Slovene-speaking Ljubljana, two hours by car from Topolò, but now live together, some full time, others for parts of the year, in the village in this bilingual region of Italy. The identity and space of borderlands being so central to their practice, it is no surprise then that their annual publication, Robida Magazine, features pieces in English, Italian, and Slovene, among others (so far, the magazine counts 9 languages published across their 8 issues, with a 9th issue, titled Soil, on the way). From this annual magazine, to hosting a “Summer School” of collective learning with lecturers and participants from across Europe, to their internet radio station, Robida Collective is exploring, challenging, and remaking the relationship between the small, isolated, rural village they call home and the rest of the world. This connection—between the rural and the global—has long been a preoccupation of my work and is why I sat down with Robida Collective last month to ask them how they understand their village in relation to the urban and the rural, the global and the local, and what relevancy places like Topolò might have for the future. CONTINUE READING

SEEKING ADVICE: WATER WORKS, A DOCUMENTARY Finally, just an ever so brief update here that I'm the recipient of a generous travel award, which I plan to use to make a short, experimental format documentary on water infrastructure, water use, and future water scarcity in the U.S., tentatively called WATER WORKS. More to come soon, but if you see any interesting water stories, news tid bits, etc. I'd be so grateful if you sent 'em my way! I made this video project, developed as a panoramic immersive video installation (hence the weird long format), to question how we might experience the ghost of an ecosystem, specifically the Lago Di Texcoco under present-day Mexico City. It's not great, but was foundational to my current thinking on water relationships in cities and water scarcity and how it relates to design.

Screenshot from “Ghost Lake” (2023) the short “film” I made in architecture school last semester.