swellmilk
SWELLMILK #615
13/05/10 02:13
#615 DRAGBLEACHER
everyone ‘belongs’ somewhere.
for me, that night, it was here, behind the bleachers, all by myself, surrounded by a halo of floating rubber... this image is a particular investigation of a particular kind of culture. I took it at the drag races on I-35 about 20 miles north of where I live. The I am learning more about the culture, the process unfolds through the type of visual investigation, one where capture happens in a drunken state and edit happens in an even drunker state. But it this world to me, its brutal, its dark, it is the antithesis of Symphony. It is Dionysian in the way explored by Frederick Nietzsche, who described that type of art as participatory in a way in which one might lose herself within euphoria. It is art making inside of a frenzy, to produce a frenzy, to the end of parasympathetic release. The workup To a DRAG is an amazing thing which includes revving engines and melting of tires. It includes sounds and elevated heartbeats and tremendous hunger for hot dogs covered with sauerkraut and relish. Postures change, expressions change, hands go over ears, idle chat stops, and then the dragster runs. Looking at this image, thinking about all those things, and thinking about the distance that I found for myself just on the periphery, brooding, I think of the sublime. A new plastic hyper-personal glow-in-the-dark sublime that I define for myself. It drags me to dark colors, negative spaces, quietness inside storm in order to define subjects that are filled with terror, dismay, frenzy.
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SWELLMILK #611
13/09/09 21:42
#611Attackship
chairman of the environmentally armed services committee today announced introduction of the E-22 ‘Creosote Raptor.’ capable of miraculously tender air speeds and armed with simultaneously regenerating puff-ball soft bombs. the C-22, along with the specter jellyfish and special forces confusion monkeys will round out the recently developed envio-stealth branch of the military.
SWELLMILK #613
09/05/10 03:36
#612 Sound
someone i was just beginning to know sent a moment of understanding. it passed from one to another. it traveled across a compressed expanse of desert. it came vibrating, and wrote itself deep with barbs and hooks.
i looked for this picture so i could work it up and send it out, so i could better re-live that moment, so i could better remember the lovely soul who made it, and with whom I forever wish to negotiate.
the succulent invites a soul into its well, and poses questions in the form of runes and quiet waits. understanding circumvents the gates of hell, and mocks bastions of scorn with tunes and kindly fates.
SWELLMILK #609
07/03/10 12:21
#609 Fix-up
Her hair is like the economy
it shelters souls from plight
and once sought sober autonomy
till she teased with subtle might
Teri is sometimes my student and sometimes my teacher. She lives with husband and kids not too far from my mom in Phoenix. After we took this shot i followed her gang to Wallmart- and we shot in there.
SWELLMILK #608
11/05/10 02:14
#608 Spilled Whine Scene
a bottle of red for a sucker’s dollar
as a part of an end to a rotten day
washcloth time marks hysterical squalor
to next weeks discount on cheap chardonay
wish for time you supple kid
wish for response to eternal laughter
wish for a fork to eat what you did
and a knife to pardon what comes thereafter
a bottle of red for a nick and a dance
the emperor’s dead from a fleeting glance:
he once was a parrot, learning to cry
but now i cry, but now i sigh, but now i die
from a bottle of red, from a sucker’s dollar
keep the receipt after blush dismay
if you turn your head from the huckster’s holler
its the end of the show but the start of the play
SWELLMILK #608
13/03/10 19:07
#606 Floodgate
i haven’t been dreaming lately, so i just make them up in photoshop.
this imagined dream is about impending flood, or perhaps, flood restrained by men in towers.
if i get up from my computer and look through the kitchen window into the backyard i’m sure i’ll see a muddy mess. its raining here, and a hurricane fast approaches. i am digging a line in the clay soil out back to redirect a personal flood which happens because of poorly placed drainpipes. but i’m not finished- tools are out there, and though the pipe lays in its ditch, it remains unconnected, and unable to function its intended purpose. as vulnerable as it all might be, i am unwilling to don rain gear and gain control of things out there.
in photoshop i cut and paste a diagonal plank of wood into the composition: to add confusion, to mimic thoughts i’m having.
in this imagined dream men in towers push buttons that close gates to prevent flood waters from coming in.
but then, i mean, what if, i think i might be trapped on the wrong side of the gate!
SWELLMILK #605
20/04/10 21:56
#605 Dye?
i got a bouquet of flowers. i took them home cut them out of their plastic wrap. soon i separated some of the varieties into their own water vase. one group of flowers was ultra-pink. then, after one night the water that they were in became pink, same as the petals. Did some farmer put dye in the plant to make it more pink?
Pink came out of the stem into the water, just like one time when I left a pink marshmallow in a water spot: the next morning I remember a sticky pinkish stain. Then it occurred to me that I should make an image of that pink water, in the morning, as the sun came up to shine through my kitchen window, and I drank coffee with soy milk.
SWELLMILK #604
17/08/09 23:02
#604 Rest Stop
3 disturbing coincidences: the first brings perception of moral authority into question, the other two focus that perception, through surreality and then pin-point clarity. 3 events happen at a rest stop on i-10 as one travels North through the mesa chaparral, which serves as an elevator from desert to mountain, from Phoenix to Flagstaff.
The first happens in the form of a chance conversation with a silver haired big bellied retiree, through which you discover a mutual acquaintance. He clutches a styrofoam cup of cream powder and 3 hour old coffee, brewed by a volunteer from Black Canyon city. You finish a second can of sugar free Red Bull. If coffee cooks for 3 hours the molecules change, and it produces the shakes. If you drink two cans of sugar free Red Bull you get the shakes. The mutual acquaintance is a woman against which you committed an unforgettable wrong: and though you perceive he knows nothing of it, that refuge fades, as the details of a series of cold calculations slither into present consciousness, like so many rattle snakes on a warm sidewalk.
The conversation ends, and as he makes his way back to a royal purple Lincoln Town car you bend at the waste– an attempt to coax knotted lower back muscle into a neutral state. But when you rise the scene re-draws itself in a monotone of green-orange fade to black, here and there, back and forth, brought to you by suspended floods (paid for by tax dollars,) and Taurine, and memory. And your head thobs, and demands to be seated, and vision blurs at the periphery, and the drone of trucks in idle, once Catholic in their muted insistence, now become jury and appointed attorney. Will we ever escape judgement?
There is a razor sharp switch blade in my pocket that I have fantasized about brandishing, in the case of sudden attack in a rest stop restroom. There is a camera in my hand, which I have used to clarify and extend fantasy, that now demands my full attention. There is a series of cold calculations one makes prior to capture. They remain concerned about movement and time and narrative and relationship to some archive. There is a process of detaching from those choices so as to present the opportunity for a sweet loving bitch to lose herself in your soul. And there is a moment when that bitch, now your lover, coaxes a button push, sometimes in rapid fire succession, sometimes in detached refrain, and sometimes with reckless abandoned, without regard for consequence. And sometimes coincidences come together to form a vision of judgement, transcendence, guilt, folly.
SWELLMILK #603
12/05/09 23:00
#603 Rooted
This is about Yuka– a beautiful, bright, shining star, who beats cancer. I think about her when I walk to the end of the block and the streetlight suddenly outs then flickers its way back to illumination. And when fresh cut grass sends up its scent.
over brown twist root
green stems of prosperity
attend lofty leaves
SWELLMILK #602
12/05/09 22:56
#602 Foreclosure Crisis
Yesterday I gained access to an ex-home, one where the family walked. I mused that perhaps the mortgage was worth more than the property, or some other financial/familial desperation had set in. The place rests on a once in a 100 year flood plane, but I found out from neighbors that it has knee-high flooded 3 times in the last 15 years. In any case the house was people empty, but not without it’s ambiance. I think the batteries were low in a fire alarm, so there was an occasional chirp, as if someone in sports shoes was turning a corner on a vinyl floor, or there was a bird trapped upstairs. My friend Jaynee, the real estate agent who gave me access to the property, said that that house wasn’t stripped, meaning that the people left without stealing fixtures or kicking in walls. She said that people are doing that less and less around here: which made me feel like everyone was giving up hope. Would you have your way with a dream gone bad, or just walk away? The property listed for 106 nine, which thought was cheap, given the size of the oaks that lined the street. Jaynee said that the only client of hers interested in the property, an investor, promptly withdrew his bid, after he realized that that he couldn’t make enough on the rent to pay the principle/fix-up costs. She mused that it probably wouldn’t sell at the list price, but the bank was unwilling to go any lower. She left and I settled into the empty space. It was hot and quiet and I felt as if I was trespassing. The place began to smell like mold, but the blood red walls kept me until the sun went low in the sky. As I made some images I thought about my place, my mom’s place and the American dream. I locked the door behind me when I left, and then felt panic for a moment, as if I left something in there. I plan to visit four more foreclosures next week.
SWELLMILK #659
26/02/10 09:47
JAR OF DREAMS
jar of dreams... a group of graduate students came together to collaborate with to environmental artists from New York. We decided to fill empty jars with specific to try this found near an inner-city lake. We invited the community to participate. The jars were filled with all kinds of things, from turtle shells to fishing line to sticks. We also added fish that had fallen and sprouts and slimy things. Once we fill the jobs we took into account and stacked them upon each other in a semi circle, placed unevenly, tentatively, and a new environment. Most of the jars were filled with water from the lake. Through the water we could see the distortion, shaped by the glass, perceived by us as if it was art. People engaged with the collection in many different ways, some reached out and touched, lifted them, inspected closely. Others gazed from a distance. I suppose to some that details inside a jar was less important the color pattern produced, stained glass like, as light projected soft and billowy through. For my part, I took pictures: imagined them and recorded the imagination inside my camera. My relationship to that event remains visual and not tactile, like dreams. Here is a dream, a jar encased dream- dreams, perhaps one rolling, twisting, invading into the other like fishing line- fishing line that was used at one time for specific purpose but has now been re-appropriated into the realm of dreams.
SWELLMILK #655
25/01/10 00:14
This one is called sub-way... but I didn’t take the picture on a subway, I took it at train station, at night, after a party. so ‘sub,’ as in the the opposite of Dominant, and not as a means of conveyance through the underworld. I: on the tail end of a so-chu drunk, just when lights of the station finish their funny melt and instead dance noxious. as I recall, i had an expectation of some kind of arrival, and that was terrifying... I depend upon arrivals, expectation longs for them, and carefully plans to the second, so as not to miss any given coming train. Lost here now:
haiku blather dissecting fear,
sublime moment
recording so clear.
that often happens at night time on train platforms in Japan, i see movement in animation- noir scenes punctuated by staccato sound, silence against mumbling, a green lit diorama of blank faces staring into blue cell phone light. here is my personal plastic sublime, juxtaposed against impending arrival, my death. so during these moments I depend on a camera to extend and order consciousness- to get it down.
There she is, and so serene, so cool, detached, adjusting something placed in her hair. I secretly gaze at her careful touch and move closer- it looks like a wet lollipop, sticky... Through her my fear, if only for a moment, might alleviate.
“may i take picture?”
“why?”
“because i like that lollipop in your hair, and i want to remember it”
“you may...”
my desire to gaze, to interact, to remember, the reconstruct memory by creating memory, this subordinates, extends, and orders my consciousness. the subordinated controls dominance through acts... dominance is patronized and subverted through all that.
here then is the thinking behind this image...