Jordan Swartz-The Rad Times #20

After a couple long years, I was recently was reunited with my belongings. My collection of art and photo books, zines, and various objects sits on a metal shelf to my left as I type this. My stack of to be read novels sits to my right, 2 chest high stacks, spines horizontally arranged widest to smallest, from bottom to top. For the better part of my adult life I traveled and owned as little as possible, slowly collecting things along the way. I have records from most of the bands that I toured with, other records are ones that I designed or have photos on the cover, I have the 10” record of the high school band of the German kid that lived in my house in DC one summer, and my friend Matt’s Christmas 45. There’s a painting in my bedroom that I swear my friend Tyler painted when we were in high school even though he thinks it’s not his, photos made by close friends and others I no longer talk to, a dark room print of Minor Threat by Bill Daniel that I got as a gift for helping him design the last edition of Mostly True. As Rob in High Fidelity says “Books, records, movies, these things matter.” Yea they’re just objects but they’re objects that have woven their way into the fabric of my life. Books, records, and movies made me who I am; to get to surround myself with them and even regularly help create some is pretty rad.

Thanks for hanging!
Be good to each other.

Color isn’t just disappearing from our homes, cars, and built environments, it’s also being removed from movies and tv. Unfortunately the catalyst for a lot of the color grading you see these days, was one of my favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Filmed in a lush Mississippi summer bursting with greens, they wanted a dried out look and did so with new technology at the time. It’s now invaded a great deal of our visual media. This article gives a few other possibilities, but no matter the reasons I’m all here for bringing the color back to our lives.

“Every photo is the first frame of a movie”- Wim Wenders.
I was recently reunited with my copy of Wim Wenders Once. A photo book in the sense that it contains photos, it functions as something else entirely. Each photo block is preceded by a diaristic poem starting with the word Once. Part travel document, part personal diary, part story time, it’s a capsule of one creatives wanderings. It got repressed a few years ago so you can still find some reasonably priced copies out there.

Building on the Take Ivy book from a couple newsletters back, post WWII military surplus is responsible for more of what you wear than you might expect. The GI bill helped make college attainable to more people than ever, the clothing was in excess which meant it was cheap and easy to find. Eventually the clothing was used against itself and worn in rebellion against the system that made it. Easing it’s way into popular culture, every big name fashion house and even the small ones, have done their variation of a field jacket or khaki trouser.

The early 2000’s were an amazing time for the internet. Not yet fully engulfing our lives in a bubble of constant contact, but enough that you could discover new things daily. Originally found on Wooster Collective, WK Interact was one of my favorite artists from that time. His sweeping portraits, wrapping the corners of buildings or spanning great lengths of walls, all of them high contrast and gestural. I own a few of his books and over the years I’ve become more drawn to his custom objects and tools, bricolage pieces to serve a purpose, both form and function.

I’m still slow rolling out some of the photos from my road trip a couple months ago and have been shooting a ton more these days. The above photo was in a show recently at the Black Box Gallery.

The above image is in the next issue of Ghostwatch zine by Paper Cult, you can grab a copy of the Halloween themed zine here. I also still have a few copies of the screenprint run I did of this, if you want one reach out.