RELEASES
LONELY SPRING - “JUST ONE THING”
Lee passed away three weeks ago.
I’m sitting on the couch in the living room. It is 7am on Labor Day. For a couple years my daughter scribbled Crayon on the walls when we weren’t looking. She doesn’t do that anymore but we haven't painted over it yet. Blankets are twisted in little piles on the floor. Plastic cups on the coffee table, books, and socks. Papers, twine and a set of binoculars sit on the ledge of the piano. The house is a mess but we’ll get it together. The kids start school tomorrow. They are sleeping in, savoring the final hours of summer.
Heather is making coffee in the kitchen. She just came in and opened the windows. One of the grape vines growing on the side of the house is trying to bust through the screen, she says.
Lee left three weeks ago. I’ve been working on our movie and talking about him. It has been hard because I miss him. His absence, other things are climbing up.
The first day we scanned photos. It was March. I brought my scanner over and had set it up in the kitchen. Lee has thousands of photos, but the very first ones I saw were black and white, from a trip Lee took to Canada with his girlfriend at the time. Images on one side and little passages hand written on the back, at the same time informative and poetic.
Until then we had mostly been talking, unsure what this project was. There though, we could see it. Use the photos. Tell a story that was about Lee but also about all of us: show kids, adventure kids, bad cars and only the french fries at Denny’s, messy rooms with cracked CD cases strewn about. About garage bands and bedroom bands. About Green Bay and Madison and Milwaukee and the triangle that connects them. About youth, the crash of youth, and the final yelps of the American Dream. An experimental, archival, reimagination of his life, imperfect, negative budget, punk.
“It will be difficult,” I remembered pausing. “But that’s what we’ll do.”
“Yes,” Lee snapped his fingers, because he could still snap, I remember.
And we were off. We had energy. We got it.
8 days before Lee died, he recorded the voiceover for the new scene being shared. It was a gift, because we thought we had missed the window for any voiceover, but a new oxygen machine had given him some pluck, some of his voice back.
It was a quick friendship that lasted on this earth for 364 days. It was fun, intense and terminal. I told Lee a couple weeks before the end that getting to know him and Erin, being invited into a new family and working on Lonely Spring, had made this (amongst other joys) the best year of my life. And when I said it, I realized how true it was.
We’re heads down on the movie now. Lee’s friends are working on the soundtrack. We’re booking shoot days and planning. Everyone misses him so much.
There is still a great amount of debt associated with Lee’s death. So please consider donating to the GoFundMe and sharing this story.
Love, Sean
Footage from Static Eyes “Trouble” made by the good people at Rock and Roll Remote Control. Music by Static Eyes. Music by Miles Davis.
GO FUND ME
LONELY SPRING - A FILM BY LEE OLSON AND SEAN WILLIAMSON
I knew Lee’s wife Erin, from back when. We were bartenders, buddies, and ran in the same circles. I went to a couple parties at Erin’s old house by Cactus Club. One time I got drunk and hit a pinata with a baseball bat. Erin is the kind of person you see in the world and immediately hug and say hi to. I hadn’t seen Erin for years though. Not for any reason. Just life, spinning you out like it does.
In the summer of 2023 I read a Facebook post detailing a GoFundMe to raise money for in-home care for Erin’s husband, Lee, who had been recently diagnosed with ALS. A paraphrase of the thoughtful ABOUT section on the GoFundMe arranged by Lee’s friends (and music collaborators) Chris and Lydia, conveyed the following:
“You may know Lee Olson as a Brewers Fan, Milwaukee Parks Enthusiast, a punk rock singer with eccentric dance moves, or a caring and compassionate friend. Likely you know all of these aspects of him and more. Lee was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gherig’s disease, after nearly two years of falls and drastically declining mobility and health. ALS is a terminal neurodegenerative disease in which a person’s brain loses connection with the muscles and nerves die off. People with ALS lose their ability to to walk, talk, eat and eventually breathe, with a life expectancy of 2-5 years from onset.”
The GoFundMe page goes on to outline the obstacles and enormous cost facing Lee and Erin (50-100k annually for in-home care) as they aim to maintain a life of consistency, comfort and adventure, in the last few remaining years of Lee’s life.
In a radio interview on WUWM, Lee talked of the challenges they faced in the new reality of their lives.The interviewer, Joy Powers asked Lee what he would like people to know about him and Lee said in so many words that he was still Lee Olson. He still liked punk music (especially the bands from Milwaukee), he loved The Brewers and hanging out in the yard. While this disease will slowly take his life, it will not take all of him.
I listened to the interview in my minivan outside the Franklin Library. My kids were going nuts. It was a hundred degrees. The conditions of the summer were stacking up: the endless hours of libraries and parks and sibling bickering and car troubles and drinking troubles. But this interview stilled the noise. I wanted to know more.
What kind of person was Lee? What did he want? How did he live? I wanted to ask him enough to complete the picture. I imagined other people would want enough to complete the picture. So I sent him a message on Instagram, setting up a meet. I thought this would be a one off interview, that I could pitch to an alt-weekly to get eyes on the GoFundMe and walk away.
Then Lee and I quickly struck up a friendship and the project evolved. And over the last year I have interviewed Lee and his friends and family. I looked through his thousands of photographs. I have read notebooks of lyrics and stories and love notes.
The resulting project features many players, people in photographs coming to life before my eyes. It also moves across Wisconsin: from Green Bay to Madison to Milwaukee. It is a story about specific people, that becomes a story about people. A story about a specific fleeting life, that becomes a story about this specific fleeting life. Outward and outward.
Telling this story I felt like the battery but not the engine itself. It was all there: Lee’s stories, photographs with inscriptions on the back: some informative, some funny, some poetic. The organization of these artifacts of Lee’s life has revealed something true and universal about the way we live and also the way we die.
LONELY SPRING, the film version of the interviews conducted over the last year, and the organization of Lee’s works, will be playing in three exhibitions over the next few months. Culminating with a feature length version premiering in the early part of 2025. We will be posting video, photos and writings from the project regularly to this site and to social media, throughout this process.
They say that the price of love is grief. And over the last year I have watched Lee’s people paying that price. But plainly put, in our capitalist society, the price of love is more than that. The costs of living and dying with a terminal illness are crushing. The remainder of Lee’s life and his death could cost upwards of 70,000 - So let's lighten that load, because while we are powerless in so many ways, we do have that power.
As always: love your friends, love yourself and go Brewers.
GO FUND ME
BLIGHT SEASON 3 : EPISODE 7 : ROUGHNECK WILDERNESS
BLIGHT RECORD PROJECT # 1 + RELEASE PARTY
Hello and welcome to the new branch of the Blight tree, The Blight Record Project.
The Blight Record Project produces adaptations of contemporary short stories (and other experimental storytelling ventures) printed to vinyl in limited run. The debut full length split features “Angel of Death” by Brian Evenson and “A Skull Dreams It Is A Horse” by Ashley Mayne. Both stories are scored and composed by Nathaniel Heuer and the band Hello Death.
PURCHASE THE RECORD ON BANDCAMP (digital and physical)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
BRIAN EVENSON is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell (2021). His collection Song for the Unraveling of the World won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Prize. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
ASHLEY MAYNE’S work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She lives in Upstate New York and edits fiction for Fence.
NATHANIEL HEUER is a musician and artisan. He currently writes, records, and performs with some of Milwaukee’s preeminent bands, including genre-bending Group of the Altos (The Altos), experimental rockers Marielle Allschwang and The Visitations, and his own indie folk project Hello Death.
BLIGHT SEASON 3: EPISODE 6: BABY BUMPER
In 1993, my great Aunt Peg Ransom was a player in a dramatic scene that was reenacted (months later) on the CBS Television show Rescue 911. I began working on this story in 2019 in my apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, and will be sharing it as part of an experimental non-fiction, memoir series on Blight.
“Final Questions” by Rhea Dhanbhoora
Editing, music and sound design by Ian Sallman
BLIGHT SEASON 3: EPISODE 5: THE OTHER DAN
Follow Dan on Twitter @danbacula - Follow Ian at: https://iansallmann.bandcamp.com
BLIGHT: ORDER MERCH - IG and TWITTER
BLIGHT SEASON 3: EPISODE 4: SUMMERTIME
Blight is back with new stories, new art in a new format. Each episode will contain works by Sean Williamson and a guest writer/musician.
Episode 4 of Season picks up right where it left of over a year ago. With stories by Sean and “Summertime” by guest storyteller (and repeat guests on the show) Tom McGowen. The photo above is from “Summertime”
“Other Side of the Wall” by Sean Williamson, engineered by Jorge Oliveira, drums by Nick Amara, additional vocals by Chau VT.
Join the ORDER MERCH - FOLLOW on IG and TWITTER
WE ALL FALL DOWN
ROBERT CORMIER AND THE COLUMBINE MASSACRE
“They entered the house at 9:02 p.m. on the evening of April Fools Day. In the next forty-nine minutes, they shit on the floors and pissed on the walls and trashed their way through the seven-room Cape Cod cottage.”
Robert Cormier’s We All Fall Down is the story of trashers, boys who invade and destroy homes. The boys trash the Jerome household and when the younger of two teenage daughters, Karen, returns alone they attempt to rape her and end up pushing her down the stairs, putting her in a coma. This attack is witnessed by The Avenger, a vigilante Peeping Tom and stalker of the older daughter, Jane. He vows revenge on the trashers. He once shot a bully from school in the face, before shoving his own suspicious grandfather off the apartment balcony.
When I found the paperback in the library it seemed like a prophecy realized. A road map for the brutality, heartbreak and violence that would make up the rest of my life. That was dramatic, but I was, after all, a high school freshman. Just two years earlier, when I saw the images of the Columbine School Shooting on TV: Senior portraits. Grainy security footage. Swath of blood. Students marching, I felt different. Those images activated within me a new understanding of the danger I was in. Also, in the paranoia of my teenage mind, home invasions and school shootings had similar qualities—they were each, in their own way, the most terrifying thing that could happen in a place you were supposed to feel safe.
Before the publication of We All Fall Down, Cormier was already one of the most infamous Young Adult writers of all time. His themes of youthful depression, violence, and sexuality had put The Chocolate War, Beyond the Chocolate War, and I am the Cheese, on challenged book lists across the country. We All Fall Down was no less bleak than Cormier’s other work. The main character Buddy Walker, a young hopeless alcoholic, is brought into the trasher gang after his father walks out, throwing his family into disarray. Though Buddy participates in the trashing of the Jerome house, he is offered to the reader as less complicit in the crime because he wasn’t in the room when Karen was pushed down the stairs. Buddy, because of his guilt, begins to stalk Jane and through a chance meeting they fall in love. Of course, from there nothing good can happen. I stuffed the book inside my textbook in math class, my teacher Mr. Hower’s said constantly, “Sean, put the book away.” Each time it felt like a smack in the back of the head.
I felt ugly reading We All Fall Down, as I had Cormier’s other books. I wondered, is that what happens when things go bad? Is this what would happen to me if I started drinking and doing drugs? If my family fell apart? At that time my brother drove me to school. My parents still gave me money for lunch. I was on the cross country team. I wouldn’t hit puberty for another year. This was as innocent as I ever remember being, but I was reading the signposts along the way. In school we did active shooter drills where we hid under desks and the teacher turned out the lights.
Our history teacher Mr. Obmascher was a slow pot-bellied man. He told us if there was a shooter he had weapons hidden all over the room. He told us, holding his skinny pointer finger in the air, that he would hide in the shadows and whack the shooter with a bat when they stepped into the doorway. But hose boys went into that school with machine guns and bombs. They could step into the doorway of the classroom right now, I thought. Mr. Obmascher wouldn’t be able to do a thing. I could be reading, We All Fall Down tucked into a history textbook and a grenade could roll into the classroom. I’d be torn to shreds. I’d never see it coming.
There was a senior named Maureen. I had not come up with the courage, or seen the opportunity to talk to her, but would steal glances at her in the hall, at football games and after school in the parking lot. We passed each other every day in front of the tech wing. She had dark hair and dark eyes. I could sometimes see the outline of her bra through her shirt. I thought about Maureen at night. How she moved in the halls. How she laughed with her friends by the payphone. I would think about her on the bus to school. How she studied at night in her room. How she kissed. These images of Maureen worked through my head until I saw her the next day. They built the long bridge from one tiny moment to another.
As I read, I imagined that Jane Jerome looked like Maureen. In We All Fall Down, Jane helps Buddy after he falls on the escalator at the mall. Of course, she doesn’t know that he is following her. She doesn’t know that he was with the group of boys that destroyed her house and put her sister in a coma. Despite this substantial wall, Cormier brings them together, each needing the other to navigate their respective wreckage: Buddy’s home wrecked by his philandering drunk father, Jane’s home wrecked by Buddy. When I saw Maureen shuffling past by the tech wing, I had to wonder: Was Maureen in love? Was her family in peril?
“They could not get enough of each other, which made it necessary for them to have rules...How long kisses could be, how far touching and caressing could proceed. Cupping her breast drove him wild, thick juices in his mouth, the threat of a sudden embarrassing eruption...One night he stiffened in the middle of the longest kiss they ever had, their mouths meshed, tongues wrapped around each other, his hand kneading her breast...”
“Sean! Put the book away!” Mr. Hower’s yelled.
Cormier’s sex scenes filled me with astonished longing. I felt myself racing from one angsty sex moment to the next. The vision of Buddy and Jane necking in the back of his mom’s car. The vision of Jane alone in the bathtub. The love between Buddy and Jane was important to me. The lust between them was more important.
Of course, this was an interlude and not an escape from the horror in their own lives. Their lust was a distraction, like We All Fall Down was my distraction from the dread of bombings, of planes flying into buildings, of classmates turning machine guns on the lunch room. In the short number of pages connecting their first kiss and the end of the book: Karen wakes up, Jane is kidnapped by The Avenger, who tells Jane about Buddy, The Avenger commits suicide, Jane breaks up with Buddy, Buddy starts drinking again. The book ends as badly as I imagined, all an ugly accident that felt like an accusation.
When I finished We All Fall Down, I looked for Maureen less. Then class schedules changed and I no longer saw her in the halls. It was as if finishing the book ended my infatuation with Maureen. This was surprising and a relief. Because while the thought of classmates coming into the school with machine guns was terrifying, the thought of talking to an older girl while the outline of her bra was visible, was more-so. Then I was overtaken by new distractions and new fears. I started drinking and taking drugs, every day less innocent. As I went through high school and into adulthood the high pitched eruptive dread of shootings and bombings transitioned into a constant low tone, like a phone left off the hook.
- Sean
BLIGHT SEASON 3 : EPISODE 3 : DISAPPEAR
Hello and welcome to Blight: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair. This episode features Tom McGowan on the impermanence of life, two stories by Justin Spaller and the debut single by Lonely Games, "Charlene."
Hosted by Sean Williamson
Show music by Shawn Stephany
mixed by Shane Olivo
BLIGHT SEASON 3 : EPISODE 2 : ALIENS
Hello and welcome to Blight: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair. Sean Williamson talks seeing Pedro the Lion at Cactus Club and the importance and preciousness of independent venues. Jo Hylton on one film. Parker Winship on many films.
"Shimmer" by Cairns
Beet Street Music Video Project Showcase
Show music by Shawn Stephany. Show mix by Shane Olivo.
BLIGHT SEASON 3 : EPISODE 1 : THE SHRINE WITHIN THE SHRINE
Welcome to Blight: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair: Season 3: Episode 1. In this episode we talk about Milwaukee's Cactus Club and the importance of punk rock. Visit the Cactus Club WEBSITE for merchandise and check out their Patreon page for some excellent programming.
Jessica Heuer tells a story about being isolated with chemotherapy, observing as her Chicago neighborhood moves on in it's own pain and joy.
Robert Trettin tells an adventure about hiking to meet a Buddhist nun, in the mountains of Nepal.
Music by X Harlow. Show mix by Shane Olivo.
Mix on "Springtime in Quarantine" by Nathaniel Heuer
THANK YOU! T-SHIRTS!
Hello listeners, storytellers and well-wishers,
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their support of Blight: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair — Season 2. I have received a lot of positive feedback. It was encouraging to hear the shared enthusiasm for the revolutionary power of art, cycling and gardening. We have another season of Blight in pre production right now. We also have shirts for sale, designed by Shawn Stephany and printed by our friends at The Shop! So if you want to support the show and also want a sweet shirt, please put your order in today! Selling 100 shirts would go a long way in covering costs for the next year of programming.
Thank you —— Sean and the Blight family
BLIGHT 1: STORIES IN THE KEY OF DECAY AND REPAIR
BLIGHT : Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair is the collected audio work of Sean Williamson and friends. Each story is a meditation on death and rebirth. Each story is about endings and beginnings. There are dimension-shifting-dogs, flickering street lights, gas station hot dogs, toddlers, peach Schnapps in water bottles, Yancy Thigpen, and much, much more. BLIGHT is a comfort. BLIGHT is a voice. BLIGHT is a reminder.
CREDITS
The Street Lights Flickered : Written and performed by Sean Williamson. Produced by Sean Williamson, Shane Olivo, Shawn Stephany and Robert Trettin. Original music by Shawn Stephany. Recorded and mixed by Shane Olivo at Bobby Peru Recording. Milwaukee, WI. 2016
Dog Dreams : Written and produced by Sean Williamson. Performed by Jon Mueller. Music by Justin Schmidt. Mixed and Mastered by Shane Olivo and Sean Williamson at Bobby Peru Recording.
Kansas City Road Trip : Recorded by Sean Williamson in Kansas City. Mixed by Shane Olivo at Bobby Peru Recording. Music by Altos.
The Funniest Thing : Written by Sean Williamson. Performed by Erin Wolf. Music by Chris DeMay.
SEAN WILLIAMSON : YOU’RE DOING WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE
“Life ain’t short, it’s long.” So says a dying Earl Partridge in Paul Thomas Anderson’s melodramatic Magnolia. That sentiment hangs heavy over You’re Doing What I Should Have Done, a stark, moving, and quietly brilliant collection of audio short stories from Milwaukee filmmaker/musician/writer Sean Williamson. Clocking in at under 10 minutes and spread out over just four tracks, You’re Doing still manages to convey the dreams, the triumphs, the disappointments, the missed opportunities, the unexpected compromises, and the inevitable ends of a long lifetime.
“Each morning when I wake up,” Williamson begins on opening piece “You Wouldn’t Believe,” “I think of everything that’s happened.” From there, he gets into that everything: growing up and taking stock of your life (“You Wouldn’t Believe”), dimly remembering first apartments and nights spent walking home alone (“The Reflection Of That Reflection”), and daydreaming about actress Jenna Fischer during drunk driving classes (“Jenna Fischer”). Then there’s the title track, a sad and funny and lovely and sad again piece about the final days of gone-but-not-forgotten Milwaukee icon Dave Monroe. “It’s not the past I regret, it’s the future,” Monroe says, via Williamson.
Matt Wild, Milwaukee Record
Written and performed by Sean Williamson. Recorded and mastered by Shane Olivo at Bobby Peru Recording. You’re Doing What I Should Have Done CDs are available for sale. Photograph and Layout by Sean Williamson. With portrait by Erik Ljung
SEAN WILLIAMSON : BUILD A BRAND NEW LETDOWN
“Build a Brand New Letdown is a short EP of work written over the long period of my sparse haphazard song writing career. I have always sang in bands and writing my own song is always something I’ve had much less confidence in. I remember just making the decision to get into the studio, and thought, that maybe in like ten years I could be a competent songwriter. I don’t know if I’m there yet but I will always be happy I made the decision to roll the tape. A lot of wild life things were happening while I recorded these songs with Shane. I found out I was going to have my second child and Shane was one of the first people I told. Because we just had this special thing where I would come by once a week or every other week and record a song. He was recording in this beautiful studio way west on National Ave. There was a really nice piano I could play. And I kind of just thought yeah, I need to lean into this.
The second and fourth song on this EP were thing I was writing in High School and I just kept tinkering with them. Then I took guitar lessons and they improved. And I could feel OK about them. And I think that’s a good thing to remember about the writing and creation process, is that nothing ever has to go away. You just keep working on things and generating ideas, and things might work out eventually, And if a specific story or song doesn’t work at that moment, then something else might. And things will never be perfect and rarely sound or read like they do in your head, but if you can create something, then you can face it and say: I did this, here it is.”
All songs written and performed by Sean Williamson
Produced and engineered at Bobby Peru Recording by Shane Olivo
Piano on "Be Still" by Chris DeMay
vocals on "I Feel Better Now" by Heather Hass