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.

(American gay fiction writer and flickering beacon during the Dark Ages of post-war American fiction) James Purdy died today, and as so often happens, The Times obit neglected to explicitly state that he was gay/queer/homosexual/vext. Not that you could really hide it in Purdy’s case, given that the subject matter of his books so often dealt with such themes, and to be fair, the obit did not fail to discuss his work in these terms.

But according to our friend John — who is in a position to know such things — Purdy spent a lot of time ‘chasing after young men many decades younger than him,’ which I suppose is simply beyond what The Times is about to include in any obituary. Still, it’s fun to imagine: “As a gay man who lived in New York City for close to sixty years, Purdy was never partnered, but ravished approximately 40,682 men — many barely out of their teens! — and in his later years was never seen without a posse of young admirers.”

Although the obituary makes the case reasonably well that Purdy was an Important But Neglected American Writer — which is true (and if you haven’t read him, we recommend starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works) — there is a somewhat disturbing soullessness to the piece as a whole, a hovering ‘lonely bachelor’ aura that makes it feel just a little sad/stereotypical, as if Purdy was ‘a lonely and bitter homosexual’ without a trace of love or passion in his life. (Who knows, maybe that’s true.)

Or maybe I’m just thinking about how I would want my own obituary to be written, i.e., even if I had written 20 novels that were/were not critically acclaimed, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend/partner/spouse/husband (something ‘culturally sanctioned’ for The Times to mention) I would still want a few words dedicated to some aspect of ‘being human’ or perhaps just being ‘alive’ (by which I mean a capacity to feel/love, even if it’s not necessarily feelings for another person).

E.g., “An admirer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Purdy was known to make a point of walking across it at least 300 times per year.” Or: “In addition to writing books, Purdy collected flower-themed stamps, for which he held a lifelong obsession.” Or: “Purdy had a beagle named Stanley who for many years never left his side, and was often seen dining with him in restaurants.” Or: “Purdy loved nothing more than a good salad!”

When I read about death — and particularly about that of an artist or writer — I want to see some signs of ‘real life,’ some indication that perhaps this person was a ‘lil obsessive’ and not just a robot in the bourgeois capitalist society/factory in which we’ve all been slated to pass these recent decades; if it’s not there, the risk is that you put down the paper (a metaphor) and think ‘what’s the point?’ which is a completely different level of neglect, and one that none of us really deserve.

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).

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.)

After obsessing about the Hipster Runoff review of TV on the Radio for the past two days, we realized that it had sent us into a retroactive identity crisis. It was as if it were fifteen years ago, and we were just starting a band, and — as “entry levelers” — we were first trying to assess the boundaries of what was hip and what was not hip, and how there were certain bands we hated but who we dared not criticize — even to ourselves — because say, Gerard Cosloy or Tim Nye or Gail Chickfactor had ordained them as worthy. Which isn’t really remarkable; we were 25 years old, new to the city, in the closet and too insecure to have the confidence to cultivate any kind of aesthetic instinct, either in terms of listening to music or making it.

What is remarkable, however, is to see this kind of fearless vision in someone like 22 or 23, or whatever the HRO guy is. Imagine writing something like this at that age:

I remember when I was an entry-leveler/pure altbro, I went to a TV on the Radio concert. The white guitarist guy made every one in the audience take out their keys to ‘use as percussion.’ I looked all around me. The crowd began dangling their keys in rhythm with a babbly TV on the Radio song, grinning with delight as they ‘authentically appreciated the venue’s acoustics.’ I immediately walked out of the venue. While my life is meaningful, a part of me realized that it wasn’t meaningful enough to participate in a collective concert experience. (Bold ours.)

Here — in one sentence — is what could be the essence of our own existence at 40. Or at least an idealized, philosophical existence, i.e., leaving aside all the boring compromi$e$ we’ve made for all the u$ual rea$on$.

While there’s an effortless quality to youth we regret having squandered, it’s a relief to know that everything we dreamed of back then was lost, and so will no longer burden us going forward.

Yesterday when we woke up, it was freezing rain; but suddenly in the afternoon, the front lifted.

Within minutes, the sky was bright. As we observed this, our thoughts also began to seem less muddled; we could breathe easier. No problem was insurmountable!

Little did we know that the clear skies would usher in a new cold front, which cruelly turned everything to ice.

It’s been almost a year since we posted any video, but we decided to give it another shot: after all, we now have a Powerbook, which we were planning to use for all sorts of clever and witty entertainment. As you’ll see, we still have a long way to go! Still, after four hours with Final Cut Express, three temper tantrums, two breakdowns and a partridge in a pear tree, this is what we came up with — a snowy morning in Washington Heights!

In Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s four-hour treatment of the 19th-century King of Bavaria, we are introduced to the king as a young man, but learn almost immediately — in what feels like a flash-forward — that he will eventually be dethroned by the state legislature for maybe being insane. So with the question of what happens effectively taken off the table — as it should be in all biopics – this gives Visconti the opportunity to explore exactly how this earnest young monarch slips away.

Helmut Berger, both handsome and delicate, plays Ludwig with a brittle yet manic elegance that showcases both his beauty and optimism in the early part of the movie and a grotesque deterioration — including his horribly rotting teeth — with which it is gradually replaced. Throughout he possesses a nervous intensity that makes his descent into madness — or disillusionment? — completely convincing. That Berger was also Visconti’s off-screen lover makes sense; at a certain point the movie is less about the historical character — i.e., the tormented homosexual, the builder of castles, the financier of Richard Wagner — and more about Visconti’s obsession with Berger. As we watch, we become similarly entranced by Visconti’s depiction of a world that aches with fragile and untenable beauty, so that as the music — from Tristan and Tannhauser — repeats over and over, we are immersed into something close to a feverish dream state, in which even the smallest shift of our eyes away from the screen threatens to induce a searing pain.

The bright colors of the royal uniforms, the damask wallpapers and gilt interiors are contrasted throughout with barren, wintry landscapes; yet both are equally dream-like here. Visconti likes nothing more than to slowly pan across a landscape, often leaving the foreground blurry as we slowly fix our gaze on what may or may not appear in the distance. Eventually someone appears, we somehow understand that in the middle of this decadence they are doomed; that much of the cast — and particularly Romy Schneider as Ludwig’s cousin, the Empress of Austria — are exquisitely, almost painfully beautiful, both doleful and sensual, makes us forget the film’s more obvious and superficial flaws, i.e., its many loose ends, abrupt edits and pointless conversations. Once we succumb to Visconti’s vision — his “music,” so to speak — we understand that we are watching an opera, where language — at least in its most literal form — becomes secondary, and perhaps even irrelevant, to the piece as a whole.

It is for this reason that we are not bothered by the somewhat ridiculous dubbing of the actors’ words into Italian; just as Ludwig himself preferred the artificial beauty of his exotic interiors to anything in the real world, the film is an exercise in artifice; at no point do we lose sight of the fact that we are watching.

There is no “escape” watching Visconti; rather we are presented with the certainty that even the greatest and most sumptuous works of art — the ones that kings have literally died for — will like icebergs eventually melt into the sea and be lost to us forever.

One strange thing about growing up in Pittsburgh was that even before we lived anywhere else, we used to say that it — i.e., Pittsburgh — was haunted. But when people would ask us why, we were at a loss to explain: either you got it, it seemed, or you did not.

But now that we live in the equally haunted neighborhood of Washington Heights, we’re in a better position to explain. Like Washington Heights, Pittsburgh — or at least many parts of it — resonates with a decrepitude that can only be attained after the big show has ended, so to speak, after the spotlight of “development” and capital and investment has moved to newer and more exciting venues, leaving the hulking wrecks from the old production to languish in the shadows. Nowhere is this contrast greater than upper and lower Manhattan, but Pittsburgh — like so much of the Midwest — has also been left behind in the last twenty years; to spend even an hour or two driving across its bridges and through its tunnels is to be shocked by the deterioration, the sense that the bridge you are crossing might just fall into the river at any second, and most of all, a sense that you are not in the United States of freedom and equality, but some mockery of this, some communist blok country from the 1980s, even down to the ridiculou$ new sports arenas that have recently replaced the old ones.

There is, of course, an exhilaration that comes from being removed from the toxic streams of money that circulate around and through us so constantly, at our downtown corporate jobs, and in the lives of those we read about in The Times or watch on The Hills teevee. There’s an uncanny feeling of safety here, not unlike what we used to experience as a child when we would retreat to the back of our mother’s closet for a few hours, just to escape the mayhem of the family. You walk through these streets and see the cracked building facades, the crumbling letters of a dead marquis, and the windows that are somehow never quite square, and you know that these are places of survival, where luxury of any kind — except perhaps the most base — is only a taunting echo across the lost decades. But underneath the despair, there is also for us — the observer — relief.

We of course have always preferred this backstage environment, where the rules of normal society may or may not apply, where there’s a certain code of conduct that arises out of the need to scratch out an existence in these corrupted hills. It’s not that people aren’t conservative, but there’s less pretense and optimism — and consequently, public judgment — than what you find in the West; even the mountains around Pittsburgh are more stoic than angry; they seem old and resigned to their fate.

The Pittsburgh Signs Project — a new book being published by CMU Press — beautifully documents this fading existence in a series of 250 photographs by Jennifer Baron, Greg Langel, Elizabeth Perry, and Mark Stroup. We can’t help linger over this pleasingly obsessive record of a neglected and disappearing past, not so much with a thought to save or preserve any of it, but simply to consider the transforming power of time and erosion; objects here that would have once inspired disdain now possess a dignity that thankfully transcends the more tedious elements of nostalgia or kitsch that sometimes threatens to ruin our appreciation of pop culture, especially those mass-produced elements of it. Rather, we get the sense that each of these signs is a unique artifact recovered from the bottom of the ocean. Or you might think of it like strolling through a graveyard in which you have no personal relation with any of the dead; with each one, we try to imagine what life was like when it was new, when it was shining with the dreams of those who created it, and seemed to offer an escape that’s all but unthinkable now. This of course is not done with condescension or pity, but rather jealousy that those who once lived could have been offered so much more than what we are left with today.

The Pittsburgh Signs Project, just named one of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s books of the year can be purchased here or contact the editors directly at 250signs [at] gmail [dot] com. Read more here and here.

All photographs courtesy of and by Jennifer Baron, editor and contributor to the Pittsburgh Signs Project (click for PSP website or here for the PSP Facebook), except for South Hills Bowl by Dan Buczynski and Twin Hi-Way Drive-In by Corey LeChat.

For most of us, repetition is an unavoidable facet of modern life; we might even go as far as to say that it’s been like this as long as we have lived in one village or town or city.

When we were young, we craved the opposite of repetition; we wanted to travel to fifty different countries, to work in multiple professions, to have a different favorite band every week; we made friends and when they displeased us, we cast them aside for new ones.

But eventually we became disillusioned with this constant quest for change; for one thing, we weren’t making any money — even a base-level amount that would pay for food and rent — and for another, we realized that what we were running from was the thought of spending an entire life in our skin, so to speak. Once acknowledged, it was (relatively) easy to stop. Within a week or two — sufficiently chastened — we interviewed for and obtained our first “real” job.

These days, of course, we are more resigned to both the tedium and pleasure of repetition; the days and weeks and years meld into one another with barely any change at all, along with the certainty that we are nothing but mindless cogs in a huge capitalistic machine that shows no sign of ever slowing down. All of our food and clothing and toys — by which we obv mean Powerbooks and iPods — are mass-produced and identical. Our cats are both gray, and many people can’t tell them apart.

We might be more inclined to regret this state of affairs if it weren’t for the certainty that it’s also the foundation of the metropolis; and that if we were still making our clothes and food and laptops with our own hands — the way they used to do 4000 years ago — we probably wouldn’t be alive; we would have been stoned to death for the usual offenses. It’s not that we love repetition per se, but we have learned to live with it; we find interstices within these motifs — the city blocks, the windows of a skyscraper, the boxes of cereal or flocks of circling birds — in which for a few seconds we  slip away. In effect, we become anonymous; we lose all sense of self and feel the dissonant pulse of something unknown and dangerous yet artistic, destructive and creative, humbling and empowering. For these few seconds, we no longer fear death, and on some level — though obv not the most literal — even crave it.

And then we are woken up by the passage of more time or some practical necessity, at which point we return to daily life and all the longing and torment that implies.

Sometimes we try to reflect this dissonance here.

We understand that like all beauty, it’s completely subjective; and if you don’t like it, you’re always free to leave.

Ladies and gentlemen: tonight we offer you the George Washington Bridge.