swiftfence - Tumblr blog

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Gill Button (British, b. 1973, based London, England) - Forgotten Dream, 2021, Paintings: Oil on Linen

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I had so much fun filming Oliver McGoldrick’s short comedy The Dark Chasm of Lincoln Street - with Jess Li producing, Yvonne Paretzky as my Holy Sister, and a great cast and crew! 16mm horror. I screamed for real.

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Eli Sostre, Keanu Kay Milborrow

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Brecht Vandenbroucke

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Blue Monday, Joanna Concejo

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Robert Mapplethorpe

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Robert Mapplethorpe Two men dancing (1984)

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Richard Quinn F/W 2020

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Where’s your head at?

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July 19th, 2020. Scanning old Tumblr drafts, I found this photograph, this post abandoned, part of a series where I riffed on night photography, drafts of which transmuted into my chapbook, The Stag, a collection of poems which came out the week of 45′s inauguration, a project which churned into dust. I’ve been thinking about abandoned tangents recently, including this chapbook and the eight months I lived in California - how the emotional tenor of that time was frantic sterile heat, strangers in Silicon Valley bars and supermarket aisles swearing the dot com crash had met its trough, internet commerce a false promise, but the truth was, it hadn’t even happened yet. It’d still be a year before a friend would send me a link to join a brand new site called The Facebook, before I’d join and click around and say, cool, but there’s no one here. I felt the treble-pitched anxiety, not the regular old FOMO - fear of missing out - which is grounded in the moment, but a higher octave of generational worry that everything of interest may have already happened. A frustration that’s a baseline emotion in New York City where the elder statespeople of the vibe swear everything cool happened in the mythic 60s, 70s or 80s. In Silicon Valley, the harmonic was a pervasive ambient pitch. I took writing workshops at UC Berkley Extension and UC Santa Cruz Extension, and after one of the weekend sessions, sat on a foggy beach with an older girl from class and she told me that at twenty-nine her life was over. She’d had the good fortune of working a front desk job at a startup when her stock options’ valuation shot to nine million overnight. She’d cashed out and was now just doing drugs and writing poetry, trying to pass the time. Maybe she wanted to learn the guitar, maybe I could teach her. I’d carried a guitar with me across the country and stashed it at the back of the white-carpeted closet I’d rented in Mountain View without much thought. Although I frequented record stores and cruised around in my silver car, searching for addresses printed on inserts and back jackets of vinyl hardcore records released out of garages in towns called Los Altos, San Jose, Redwood City, towns that weren’t nearly as romantic as they sounded, I lost music somehow in those months. I ghosted house parties hosted by pop punk bands in their mid-forties who’d built their homes from scratch. I ate at Indian buffets and found a day job working for a bioscience company, drank at the Red Room in Oakland, and started trail running. At first I ran because the eucalyptus in the dry heat helped with my allergies. Then I ran because it melted my future from me. It felt like the end, but nothing had happened yet.  Here’s a remnant of the old abandoned post – a bit from The Stag: === And I don’t know if there’s a way to evoke the curl of a leaf without repetition. Sometimes it seems leaves are copies of copies. Sometimes it seems a leaf happens once, a singularity, like love but love is heartbeat, pattern, reformation, myth I tell myself in the morning when I don’t want to speak to my roommate because I haven’t yet had my coffee and because the Dreamers Dictionary led me on a scavenger hunt to this: Antlers are a symbol of spiritual authority because they grow above the physical skull: To dream of antlers signifies regeneration because antlers die and regrow, each time more magnificent than the last, and because they’re worn by Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Master of the Animals, by female Mongol shamans, by the rotiyaner or “men of good minds,” the traditional chiefs of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, the Iroquois, because antlers suggest the figure of the World Tree that the shamans climb, because the French word for antlers, les bois, means wood of the deer. You can view the facade of the great Gothic church of St-Eustache at Les Halles, look up, and near the top, lording over the gargoyles, see an antlered stag. The Calvary cross between his antlers. A magnificent specimen. They say Jesus Christ spoke through a deer, and when he did, a general gave up his war, his war being hunting a symbol, the symbol alive, ablaze at his back, shining in the grass of his past. And I say the word Jägermeister because the branded word means “hunt master” in a language I am unqualified to translate. Because the real world is untranslatable. === I didn’t know it then, that I was writing Google poems, poems of accumulation, knowledge piled on top of knowledge, column poems that could be scrolled through like an infinitely bottomless webpage. I was lonely in California and needed a place with a desk where I could write it down, so I looked at a room in a midcentury modern shared by three young venture capitalists in pastels and Adidas sandals and the arrow of time opened in an irreconcilable direction (I declined their offer). A checkout person at the supermarket in Palo Alto complimented my watch and said, “you have smooth hands, you are so young to be an executive” - I never wore the watch again. Instead, I answered band member ads on Craigslist, an activity that was inadvertently more social than creative. With new acquaintances, I saw Jason Molina at Bottom of the Hill and Kaia Wilson at an art space somewhere in San Francisco, where I acquired more acquaintances haphazardly, through tipsy spurts of extroversion, one of whom was a new age abstract painter being slowly gentrified out of his Mission apartment, the other, a biotech scientist who was a distant relative of Robert Kennedy, and who lived in his parents’ eight million dollar mansion, but mostly, I spent my time writing poems in coffee shops when I wasn’t working the science job, which drained me. There was a night when the cafe I frequented instituted a new policy - lone customers could no longer write in notebooks or on laptops after five - so a stranger and I shared a table and ordered ceviche so that I could write and he could scrawl charcoal ballerinas in a sketchbook. I offered him a ride home at the end of the night and his directions took us up a winding road into the redwoods of Woodland Hills, the fog so dense I could hardly make out the hairpin turns, several times, the grill of my car approaching the edge of a cliff as he shivered, car sick, he said, tearful, and between bites of chocolates from a box of See’s Candy that I’d stashed in the glovebox, he confessed that he didn’t actually live in Woodland Hills but was headed there to hide from an ex, who’d stalked him all the way to Silicon Valley from Dallas, where she had been a dancer with the Dallas ballet, and where she had stabbed him in the heart with a pair of scissors. It was at this point in the drive when I intuited, as my headlights pitched down into a canyon and up into the trees, that he was more likely the one who’d wielded the scissors, and when he cried out for me to stop! I did, and he lurched from the car and vomited into the steaming grass. After that night, I began running steep trails at a park in Cupertino. I’d run at sunset into the blue dusk, pushing myself until I was no longer scared.  I abandoned this one, too – another section that became The Stag: === Early in the summer, a crack-white albino deer made numerous appearances throughout the heartland, masticating Iowa like some sort of psychotic angel. Deer crashed into my MacBook dashboard. The headlights were in the deer, their dead-eye stare, the stare of the bystander, the stare of our Wilde Year, our Cat Cow Year, our Up Dog Year, the Year of Each and Every Animal, the Year of the Paranoid Schizophrenic Liarbird. And now for another throwback— A sample, a loop— the only kind of language we now understand: The kick of syncopated hoof   dust. I’m a hunter. I’m practically still an adolescent. I keep a tube of epinephrine in my glove box. An emergency break the glass— And another section, which I wrote on a park bench before driving to Stanford to run the loop at The Dish, a three mile asphalt trail around the enormous satellite dishes used to calibrate spacecraft: The birds here are too good for bread The girl on the see- saw, her ear is torn like bread I understand the ducks, the brass band I understand my purpose, which is to feed what I can

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Art of “ L E O N M. ”

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Movie Matinée

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Dana Wyse

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Happy album week! My baby, Switchblade Moon, is now part of the world. Here’s some free download codes: gjun-w8xa 3fwv-h2mb 5ah6-vdkw r6q2-gcg4 dnrd-uxrm samc-jvc6 6ht4-7fsv ucnq-5qx8 vpd6-bta2 994k-wnuc Redeem them for songs over here: https://jasminedreamewagner.bandcamp.com/yum

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Johnny Damm

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Leonora Carrington (Mex, 1917-2011), Mi general aspirina y sus hombres, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.3 cm, private collection

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