In the effort to be less ‘gay’ and less ‘reclusive,’ I’m ‘rebranding’ with a new blog written by ‘Matthew Gallaway’, which not coincidentally is the name I’ve used for my novel The Metropolis Case, which will most likely publish at some point in 2k10. I hope you’ll join me there! Please let me know if you love/hate the new design, or if you have any technical difficulties with feeds/subscriptions/linkage. Hope to see u soon — miss u! xoxo TGR

For the past ___ years, I’ve been neglecting my guitars and amplifiers; for example, I stored my ‘blackface’ 1960s Fender Princeton Reverb at my friend John’s house, and everything else sat in the forgotten recesses of closets, which is not exactly the best thing for intonation (in the case of the guitars) and — for some reason in the case of the amps — reverb, which was shot on both. After the long, slow and oddly painful (via ‘learning to be an adult’) denoument of my old band Saturnine, I wasn’t sure that I would ever really want to play any of them again; they seemed to represent a feckless quality to my youth that had left me careening from one pursuit to the next, without ever really considering whether I had sufficient skill/talent/devotion to ‘make a living’ at any of them; at the same time, the idea of doing anything ‘as a hobby’ seemed ‘too mainstream,’ and so I ended up taking jobs that in most cases could not qualify as the foundation to any kind of traditional career, e.g., I sold lens-cleaning fluid, I watered plants, I worked at a record store, and — most humiliating — I ‘temped’ at law firms where my former classmates were a$$ociate$.

In retrospect, of course, all of this can be understood to represent a desire to fuck/buck/rebel against tradition without acknowledging the most obvious way in which I would never be traditional, i.e., the state of being gay/vext/non-heterosexual. This is also why when I see movies about wayward youths who have trouble ‘settling down,’ I tend to project my own past and conclude that he/she must be gay/vext/non-heterosexual, although I’ve learned to be somewhat more delicate in phrasing this opinion (if I phrase it at all) via all sorts of disclaimers, after being told quite vehemently on numerous occasions that ‘not every1 is geigh, u know.’ (To which I always respond with a smile and a nod and an unstated mental rebuttal: ‘that’s what u think.’)

But since subsequently working in a corporate office for almost 1000 years (via the evaporating publishing biz) and experiencing the true weight of ‘fiscal responsibily’ (via lawsuits and Manhattan real estate); I not only became more resigned to the idea that I would never be ‘Steve Malkmus,’ it was a thought that seemed vaguely disturbing and repellent to me, not unlike the way I think of myself as having ‘tried to date girls.’ But as much as I once tended to disavow the past completely, it has more recently occurred to me — via iTunes — that it was not a complete lie; I still genuinely love/admire much of the music from that period of my life — even if it’s not ‘geigh’ like Britney/Madonna/Cher/Coldplay — and moreover there was still a certain satisfaction to be found in writing/recording songs — via Apple Macbook — even if I no longer have a band with which to take them ‘on tour’ and play them to a thousand ghosts in as many empty rooms.

So I took a few months and gathered my gear; I drove to John’s house ‘in Yonkers’ and picked up the Princeton, I threw out ten bags of garbage that had accumulated in the closets on top of the guitars. I plugged them in and like any neglected child, each one had issues — there was hissing/crackling/moaning/howling — and I gradually set about finding repair shops, which due to the ‘vintage’ status of this gear is never an easy (or at least obvious) task in New York City. In the past I had used some stoner in the East Village for my guitars and a toothless genius/punk rocker in Brooklyn for my amps, but nobody seemed to know what had happened to either one of these guys, though everyone agreed it was unlikely that either had endured the most recent decade, which may/may not go down as one of the worst of all time (via Dick Cheney/Alan Greenspan/the Donald/Tumblr).

But eventually for the guitars I found a guy who (miraculously) lives/works on the Upper West Side, so that wasn’t too difficult, while amp guy was in the middle of Queens, where the grid system breaks down and Google Maps will torture you by say, directing you to take an exit from the Grand Central Parkway that doesn’t exist. But luck was with me, and both were technical savants, which you can tell pretty much instantly from the decor of an apartment/workshop, i.e., are there amps/guitars/wires/soldering irons/blowtorches everywhere and no art on the walls, except for perhaps an autographed shot of Stevie Ray Vaughan? (In short, these guys are never geigh.)

Today I picked everyone up and was informed that — after some minor repair$ and adjustment$ — they were all in excellent shape.

This has been a post in which ‘repairing your vintage guitars and amplifiers’ is a metaphor for ‘coming to terms’ with your past. (These guitars/amps are part of me, now.)

I have some vacation days coming up, and can’t wait to spend a few hours playing, even if nobody ever hears them sing but me.

The garden at the end of winter is not exactly a joy to behold: branches are bent or broken, evergreens are pale, and even the ground — littered with dead leaves and twigs — seems inhospitable.

But a closer examination reveals signs of life: the first photo above is a Sycamore Maple (Acer pseudoplatanus “Eskimo Sunset”) and this is a tree peony. If all goes as expected, they will both be in full bloom within a a few months.

Even the climbing hydrangea is prepared for the warmer days ahead; one advantage of being a plant, it seems, is that you are less deterred by circumstances beyond your control, and simply welcome the change you know is going to come.

I first met Leanne in the fall of tenth grade in the Kingswood dining hall.  This was my first year of boarding school and — residual fear from public school — I was still petrified at the thought of eating alone; I don’t remember if I circled the cavernous room looking for someone I knew (preferably from the boys’ dorm or the hockey team) or whether I went directly to the emptiest table on the edge, where she and her best friend Mary already sat, clearly not interested in the throngs who populated the middle of the space.

Leanne — who I think had skipped a grade or two by this point — was dressed waifishly in khaki pants and a man’s flannel shirt, and still possessed the androgynous charm of a precocious child; only her shoulder-length hair, wavy with bangs and indifferently styled, pushed her more toward the girl’s side of the equation. Mary, dressed similarly — and with short, shiny swimmer’s hair and broad shoulders — seemed even more ambivalent about adorning herself with the trappings of the more traditional — and popular — segments of the school, who chattered away en masse only a few feet from our table.  As it turned out, they were extremely conscious their separation from the “mainstream” of the student body, but — revelation to me — framed this in terms of class, not gender; though they were both “day students,” Leanne and Mary were not from the posh suburbs surrounding the school — Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham — but from further afield, although the exact names of these towns now escapes me. In this respect, they were more like the boarding students — who tended to come from more middle-class environs — but because the girls who boarded were a smaller and more insular group, it made sense that — at least at this juncture — Leanne and Mary were outsiders from almost every vantage point.

Although I — as a hockey player, book-smart, and with conventionally masculine good looks (which I say with no pride, and perhaps some shade of embarrassment) — was the opposite of an outsider, a fact that may have begged the question of exactly what I was doing each day eating lunch with self-professed “losers” like Leanne and Mary, they obviously appealed to the nascent dissatisfaction I felt for so many facets of my own life at fifteen. I think my presence egged them on, as if I had entered a private theater, a sort of performance of two in which I was the only audience member. Leanne was the ringleader and the wit; her down-turned eyes, along with a small bump on her nose and a strong chin, seemed to possess an inherent melancholy that made her observations — usually either an extreme form of self-mockery or just mockery, particularly when it came to money and what it bought for those around us — all the more outrageous; Mary would quietly gasp in agreement and laughter as Leanne threw her head back in hilarity and sometimes waved her thin arms around — almost daring the world to notice — as I watched paralyzed with awe at the urbane quality of what I had implausibly found in the suburbs of Detroit.

It would be fair to say that I fell in love with Leanne in every way except the one that mattered, or at least required some definition; it would probably also be fair to say that my feelings were reciprocated, but only for a little while, until it became apparent that I would remain cruelly aloof, no matter how inwardly charmed I was by the long letters she sent me over Thanksgiving break describing the horrors of a car trip to visit her grandparents in Florida.

We remained friends — and possibly even good friends — throughout high school, and I think she generally regarded me with a sense of stupefied affection, as she — and no doubt others — wondered what my problem was, when the answer was so obvious as to appear completely unlikely. For my part, I watched from of a distance as she gained popularity among an alternative crowd of “faculty brats” and assorted “boho” types with whom I was also loosely associated; more than anyone I met at Cranbrook, I had the sense that she was simply biding her time before being released to the world at large, which she would undoubtedly conquer.

As luck (or bad luck) would have it, we both went to Cornell; she was the first person I saw when I arrived on West Campus in a cloud of hopeless dread, knowing that I had made a huge mistake, compounded by my agreeing to live with a childhood friend in the freshman-football dorm (an arrangement made to please both sets of parents, predictably enough). But Leanne was nearby, and for one night — this during orientation — it was like we were in tenth grade again, and we walked through the teeming crowds, wondering openly how everyone could be so stupid, and yet at the same time so oblivious to their stupidity.

After this, we quickly lost contact. My academic career was marked by a program of laziness, subversion and ambivalence — i.e., I majored in “Government” — and for friends I sought out those whose aura appeased my own vague need for self-differentiation, but without ever forcing me to elucidate the underlying reasons for this; in short, I gradually attached myself to some of the fine-arts majors. Leanne by contrast quickly established herself as a “star” in the creative-writing program, and became popular in a way that seemed a thousand miles away from the person she had been in high school; when we saw each other, our conversations were brief and superficial, as if neither wanted to remember where we had come from while distrusting the other for knowing the truth.

After I moved to New York, I occasionally saw Leanne at parties in Brooklyn. By this point we were “adults,” and reflected somewhat more candidly about who we had been, although as someone who remained closeted, there were severely enforced limits on how far I would allow myself to go in this regard. Nevertheless, because she retained her brilliance I felt a little sad when she married a writer and seemed to give up her own aspirations, as if they were my own. After this, our friendship — if it could even be called that — became increasingly attenuated (not out of any malice) and at some point I learned she had gone to architecture school.

The last time I saw her, I was finally “out”; I remember feeling nervous, as if I should apologize for how dishonest I had been, yet at the same time searching in her eyes for some sign of the person who still lived in my memories, which was no doubt an unfair burden to place on both of us; for who could possibly live up to the naive, unformed expectations of a fifteen-year old? Though I would have liked to dwell on the past and exactly how it had contrived to push us to this point in the present, we were at a crowded art opening, and so talked aggressively for a few minutes about her job as an architect and my obsession for old bricks. (Only later did I realize this obsession was both literal and metaphorical.) Though understandably distant, she still seemed impossibly erudite — and even good-natured — as she pointed me in the direction of obscure artists and design theorists whose work might reinforce my own tendencies. We traded e-mail addresses, but neither followed up.

Although I knew she remained in the city, and it would be quite feasible to track her down, I preferred to think of her as elusive; and here my inclinations seemed to be reinforced when, the last I heard — via a friend — she was quitting her architecture job and going to Africa.

She recently appeared to me in a dream, and it took only a few seconds to locate her on a professional networking site on the internet. I made no effort to contact her, though; it wasn’t that I lacked the desire to see her again — the tug of nostalgia almost reduced me to tears as I remembered her laugh — but a sense of stinging remorse that I felt certain would descend upon me in the minutes after such a prospective meeting; but even as this occurred to me I realized that this, too, was an exaggeration, and in fact, I was more than prepared for either scenario (i.e., to meet or not to meet her). Then I felt redeemed by a greater certainty that what had appeared to me was a symbol of my own youth, and one to which I was more than ready to say goodbye.

As many of you may or may not know, last year we wrote an essay that was published by Gawker on Valentine’s Day as part of a “Gay Modern Love” contest sponsored by Sheila (miss u!) and inspired in part by our rants about the heternormativity of the Modern Love column in the Times.  We thought we’d take the opportunity to reprint the essay this year because a) we’re lazy, b) you never know if Gawker will have its archives up forever, c) we’re still kinda proud of it, and d) it reminds us that life is not always as difficult as it seems, or even when it is (and worse), there’s sometimes a silver lining worth holding on for.

It’s late November 1998. I’m 30 years old and a total closet-case: it’s past midnight and I’m scrolling through the men-seeking-men listings of Web Personals. During the day, I still like to tell myself that—although I’m not exactly a virgin in the same-sex department—whatever homo tendencies I have are basically a minor health problem; in short, as soon as I meet the right girl, I will be “cured” of the desire to say, head out to Prospect Park at 11:30 on a Tuesday night or—as I have been doing more and more as the days grow shorter—take a walk through the virtual hallways of the internet…” There are three categories to choose from: relationship, friends (“as if”) and sex. (Guess which one I go for.) Among the ads that catch my attention (and this being 1998, there are no photographs) is one from a 41 y.o. GWM, 6’3″, 240lbs and hairy. Although I’m somewhat deterred by the “G,” I imagine a strong and vaguely angry-looking man with a buzz-cut and receding hairline. Moreover, he doesn’t use the term “bear” but “linebacker,” which appeals to the hockey player in me. Why this gets me going is an unsolved mystery at this point, but it most certainly does; in an agitated state, I send off of a reply: 30 y.o. GWM 5’11″/175 looking for…(whatever the equivalent of NSA was in 1998). It’s the first time I’ve ever used a “G,” and while part of me doesn’t like it, I figure if it gets me what I want, nobody else will ever have to know.

A few days later, I get a response in my secret “Gay-O-L” account. Stephen suggests we meet at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen. For me, the intervening days and then hours are marked by repeated mental games of “what the fuck am I doing” and interludes of queasy anticipation. When I arrive and look for someone matching his description, I am nervous—what if he lied?—and generally relieved that it’s five o’clock and already completely dark outside. But to my astonishment, when we find each other, he is not only all of the above—as if molded from my dreams—but has the most intense green eyes; one glance leaves me more naked than I’ve felt in my entire life. My head is filled with an onslaught of distortion and melody; for once I am living one of my all-time favorite Hüsker Dü songs. My fingertips—the same ones that have memorized every note of Zen Arcade over the past decade—itch with anticipation. I try not to dwell on the implications of this, and think only of the night ahead.

Inside we order coffee and spend a few minutes talking. It turns out his “linebacker” description was a bit of a red herring; though he looks the part, his knowledge of sports is nil. Moreover he works as an opera director; not coincidentally, he has been out since the beginning of time. I don’t initially respond to this as we marvel at the power of technology, which has brought together such an unlikely pair. We ceremoniously thank the internet and imagine ourselves as circles on a Venn diagram with infinite degrees of separation.

“And what about you?” he finally asks, expressing (at least as I read it) a mix of real curiosity and—if not disdain—coy skepticism. I’m sure he knows that my “G” was a bit of a stretch. For the first time ever, I’m actually bothered by not being out. I feel ignorant to have worked in a record store for five years without knowing one thing about opera besides “Pavarotti.” (And worse, that I have done this in the wake of graduating from NYU Law School.) I think it might not be so cool to share an apartment with 1000 of my Brooklyn friends and cohorts, even if we did build a sound-proof rehearsal room in our basement that’s home to an equal number of indie-rock bands; or so impressive that my own band has five records and tours, or that we made the top-thirty on the CMJ radio charts last summer.

I finally decide to answer him directly: Nobody knows. (That is, except a few anonymous strangers.)

“Not even your mother?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What about your friends?”

“Nope—no one.”

He nods slowly and I try not to think how this must look. To my relief, his beautiful eyes remain placid, forgiving and even desirous. After all, I remind myself, it’s only sex. I change the subject. “Where did you say you live?”

“Uptown—Washington Heights.” Once again I have no idea what he’s talking about, but decide not to make my usual quip about never going above 14th Street.

I ask him what led him to move there.

“I’m a bit of a recluse,” he says, before explaining that it’s cheap and that he doesn’t mind being an outsider; sometimes he even prefers it. Unlike me, he has only a few friends he sees rarely and is not particularly “close” to his family. As I listen to this, my mind begins to race as I picture myself in his shoes. What would I do without my friends? (Where would I get drunk?) If I came out, would they forgive me for selling so many years of lies? And my family! All of my older brothers and sisters, married with children, what would they think if I ever described our relationship so perfunctorily, with such distance? Equally disgusted and intoxicated, I could suddenly see myself like Stephen—a recluse—obsessively devoted to the most queenly pursuits of silverware, mid-century modern, Schopenhauer and alpine gardening.

He laughs as he considers me, and seems to understand what he represents in terms of both yearning and doubt. “So—do you want to come over?” He places his hand over mine for a second and removes it.

“More than anything,” I say, and now—ten years later—his is a destiny I am happy to call our own.

(Image via Gawker).

It’s not hard to remember a phase we went through in elementary school, specifically fourth and fifth grade (and possibly sixth, although even now it pains us to think about this) when each Valentine’s Day, we took it upon ourselves to make increasingly elaborate boxes for the obligatory exchange of cards that occurred each year. My memory of this exchange process is that it was quite rigidly democratic (in the way the 1970s could sometimes be, and to their credit); if there were twenty-three kids in your class, you were obligated to present each with a card, regardless of gender or — more important — how ostracized a particular student was, in the case of _______ or _______ or _______ (one of whom, incidentally, kinda freaked us out by recently “friending” us on FB, though s/he seems to be leading a relatively “normal” life, while another one of these outcasts died at a very young age; for years in elementary school we had shunned him, after the fateful day our mother somehow arranged with his mother for us to walk to kindergarten together, which we later feared — i.e., once he had been established as an untouchable — would obligate us to be ‘nice’ to him at a political cost that seemed altogether unreasonable).

On Valentine’s Day, most students would simply bring in a shoe box with a few stickers or doilies attached to the outside, along with a few cut-out hearts of red construction paper. (Some of the girls made somewhat more elaborate designs.)

We dreaded Valentine’s Day, with its heterosexual implications and the horrible likelihood of receiving something “special” — given (and we don’t say this to brag) that we were intelligent, conventionally attractive and “good at sports” — from one or more of the suddenly cloying and detestable girls (who minutes earlier might have been a friend); it might have been something as simple as an extra sticker or a stylized signature  or a tiny piece of candy crushed into the envelope, but whatever the case, the end result was to inform us that we were officially “liked” by the girl in question, which filled our soul with a gloomy sense of obligation and doom that would later — in the cauldron of our adult depression — become the diamond of pessimism through which we would look so longingly at death.

A more rebellious child might have expressed disdain for the entire procedure, or ignored it like some of the other boys who just “went through the motions” without giving this dumb exercise a second thought. We were not inclined to such rebellion, however, and somehow — though without being at all conscious of this at the time — decided that the more subversive (and clearly the gheyest) option was to make a spectacle of the entire event, which in our case meant constructing an elaborate Valentine’s Day “skyscraper,” a six foot tower of intricately wrapped (in alternating shades of red and silver) boxes, complete with distinct inner passages that would allow a card pushed through a slot at the top to fall down and arrive in one of two containers: “Hot date!” or “No luck!” (Or something to that effect.)

We worked on this for a week or more with our best friend ____ (who didn’t even go our school) helping out on the weekend; he was a Lego/Star Wars geek, so the idea of building the “death star” of Valentine’s Day boxes held some appeal.

We brought it into class in a huge garbage bag — “huge” not an exaggeration either, given that it was procured from our father’s industrial supply company — and can still remember the shame and excitement we felt as we hauled it into the classroom and assembled the pieces to an audience of children (each in front of his or her pathetic little shoebox), a few of whom were genuinely excited and perhaps awestruck while most of the others were nonplussed or most likely ambivalent. As with so much in our unformed years (i.e., the first 30 of them, at least), we could often “get away” with even the most outlandishly ghey gestures because so much of the rest of our life was so hopelessly str8. In effect, this was our one day to really show everyone what we wanted to do — i.e., make something that had nothing to do with any of them — and for this reason we loved it and desperately wanted to prove ourselves somehow capable, but we also hated ourselves for possessing these compulsions that were odd and somehow self-destructive, if not quite self-destructive enough (speaking psychologically).

The disassembled boxes remained in our parents’ attic for quite a few years, probably at least until we left home in tenth grade for boarding school, by which point we had become more athletic and a lot more “straight,” to the extent that we “acted normal” and limited our non-heterosexual outlandish gestures to bedtime fantasies and the accompanying clouds of unfathomable guilt that hovered about us at all times. But we remember going home and seeing the silhouette of the garbage bag in the narrow crawl space, knowing that it was an indelible part of our past and praying that it would not be the key to our our future, which of course is one reason we are now happier not believing in a Christian god (except when we are feeling really sick and feverish).

When the February blues hit — and considering this winter, how could they not? — we like to immerse ourselves into dreams of spring, which entails many hours in the seed and plant catalogs. Though our garden is dominated by perennials, bushes and trees designed to draw forth the essence if not the reality (given our limitations) of an alpine garden, we like to reserve the pots for annuals  — sorry, purists! — because even though “friends don’t let friends buy annuals,” we find that they really do help add color when our garden tends to need it the most, i.e., through the drab period of late July and August. Last year we tried growing our annuals from seed with mixed results; some never got bigger than an inch or so, while others did eventually grow to the monstrous proportions we had anticipated. This year, we’re trying again, with an eye toward picking varieties that will all maybe actually thrive in the extremes of stultifying heat and humidity we seem to inevitably face each summer. Herewith our choices this year, with accompanying descriptions from the catalog:

Sunflower Sunny Smile (Helianthus annuus)
The big Sunflower you can grow in a small pot!

Flowering Tobacco (Nicotiana x sanderae)
If your summers are hot and humid, Flowering Tobacco is the annual you MUST grow.

Zinnia Profusion (Zinnia)
Winner of Gold Medals Galore, this is the Best Zinnia EVER!

Salvia Park’s Whopper Lighthouse (Salvia splendens)
So big, bright, and bold it could only be a Whopper, this annual Salvia takes the world by storm from the moment you sow the seed.

Do you know about any “must-have” annuals for 2k9? (Keep in mind we live in the swamplands of New York City.) Let us know, or send links/pix!

When we started blogging, we didn’t really know anything about the internet, much less “bloggable memes.” Until then, like most people in our demographic, we had spent our time on nytimes.com and our “Yahoo home page.” But we quickly discovered internet traffic, and modified the blog to include many “gimmicks” to attract as many page views as possible. We wrote about the need for gentrification in the Heights, we made fun of str8s in the Style Section of The Times and most notably, we posted pix of “hot gay statues” from around the universe.

But this year our interest in gimmicks has faded. We like to tell everyone that our blog is “growing up,” but this raises a difficult question: can you still be “a relevant blog” if your traffic is growing at <1 percent/year (or if your “authority” on Technorati is <500)?

Also: do you think it’s a mistake to be a “gay blog” instead of a “literary blog (written by a geighehgihay)?” Technorati reports that “to be gay walls off close to 90 percent of internet users, and 98.7 percent of ‘serious literary readers.’” Given this, do you think we should “downplay” the gay side of the blog — maybe rebrand as “The Guy Recluse”? — to make our blog more “palatable” or should we go “all out” and post pictures of David Beckham and other “str8dbags” like you see on the “leading” gay blogs?

Or is it too late, so that we’ll always exist on the fringes of the blogosphere (and never make enough $ from Google Ads to “quit our job”)?

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.)

Eventually we reached an age when we could no longer think about the larger world except with terror; it was too complicated and cruel, and every time we tried to engage it we returned defeated and misunderstood. Our own trajectory, combined with an examination of world history and literature seemed to confirm the idea that “the shortness of life, so often lamented, may perhaps be the very best thing about it.”

Yet we were too young to truly understand this, and instead fell into a tedious trap of nihilism and melodrama. “Please kill us!” we laughed bitterly at the sky.

But this passed and we grew older; we felt exhausted by our anger and longed for just a few more seconds of reflection away from the tumult outside.