John Michael Swartz

This is a moderately low-effort post, but I thought I'd collect together some of the more interesting (to me) photos from the end of September, early October.

I'm currently stuck on day 3 of my Green Mountains travelogue. We'll see whether the passage of time blurs its details into a more literary (rather than a fanatically journalistic) form.

There isn't much aesthetic coherence here, qua photography, which is fine. This is more like psychogeography.

In fact, photos 1, 2, and 8-14 are all from meetings with an ex whom I hadn't seen since we separated in 2017. We used to take morning strolls in the cemetery.

I spent perhaps too much of my 20s at Metropolitan Bar where I was a devotee to (and occasional performer in) the "Hot Fruit" cabaret/dance party. $2 PBR tall-boys, can you imagine? It felt like it would never end.

The blankest location for me here is DUMBO. I never had a significant connection to the place, as aesthetically interesting as it is. It's weirdly monochrome! Tall and cramped, everything seems slightly too large, to no purpose. Expensive-looking boutiques and understated galleries. It seems rather tourist-y, but perhaps it always was.

It's where a friend got married between the two bridges while I played Bach and a curious arrangement of a Daft Punk/Panda Bear song — very probably inaudibly, between the carousel calliope, traffic and passing trains. Before Hugh Ryan wrote When Brooklyn Was Queer, he and others had some sort of queer Brooklyn history pop-up under the bridge, which included a posterboard map of historical cruising spots in the area. My friends André and Connor and I were tasked with decorating the space, which we draped with heavy fabrics of muted sea-tones. The hosts were shocked by the sombreness. Somehow they found and deployed some riotous bolts of chintzes. Some people are never satisfied.

Huh, well… there you go. I guess I was wrong about my relationship to DUMBO. It shouldn't surprise me that I can conjur up a vivid memory or two of almost every neighborhood in NYC, since I've lived here for almost 20 years.

And Greenpoint. What can I say about Greenpoint? I recently helped to install and deinstall an Oktoberfest biergarten for Zum Schneider which was located at the southern end of it. During this time I went out for drinks with my co-worker friends afterward and I was rather overwhelmed by the peculiarly agressive form of gentrification that had overtaken the area since I had last spent significant time there. The architecture was as loud, brash, and unappealing as most of the yuppies stalking the streets. I mean, there was one building nearby that I swear had to have been inspired by Minecraft. I am trying to imagine the whole neighborhood developed into these heavy, frenetically-staggered blocky things 50 years from now. I am thinking of the expertly vivid descriptions of complex, ad hoc adaptations of built environments given in William Gibson novels, where wealth has become so contrated that the palaces of the well-to-do today are tomorrow's slummy sprawls of necessity.

OK I'm done yelling at clouds.