Until now, all of the Death Culture at Sea songs have been recorded with an acoustic guitar that frankly needs to be worked on a bit, and then we added distortion and all other effects ex poste facto.

With this song, we finally retrieved our 1960s (“blackface”) Fender Princeton Reverb from our friend’s apartment where it’s been living for almost six hundred years and broke out the electric guitar — a pre-CBS Telecaster Custom — which has also been in hibernation. We barely added any effects to anything, just a lil reverb here and there. We recorded it a “bit too hot” — which is why it’s breaking up — but bear with us! We’re pretty much the opposite of natural engineers.

Listen on our Tumblr

or

Download from the Death Culture at Sea site.

“Dreams of Sunsets and Cathedrals”

Let’s trade the keys to the past
And quickly copy our hearts
Memories of a thousands days
A down payment in part

The years have passed through today
Leaving us numb with the task
Of holding on to this one single rope
We know was frayed in the past

Seven years in the sunlight
We were bathed in the glow
I’m sorry to leave this life behind
I never thought I would go

Come with me to the ocean waves
It helps me to say this goodbye
The salt of the sea can heal these wounds
And fall from the tears in our eyes

Today in my office I hung up a color print I recently made to test out a new printer we recently bought after the old one died. The photograph was taken a long time ago, if you measure time in hours.

It was Friday afternoon and difficult to concentrate on “real work.” Instead of launching into a new project, I decided to spend a few minutes making up imaginary quotes by Andy Warhol. Still considering the photograph, I decided to focus on sunset quotes.*

*I won’t pretend they’re very good! This is more a game “for fun” than “results.”

“I love to watch the sunset, but only on television.”

“I’m always relieved after the sun sets because I can finally go out without anyone noticing my bad skin.”

“Each day when the sun sets I call my banker to make sure I still have enough money left to go out that night. If I can’t get hold of him, my friends always end up paying for me!”

“I never paint sunsets, because the ones I buy at the flea market are so much better than anything I could ever do.”

“Candy Darling always said she hated sunsets, which is how I knew she was going to die very young.”

The truth is often painful and difficult to acknowledge, particularly when there’s no way to change it.

Those who try to deny this do so at great cost.

If you ignore what’s ugly about life, how can you possibly see the beauty?

Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.”

It makes us wonder how it came about that she would consider Washington Heights for even a second.

Did Angelina wake up one morning and say: I want to live in the most ruined and barely functional neighborhood in New York City, with sweeping views of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge, which has been my favorite bridge in the world since I first saw it as a child driving from ___ to ____ in the back seat of my ____’s car?

Or perhaps she’s going to be starring in a movie about the drug trade and wants to understand what it’s like to roll up and down Broadway in a massive SUV with blackened windows, laughing at the cops and expressing surprise/dismay at all the “white fggts” starting to move into the neighborhood.

Or maybe she’s a fan of The Gay Recluse!? (<3 u, Angie!)

Whether she moves in or not, we were struck less by the implausibility of it than a certain longing to see what would happen if she did.

Does she know that Washington Heights is a metaphorical and literal graveyard of shipwrecks and resignation, from which most of us who are lucky or unlucky enough to end up here can never hope to escape?

Maybe she will be the one to change this collective destiny:  maybe Angelina could live here for a few seconds and then leave forever, having taken in her share of the beauty — both architectural and geographic — yet remain unscathed by the ghosts of longing and torment with which the rest of us are so familiar.  After all, as US Magazine breathlessly informs us: Angelina “has owned or rented properties in three different countries in the past year alone.”

Or maybe this is too much to ask, even of her; maybe she looked out the window and was disturbingly entranced by the clouds gathering over her beloved bridge, at which point she instructed her driver to take her away from this place as quickly as possible, knowing that if she stayed any longer, she would never be able to leave.

[Thanks to Bennett for sending us the US Magazine article.]

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THE CHAOS DETECTIVE is a teevee series for the internet. “City of Dreams” is a five-part episode set in Europe. Future episodes will be located in New York City.

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

City of Dreams (Part 4)

It would be a fallacy to argue that my location here in the shadows of the riverbank

in the company of another man about whom I knew next to nothing

was anything less than conscious.

I couldn’t say if the vision I saw was of the past or the future but I no longer cared

I took a step forward and then another, ignoring the chorus of screams in my head.

I approached the Russian, who stood up as if he had been expecting me. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I shook my head ambiguously. “I’m not sure,” I replied.

“Follow me,” he said and together we walked up the stairs into the infinite fog of the Parisian night.

In the fourth book of 2666, we are presented with something of an encyclopedia of the literally thousands of crimes (99 percent of them against women) that occur in Bolano’s fictional border city of Santa Teresa — modeled on the real Juarez — over a period of perhaps ten years, with an emphasis on those who were tortured, raped, mutilated (sometimes but not always in the same horrible way) and murdered, and whose bodies were most often found in the desert or an illegal dump or a remote ravine or ditch.

For the most part, Bolano describes these murders in the distant, clinical tone of a medical report — or sometime the more hard-boiled prose of a detective novel — and gives a short summary of the investigative follow-up, which invariably dissolves into the case being “shelved” for all of the usual reasons (apathy, no clues, lost evidence, no resources, horrible bureaucracy, possible cover-ups). But even as the mounting atrocity of the events described threatens to paralyze us, there is enough nuance and lyrical beauty to the prose, so that we are like a victim beaten down and increasingly horrified that these murders could continue for so long, with so little apparent repercussion to those committing them.

Which of course begs the question of who in fact is committing them, and here Bolano also has an amazing ability to draw us into the many different possibilities, while identifying none as dispositive. There are drug dealers and pimps and rich capitalists — the factory owners who hire these women — who may or may not be involved; there is a creepy “gringo” who “seems like” a serial killer and may or may not be orchestrating kidnappings/murders from a prison, even after he’s arrested; there are government officials who may or may not be in league with the drug dealers and pimps and capitalists; there are the police, whose baseline level of misogyny is so high as to be completely demoralizing as they laugh about all the different ways a woman can be raped; there are men in general in this society, who are brought up to view women as subhumans, and there are women who for whatever reason become enmeshed with these men; above all else, there is capitalism and money, which trumps even the most violent of crimes.

Bolano gives us all of this and more, so that by the end, we have no choice but to indict society, i.e., ourselves, because while Santa Teresa (and Mexico) may or may not be a special case, it’s clearly less (of a special case) than more. In essence, it’s hard to emerge from this book without a conviction that we are all guilty of these horrible acts.

It could probably be argued that Bolano’s reflection of reality in this regard is a little too realistic for purposes of a novel; is it really necessary to introduce us to so many characters and leave their stories unresolved? Ultimately it didn’t bother us, because underneath the brutality his work resonates with a compassion for the murdered women — or women in general — that leads us as readers to care about what he’s describing, even if we know — like in real life — so little of it will lead anywhere.

One question we continue to ask is exactly where Bolano stands with regard to the gays. Although Bolano (unlike 98 percent of U.S novelists, who obv prefer to ignore the issue completely) is to be commended for weaving — what? an awareness, a motif — a presence through the text — e.g., “[a]s you’re well aware,” says one character about Mexico, “this is a macho country full of faggots” — it cannot be doubted that 2666 is pervasively homophobic to the extent that virtually every character — from university professors to blue-collar cops to outspoken feminists — when offered even the slightest opportunity uses it to express nothing but disdain for limp-wristed faggots or fudge packers or whatever else. (There are also brutally violent prison scenes of men raping each other — and worse.) While we admire the truthful tone of this hateful treatment of faggots in Bolano’s work, so far we’ve felt none of the compassion he shows for women; it leaves us a little wistful, knowing that in this fictional world — like the real one — we are somehow even worse off than the hundreds of desperate whores left to rot in the desert and be picked apart by the vultures.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About Archimboldi

There are times when we cannot believe how long we’ve been alive, and concurrently, how long — assuming a regular life span — we still have to go. Though admittedly it’s a thought that most often arrives during an afternoon meeting at work, it also crosses our mind at random moments in the middle of winter, when everything seems frozen and permanent, or during an unpleasant commute, or waiting in the dentist’s office, or really any number of things we are required to do that offer nothing but the tedious certainty that life is really nothing more than a pit of quicksand in which we are slowly sinking. (Oddly this never happens when watching teevee — no matter how bad the show — which is both its gift and its curse.)

It goes without saying that as we get older and accept more “responsibility,” we worry more than when we were younger. Money, our health, the health of our children the cats, the fear of dying in Washington Heights, the fear of not dying in Washington Heights; all of this and more relentlessly plagues our thoughts with an intensity we could not have imagined even ten years ago, which makes our future seem like a mountain that gets steeper and icier with every step forward, but which offers no possibility of retreat.

During these moments of existential despair, we look back at the course of our life and it seems that every time we reached a fork in the road, we went in the wrong direction. Why did we do x, we wonder, when doing y — an option that would have been simpler — would have spared us so much hardship? Why — instead of using our natural talents — were we so intent on squandering every advantage? Why did we search out those who wished us nothing but harm and misery? (Why do we blog/Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook?) We think of others — lottery winners, acclaimed artists and writers, teevee stars, anyone who owns a 2br/2bth apt south of 96th Street on the west side — with seething jealousy, given what feels like a certainty that their lives are so much more pleasant and joyful than our own. How did it happen that so many people are younger and smarter (and richer) than us, when we used to be so good at math and scored in the 99th percentile on ever standardized test we ever took? Why did we spend 10 years in a band, when 1-2 would have more than sufficed?

But this passes as we acknowledge an (admittedly delicious and decadent) inability to really do anything about anything. It’s like when we were in law school; the first semester we couldn’t believe that our entire grade would be based on one three-hour test (no quizzes, no mid-terms, nada), but by the second semester, we could not imagine ever going back to a system in which we would be tested more than once a semester.

In this way only does life offer a common denominator: all memories (like dreams and perhaps even regrets) are created equal, and all paths lead to the same oblivion.

The opening chords of “Vapour Trail” are high and open, yet filled with same (phase-shifted) melancholy we associate with ringing church bells. To hear this the other day, as we plodded through our thirty minutes on the elliptical at the gym, was to be swept away with a sense of forgotten potential — i.e., it was not hard to remember listening to the song fifteen years earlier — and an accompanying sadness at the inevitable failure to arrive at any destination we might have anticipated, or at least with any degree of pleasure.

This is less a statement of unhappiness about our current station in life than a reflection of the unrealistic nature of our ideals at the time, and a more molten sense of regret that — at least in our experience – is so often wrapped inside the hard truth as it dissolves on our tongue. At the time — 1992 – we were just about to start law school in New York City; perversely, we had applied to schools based only on our desire to play guitar — “alternative” was the phrase du jour — which we can now admit was mostly just a superficial desire, underneath of which resided a more hidden longing, although one barely acknowledged, and in any event always accompanied by waves of terror in complete disproportion (or perhaps not, in the context of AIDS) to the glimpses of our true nature we very rarely allowed ourself.

Most of our classmates in law school, we were sad and amazed to discover, were not at all interested in voraciously devouring the music of the early nineties to compensate for — or perhaps sublimate – their sexual identities. As a result we viewed most of them with a juvenile disdain, as if we were really biding our time in this prison before going on to a better — if completely (beyond vague and preposterous notions of rock stardom) undefined — future; like Morrissey, we wanted to be famous (although in an alternative sense, the way Pavement was famous then), but unlike Morrissey (or even Pavement), we had little courage or vision. One memory of law school: after a seminar, we overheard some girl say to her friend: “I just got a kitten and named her Tsunami,” to which we interjected: “Oh, like the band?” as if some obscure group (whose music, moreover, we didn’t really like) would be of utmost importance to everyone in the world. The irony of our situation was that while we successfully positioned ourself into an environment in which we were “cool” — at least in our mind — simply by virtue of the fact that we had no interest in working at a firm or a public-interest group, at the same time going to law school made us eminently less cool in those circles in which we most desperately wanted to succeed (in this regard, feel free to envision a bullseye with Matador Records at the center.)

When we finally started a band, during our second year in law school, despite our pathetic attempts to basically ape Galaxie 500 with perhaps a dose of Ride and My Bloody Valentine thrown in (speaking theoretically), we created a little “buzz” in the East Village — and among certain assistant A&R reps from major labels who incredibly enough oozed over and slipped us their business cards after the set, just like we were in movie — primarily from the fact that our show was packed with friends (from law school, because it was the beginning of a semester and there was nothing better to do) and we made Brownies an unprecedented amount of money for a Monday night. Soon we were hearing from “crazy Karen,” the booking agent for the club, who naturally liked to have a money-making act open up for someone “huge” like the Strapping Field Hands or the Magnetic Fields or the Grifters or Fuzzy. At one of our these shows, “Gerard from Matador” was spotted in the audience, but predictably enough — because we didn’t have much to say — he left disappointed (or so we heard) and from then on he never acknowledged our existence, even in Boston when we played with his band Envelope upstairs at the Middle East.

The first time we heard Nowhere, the 1990 debut LP by Ride, we were “kinda shocked” by the opening bassline, specifically with regard to how plainly derived it was from “Taxman,” which of course is the opening song on Revolver (arguably the best album by the “Liverpool Band,” as we preferrred to call them.)  Was this bass line really “necessary”? Similarly bizarre to our ears was the song “Decay” — it arrives about halfway through the record — which is equally “inspired” by the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”  Needless to say, we quickly overcame our aversion to the record and played it obsessively for perhaps a year or more, or at least until Ride released their next record and we became disillusioned with their failure to maintain our standards. These days, we would say that along with Loveless, Nowhere is the most successful example of the sort of late 1980s post-gothic, psychedelic wall-of-noise, unapologetically sweet (vocally), proto-electronic-ish (a la Manchester beat) music typically referred to (derisively or not) as “shoegazer rock.”  It’s a record that sounds as if the sixties were funneled through a jet engine and transformed into pessimistic odes to the ephmeral nature of life and sometimes death (obviously the lyrics would make ridiculous, terrible poetry, but are beautiful in the context of the songs); the actual recording of the record is sublime, too; as our friend Mike put it the other day, the drums sound like tree trunks hitting against vast lakes of still water.

“First you look so strong,
Then you fade away.
The sun will blind my eyes,
I love you anyway.
First you form a smile,
I watch you for a while.
You are a vapour trail,
In a deep blue sky.”

The first time we played at CBGBs was a Saturday night in 1994; Jawbox was on the bill (and were responsible for getting us the show, since our bass player knew their guitarist from college), as was Sunny Day Real Estate. The catch — as we learned after accepting the offer — was that we would be the “warm-down” band, a kind of terrible but exhilarating feature that like certain forms of torture should probably henceforth be relegated to museums and encyclopedias. (CBs sometimes used to have multiple warm-down bands, as we discovered one strange Wednesday night when we stayed there until three am with Beth — like the Kiss song — whose friend’s boyfriend’s band was appearing in one of these slots; even at the time we knew there was something awful and surreal about sitting in CBs at that strange hour, peeling the labels off our beers and fixating on the decaying fabric of the random couches and armchairs in our vicinity, perhaps realizing but not quite acknowledging a fear that this was a metaphor for our own future.) Nevertheless, for our show, even though tons of people streamed out after Jawbox (the headliner), enough remained to make the event a true pleasure — something nobody could ever take away from us — particularly in comparison to the thousands of empty venues — including malls, back porches and “art galleries” — we subsequently played during our years “on tour.”

There was a girl at this show — she was from Connecticut or maybe Westchester — who we will always remember: she was tall and gangly, well over six-feet with wide hips, a shock of red hair and large, expressive eyes, which in the glow of the nightclub appeared like mirrors.  Though she professed to like our band (she even bought a 7-inch, if memory serves), her true love was Ride. She published a zine (which had more than a few issues) exclusively about the band and her undying love for them, and she encouraged us to sign a petition she planned to send to the band’s U.S. label with a thought to encourage — or “force” — them to fund a Ride tour of the States. (By this point it was 1995 and the band’s third LP was considered an artistic and commercial failure by all concerned, except for this girl we met; sadly her name now escapes us and we threw out her zine when we left Brooklyn.) We expressed our disappointment at having not seen the band a few years earlier, when they had canceled an American tour after the drummer broke his leg playing rugby (maybe?).

“Tremble with a sigh,
Glitter in your eye.
You seem to come and go,
I never seem to know.
And all my time,
is yours as much as mine.
We never have enough,
Time to show our love.”

We thought of this girl from our past the other day as “Vapour Trail” ended and the chiming guitars slowly gave way to the orchestrated strings. We wondered where she is now (although we don’t really want to know), and if she still loves Ride more than any other band. (Did she maybe play “Vapour Trail” at her wedding? (Was it a lesbian wedding?) Will she one day pass on her love for this band to her grandchildren? (Will they accept it?)) That we think of her fondly and with a certain admiration gives us some comfort, if not exactly hope, knowing that even the smallest of waves can roll for thousands of miles across a flat sea.

(Listen to “Vapour Trail” on our Tumblr.)

Today we finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. For obv reasons – namely, the book won every award last year — our expectations were high, and but for the most part were met. In case we’re only the second-to-last person to read TBWLoOW, we’ll mention that it features an intense and zany ”mash-up” (or pomo) style of high/low-culture prose that reverberates with everything from street slang (in English and Spanish) to eighties goth to Middle Earth and Dune, all of which Diaz employs with great dexterity to describe three generations of a family as they first suffer under the exceedingly heinous dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and then — or at least those who survive – flee to New Jersey and in some cases, Washington Heights (i.e., home of yours truly).

The book is necessarily long and the scope epic, filled with big and even operatic gestures of love and violence and redemption. As a rule, the women are hot and strong-willed and beautiful, i.e., they have ginormous tits and J-Lo asses and like to fuck (a lot), and the men — except for poor Oscar, who is too nerdy to get any action (although he continually longs for it) — are only too willing to oblige (and then some).  This lust for life — both literal and not — trumps any other concern in the narrative (political, historical, self-preservation, etc.) and gives the book a sweetness that ultimately saved it for us a few times when we were like: Ok bro, we get it: you’re clearly the master of this hyper-nerd/street-tuff melange, but can you just stfu and relax/reflect for a few pages?!

Part of our discomfort (though it never rose above the admittedly mild) stemmed from a slight dissonance we felt between the Dominican “culture” we — as long-term Wahi residents — know and the x-l/comic-book version that Diaz offers up with such gusto. Although Diaz certainly sheds a lot of light onto the (srsly fucked up) Dominican history of the 20th century and how that can manifest itself in a single family, we never felt that he completely captured the true despondence and bleak melancholy that clings to the streets of Washington Heights, or what we tend to view as the flip-side of the happy-go-luck-macho-men-who-whistle-at-the-girlz-on-Broadway vibe (which he captured perfectly). For this reason, the book at times felt oddly sanatized and perhaps even a lil stereotypical in its presentation of the “immigrant experience,” to the extent that it allows book buyers (namely, lit chix and fggts like us if we didn’t know better) to “appreciate” the horror without ever really getting anyone’s hands dirty. (You might even say that TBWLoOW is the literary version of the Broadway musical hit we’ve all heard so much about.) This raises far more (unanswerable) questions about the function of a novel (i.e., truth versus entertainment) than it does about Diaz or TBWLoOW (and for the record, we would raise much the same issues w/r/t Middlesex, which this book resembles very closely in both structure and spirit, if not tone).

We think everyone should read this book, and then come spend a year or two in the Heights, to form your own opinion! In our case, as much as we enjoyed the spectacle of the book, we also felt a little wistful by the end as we imagined reading a novel by say, Junot Diaz’s granddaughter, who no longer succumbs to superficial gestures of optimism (and conformity), but explores a more nuanced thread of pessimism common to the outcasts and (artistic) destroyers who have always been our true saints.

In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, we meet a narrator “Hans” — a Dutch expat originally from The Hague — who both at the beginning and the end of the story (this is not a spoiler, because we learn this in the first few pages) appears to”have it all”: relative youth and good health; an intelligent, beautiful wife; a well-mannered, inquisitive son; and a high-paying job as an oil analyst for an i-bank. The difference between the beginning and the end is that — besides the fact that his son is now a boy instead of a toddler — the narrator has moved to London from New York City, where most of the book is set.

What transpires in this interval are the events with which we are all on very intimate terms, i.e., 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the power-outage/blackout when everyone “felt good” about the city again, and the floats that went crazy a few years later on that windy Thanksgiving Macy’s parade. Fortunately for us, O’Neill does not devote a lot of time describing any of this, but simply uses these circumstances to frame a generally bleak mood made all the bleaker by the fact that — for mostly inexplicable reasons (at least on the surface) — Hans’ life is falling apart. In the wake of 9/11, his freaked-out wife decides to move back to London but basically disinvites him from coming along, leaving them in a period of indeterminate reassessment that feels very much like a state of purgatory from which he might never emerge. Meanwhile — though he continues to rake it in at work — his enthusiasm for the job is waning, and his only friend gets the axe.

What happens as a result of all this is that Hans goes for a walk on the wild side, relatively speaking. But unlike so many characters throughout the history of New York — both real and imagined — Hans does not turn to the time-honored traditions of drugs, alcohol or sex (well, he has a lil sex) to assuage his demons, but instead — and this, a big part of the appeal of this book — becomes obsessed with cricket, a game he played in his youth. At a match in Staten Island, he serendipitously meets the other most important character of the book, a Trinidad native — a man in his fifties named Chuck — who lives in the middle of Brooklyn.* Chuck is something of an archetypal Brooklyner, i.e., a wheeler-dealer with a million scams and pipe-dreams who drives a Cadillac, knows enough about many things to sound intelligent (but is never pretentious) and ultimately seems maybe benign, so that we can understand the allure he exerts on the more staid (but increasingly desperate) Hans, even as we also grasp his reluctance to get too involved. In short, with Hans, O’Neill offers us a classic case of a character whose head says “no” but whose heart says “yes.’

*We used to call the neighborhood “Beverly Square West” and, as a result having recorded two albums there, recognized many of the streets O’Neill describes — Cortelyou, Ocean Parkway, Coney Island Avenue, Flatbush — and remarkably or not, even some of the individual houses!

While this is perhaps not the most elaborate structure, O’Neill adorns it with exquisite detail, so that we are continually focused on the lush, insightful prose, much of it used to describe New York — but without any trace of nostalgia — and the rest to deconstruct both the attraction and ambivalence Hans feels for Chuck, while weaving into this narrative memories of his childhood and — finally — the continuing tension with his wife. O’Neill’s dexterity in this regard is particularly important — and remarkable — because none of the characters is particularly “likable,” i.e., Hans — except for his strange obsession — is a tepid drink of i-banking/Tribeca-loft-owning water, while his wife (even from London) tends toward the shrill/unfeeling/politically correct, and Chuck is just a little too sleazy for us to invest in.

But we were gripped anyway; besides the fact that O’Neill knows how to deliver a good story, what ultimately interested us was the idea that it could basically be read as “gay,” even though any such context (like so much in our society) is buried 100 miles beneath the surface of Hans’ carefully constructed veneer (i.e., there’s not even the slightest acknowledgment of any homo-attraction anywhere, although there are enough “gay” symbols and peripheral characters to keep the thesis afloat, as it were). Still, the fact remains that this book is primarily about the obsession of one man for another, with the former representing everything conventional (and most often, tedious) about society, and the latter offering a window into the far-more-exciting-albeit-dangerous “other” (which besides obv ethnic/class differences extends to the sexual to the extent that Chuck is very open about having a wife and a mistress.)

It was for this reason, when — at the end of the book — Hans returns to the fold (i.e., to his wife and child in London, a city that essentially bores him), and despite his own protestations of hope and redemption, we are left with a bittersweet sense of loss, as if during his interlude in New York, he had finally managed to kill that part of himself that was most alive.