Jordan Swartz-The Rad Times #28

As a teen, Bruce Springsteen was someone I knew I was supposed to like but it never clicked. At some point in late high school/ early college I found an album called Darkness On The Edge Of Your Town, it was Paul Baribeau and Ginger Alford¹ covering a selection of Bruce Springsteen songs. These gave me a new entry point to the hits my mom had listened to in the ‘80s.

Stand By Me is one of my favorite summer movies² and I try to watch it every year. After watching it a couple weeks ago I decided to read the origin text it’s based on, Stephen King’s The Body. I’ve never been a King fan either, until recently the only book of his I actually finished was his memoir, On Writing. As I stood in the aisle at the bookstore reading, having the visuals and story of Stand By Me so deeply ingrained in my brain, it allowed me to reassess King’s writing and come at it from a different angle. The character development in the book goes deeper and shares more of the kids home lives. While versions differ, falling in love with the cover song (Stand By Me) allowed me to see the roots of and have a deeper understanding of the original song (The Body).

When those Springsteen cover songs were played through a lens I was familiar with, raw, stripped down, and way more gang vocals than any Springsteen record, it showed me a different path to the Boss. It gave me a way to appreciate the music and songwriting while tearing down 30ish years of pop culture baggage and ‘70s record production. Through these other singers I was able to see the roots of what the original was doing and how good of a songwriter/ writer they were, and over the next 15 years Springsteen became one of my most listened to artists, we will see what happens with King.

^{1.Ginger is in a rad band called Good Luck}

^{2.Top 6 summer movies in no particular order- Do The Right Thing, The Sandlot, Stand By Me, American Graffiti, Adventureland, Pump Up the Volume}

^{3.I’d be remiss not to mention Sharon Van Etten covering "Drive All Night” at the Stone Pony. This cover is brutal, just a piano line and her voice carrying a soft wind of yearning and sadness, all pushing at the edge of cracking.}

Thanks for hanging!
Be good to each other.

My new zine Visual Affects is available and shipping now. It is 28 8”×10” pages⁴ featuring a collection of collages made over the last 2 years, some work seen before, some not. Visuals Affects is an ongoing series highlighting the work of other artists as well as my own.

^{4.That’s big enough to cut out those pages & hang some art in your house, how rad would that be?}

Justine Kurland’s series Highway Kind found me at a time when the photos mirrored my own daily experiences. She likes to peddle in familiar tropes and myths, turning them on their head revealing the realities of supposed dreams and legends. Her photographs deal in duality, simultaneously feeling candid and posed, dystopian and hopeful. The photo above is from her series Girl Pictures. The series features a group of teenage girls who are staged to exist freely in the face of a rooted patriarchy, a world that allows them to be fearless, open, and free.

If you take even the briefest look at pop culture these days, you’ll see a lack of original ideas, movies, art, etc. In Blank Space, W. David Marx⁵ explores why the first quarter of the 21st century has had a such a lack of innovation and reinvention and why it has all become a raise to the bottom.

^{5.Marx also wrote Ametora, where he explores how American Ivy style influenced Japanese fashion, how Japan preserved a lot of these styles, and eventually sent it back over to America and influenced our own fashion.}

The skater Marc Johnson passed recently and I was reminded of his part in Girl Skateboards Yeah Right! This was one of the few skate videos I owned⁶ and I would watch it over and over on one of those tv/vcr combos in bedroom. With Spike Jonze directing, they brought some bigger budget Hollywood tricks to the table; green screen ramps and boards, explosions, etc. It’s a classic that I still watch every couple of years.

^{6.See Toy Machine Jump Off A Building & Flip Sorry}

Known as a watercolorist, Z. Vanessa Helder’s paintings don’t fall inline with the typical thoughts of what that title may mean. Her work is focused and geometric, her colors are rich and lush. She was known for painting the Washington landscape and it’s economic/ industrial development pre and post WWII. Her series she is most often known for is the paintings she made of the Grand Coulee Dam while it was under construction.

I have long loved practical effects, problem solving, and model making in movies. Over the last few months I’ve watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy with my fiancé and after each one we’ve watched the appendices, a pseudo film school in themselves. I love seeing how they filmed multiple different scale models in a variety of ways to create this fictional world and entice the viewer in to the scene and story. Movies are lacking in technical proficiency across the board these days and sets and models are the start of that, it’s the pieces that draw us in and allow us to feel a part of a fictional world.

Taylor Galloway - Taylor recently spent a week with Jason Lee (skater/photographer) in Indianapolis shooting images for an upcoming book and exhibition at Aurora PhotoCenter in 2027. Their interview with WQRT talks about their time in Indy and hanging out with James Dean

Texas Jukebox Project - They work to make sure recordings by Texas artists and Texas-based record labels are not lost to time or fall further into obscurity. Their weekly radio show, Record Ranger, shares some of these recordings and more.

Font Review Journal - A great site for designers, they review and analyze a wide range of typefaces, with examples, documentation, and history.

River Runner - Click a point anywhere on the map and it will show you the path a rain drop would take to flow to the ocean from that point.

Make Something Heavy - An essay about creating lasting things in a time of instant gratification.