Hey, meet the Swinger

Hey, meet the swinger

A '60s kind of girl

Walks like a panther

Smiles like a princess

On the blazing white beach

Her body etched in silver nitrate

Her camera dangling like heavy jewels

shoved in the face of the viewers

This new thing was cool

BAM. And with her mouth open,

Beach girl, girl of the raging sands, the girl we can't reach

Snaps the shot, the snapshot 

with her Love Story hair wisping in ocean breeze

her counterculture eyebrows melting hearts

she snaps   to show us how easy

how almost alive

though you know she's snapping at nothing at all

And now comes the Archieparty

The beach blanket bingo we've all been waiting for

those wholesome young people

splashing each other and doing the boogaloo

but we know what's under those blinding smiles that delirious laughter

There's a reason they call it The Swinger

In nervous clicks

the straight-browed girl is squeezing the button again and again

though taking a picture of air

Her day has not come 

but it will

then as swiftly depart

she's a '60s girl bare feet and long hair and straight black brow

not beautiful but has the Look 

her moment on the beach

Again and again she tosses her tresses

in that stoned and blurry way

and for the first time we see

her dangling earrings gypsylike

her careless carelessness

her throwaway look so carefully composed

and Chaplinlike, our lovers proceed into the ocean

a march a brisk step and when seen over and over, how it becomes so clear

they have nothing to do with each other

and how would they ever know it would fade so quickly

yet last forever

broken into bits on a woman's computer

played with like a toy

a sliver of memory seen over and over

"hey, I want to get one of those"

even though "nineteen dollars

and ninety-five" was way beyond my reach

what I wanted was those eyebrows

those thighs

the windswept hair, the earrings, the boy friend

and all that comes between ourselves and time.

More weird shit, late at night

Before the mutoscope, which is one of those things you hand-crank with a lot of pictures on a rotary thing - you know what I mean, you put a nickel in first - well, before THAT even, was this thing, the filoscope. Though you can't see it here, it's just a flip-book mounted on a gizmo so you didn't have to use your finger. The action was pretty limited, but no worse than those goddamned Edison pictures of trains and stuff.

This looks more like an early film than a mutoscope, but maybe it has been cleaned up technically in some way. These less-than-one-minute dramas were thought to be somewhat risque, and a few even showed nudity, or at least titties. They could only be seen by one person at a time, which leant an atmosphere of intimacy. In fact, going to view these supposedly-naughty nickel entertainments is the origin of the term "peep show". Thus they were denounced from the pulpit as pornography, and enjoyed by all.

This lady does a sort of shimmy-dance for 10 seconds or so, then plays around with a chair. She seems to hail from a circus, or perhaps the vaudeville stage. Strong teeth.

This is, well, uh, er, I don't know what this is (or why). Definitely a filoscope, though it isn't clear how the mechanism works.

This one has obviously deteriorated more than the others. The pages seem to have rotted and turned brown. Some of them are missing, so skips and blanks are ubiquitous. I wonder if men snatched individual cards out of these things while no one was looking.

I like this one because you can actually see the thumb. There appears to be blood on it for some reason. The story is the usual sleazy thing.

All cranked up.