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NEW & USED

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New & Used is the second Perfect Black Swan collaboration between Warwick JP Baker and Toby Burke Hemingway.

Toby's stories are a direct response to the scenes captured in Warwick's photographs, and to the people Toby and Warwick encountered on their journey through the deserts of California and Arizona, in the Spring of 2008.

This First Edition book is a limited run of 500 numbered copies.

36 Pages

A passage from the story Little Mountains in New & Used:

It all reminded me of my grandfather and my father, that fire of progress that burned so hot in their bellies. What’s the hurry, I thought as I stared out into a neighborhood lying on the desert floor, like an abandoned carton of fruit in an empty market. Most of the buildings my grandfather and father had rushed to finish in our old town – determined to be the first – now stood beaten and empty. Townspeople never came and if they did, they eventually left again, onto the next place. The western frontier never stops, I thought as the housing development disappeared into the dark behind us. I fell asleep again, imagining how the malls might look now if they’d been built in our town and pictured the buildings we had left standing there – crumbling, vandalized and discarded like empty paper cups along a marathon route. A haunting promise I knew too well.

We arrived in Los Angeles around ten o’clock, I was out of brandy and the night air was no more forgiving than the air in the bus. You wouldn’t know this city’s still in the desert, I thought, as I watched the passengers all disperse in different directions across the asphalt of the parking lot. It was hard to imaginethem going anywhere from that place, surrounded on all sides by the buildings of downtown. I paid my fare at the ticket office, said goodbye to Carl and fetched a taxi to Hollywood.

Annie lived in West Hollywood, but I knew the heart of Hollywood better, so I figured I could settle in there to get my bearings and visit her in the morning. I had the taxi driver drop me at a liquor store on a corner I recognized. I bought a bottle of whisky and a six-pack of beer and headed up the street, north

off Sunset Boulevard, toward some pink and green neon signs. There were still a couple of cheap places left to stay in that part of town and I didn’t need much.

It was so bright out that I checked my watch. I looked up and couldn’t see a single star, just an empty black-grey ceiling. Soon the neon signs came into focus and I set course for the Mark Twain Hotel.

They had a room. These places always do, I thought as I paid the guy in cash. He said nothing about the booze, or about the fact that I had nothing else with me, or about how long I’d stay and why I was in town. It was my kind of place. I put the key into the wobbly door handle of my room and shoved open the door.

I whipped the lurid rayon bedspread off and sat down on the edge of the bed to drink a beer. The blanket had holes in it. There was a TV mounted on the wall and a couple of poorly patched holes near it, where old TVs had been ripped off. I switched it on and was shocked to see a porn film appear

out of the black screen. Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder and changed the channel at the same time. I got up, switched the TV off and walked into the bathroom. I filled the sink full of cold water and threw the beers in. I sat down on the toilet seat and finished my beer, then grabbed another.

Things get blurry after that. I stayed in my room drinking for a bit. I remember the noise, all the sirens and brakes and shouting, it was unbearable. At night in the desert you get to know every car that drives by your house, I thought as I heard another motorbike tearing past the hotel and fading into the sound of a truck on another street. And the smell, roach poison rising up off the carpet and getting stronger the longer I stayed

in the room. I opened the window for some air, but it was no use. The still outside air stayed where it was.

Toby B. Hemingway