We grow up and are given a set of words that we use to communicate: ideas, places, things, ppl.

But as all of these things change — as they always do, thanks to the passage of time — words that once seemed perfect become inadequate to describe the new world in which we live.

Thus we have a choice: we can suffer with old words or invent new ones. (In this sentence, words are a metaphor for words.)

It should further be noted that the words we use or invent may or may not be applicable to anyone else.

If I can describe the infinite pieces of my life in the most beautiful and accurate way possible, why should I care if you describe yours — which is infinitely different (or not)– in the same way? Moreover, why should I care if you take bits and pieces of my language to build yours? (Note to the litigious: we are not talking about copyright law here.)

In this way, we may not agree, but we may not be in conflict, either.

As long as guns are not involved, we should be able to live in peace: you will write your book, and I will write mine.

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?

You’d be surprised how often ‘str8 bros’ write in to tell us how ‘wrong’ we are in our assertions that this or that is homophobic, that we really shouldn’t be offended by something that’s ‘not that offensive,’ that we’re actually hurting the ‘gay community,’ or that our anger is ‘misplaced.’ More than once we’ve been told that we ‘need help.’

It kind of reminds us of 100 or so years ago when various people with whom our relations had soured encouraged us to go to therapy because we were ‘so angry.’ What they couldn’t have predicted was how this process — i.e., therapy — made us understand more clearly than ever how justified our anger was, given — and here’s the irony — the offensive actions of those who had encouraged us to go.

So listen up, str8 bros: if you’re going to make a prostate-exam joke for laffs, develop an ad campaign based on the negative connotations of a man’s face in another man’s crotch (or any other similar non-heterosexual innuendo), or whatever other bullshit joke you want to make at a fggt’s expense, be our guest.

Just don’t ‘get upset’ when we call it homophobic or more-stupid-than-funny, or tell us that we have to laugh at it, or ‘understand where you’re coming from.’ And when you have failed to convince us, please don’t write to tell us your life story and how gr8 you are because you ‘have gay friends,’ or that your prostate exam made you feel as if you had been ‘kicked rlly hard in the ballz’ or had ‘the wind knocked out of you.’ Finally, please don’t encourage us to write to Andrew Sullivan to ‘see what he thinks,’ as if he were the god of all things geigh.

A question to our str8 lady friends: how do you put up with obnoxious bros who try to ‘tell you how to feel’ after they’ve insulted you?

Because mostly we want to direct these bros to the George Washington Bridge, where they can jump off and never be missed.

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).

Listen on our Tumblr or download from the Death Culture at Sea web site.

Can’t believe the things I have to say before I make it through the week
I’m feeling sicker than philosophy
I read a million useless words when I was younger then
Today I’m feeling more than slightly sleep-deprived

Abruptly I was taken back to scenes I wish I could forget
Crawling through a darkened space with hands I did not recognize
Pulling me beneath the waves
We always try to swim outside but sometimes these are heavy stones
I would not be the first to take the slide

Restaurants are open for a million-dollar meal
Sometimes it hurts to think of everything I steal

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.

Some winter mornings, we wake up and consider the rooftops of Washington Heights, where — thanks to the sumptuous pre-war architecture, the expansive breadth of the Hudson and the gentle rise of the Palisades — we are charmed by the wisps of steam that trail from the chimneys; there’s something surprisingly bucolic about the scene, as if we were watching a village in the Bavarian Alps and not the most densely populated neighborhood in the country.

And then we see this (from 38 Fort Washington Avenue, not that they’re the only offender) and remember that we live in a city that cares nothing about its poor.

There is, however, some solace to be found in the idea that nothing we can do will ever change this, and our only hope is to escape.

The oily black smoke of 100-year-old boilers disperses daily across the rooftops in Washington Heights, heedless of those who suffer from pneumonia, asthma and tuberculosis. Officials and politicians? Not even footnotes in this story, which is about the aggregation of capital and the relentless rise of the metropolis.

The Wahi Lung Cancer & Asthma Roundup!

September 29, 2007

March 20, 2008

March 21, 2008

April 3, 2008

April 11, 2008 (Special Investigative Report)

May 11, 2008

May 18, 2008

June 19, 2008

July 8, 2008

November 16, 2008

While in Vienna, we visited the Secession Building. According to Wikipedia: “The Vienna Secession was founded on 3 April 1897 by artists Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Max Kurzweil, Otto Wagner, and others…In 1898, the group’s exhibition house was built in the vicinity of Karlsplatz…Secession artists were concerned, above all else, with exploring the possibilities of art outside the confines of academic tradition. They hoped to create a new style that owed nothing to historical influence.”

Looking at this, we thought of our own garden walls and how boring they are in comparison. Now every time we look at them, we’re going to wish they were covered with the same little leaf indentations as the Secession Building.

The fonts were already mod in 1898!

For years at work, we had always dreamed of painting our office walls with designs and patterns; we were sure this would make us much more “productive.” Before we visited the Secession Building, we were never sure of the exactly what this would look like.

What if we said to our boss: do you think we could allocate some of our marketing $$ to gold paint and stencils? (Maybe if we worked at Google circa 2k6.)

Did the world always seem so prohibitively expensive? For example, it cost us $_____ just to enclose our garden with cinder block walls faced with stucco. Of course we wish we had more $$ to fritter away on useless but beautiful things like this, but don’t you h8 when you’re watching teevee and Suze Orman comes on and starts yelling at some five-year old to start saving?

“To every age its art, to art its freedom.”

We would like to tell all children to spend $$$ on their own secession building, before they’re too old and it’s too late.

We got together a few months ago with a group of our fellow artists and built our secession building under the George Washington Bridge overpass, because that was the only place we could get for under $700/sf. We too hoped to create a new style that owed nothing to historical influence. Do you think ours will last until 2108, and tourists will take shots for their blogs?

“To every age its art, to art its freedom.”

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.