Though undeniably bright, there is a stark quality to the March sun that makes the phlox (and the sempervivum) seem — oddly — both luminous and bedraggled.

The silver veins of the surrounding rocks add to this quality, and for a second I dreamed I was in the mountains of _____. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever visit a desert/mountain/rain forest and think: this place looks so familiar, I have seen it in a small garden in Washington Heights.

In this post, the garden is a metaphor for the city, while the plants and rocks are elements of the past that we may or may not recognize until we see them in the present (possibly while lost, driving around in the most labyrinthian sections of Queens/Riverdale/Lower East Side circa 1988).

The Weeping Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens ‘the blues’) is one of the bluest of conifers.

Blue conifers are true beauties.

–Andy Warhol

There is a pastel hue to the sky today that I haven’t seen since ____, which makes me think that summer is approaching. It reminds me of the sky I saw not too long ago in Vienna, although there the tones were more subtle and exquisite in a way that New York cannot ever quite seem to match — probably because we are too far south — but it also reminds of the sky that I saw from this exact location last year, when I first starting paying closer attention.

It makes me look forward to the coming months, when the sun will move north — inching closer to the bridge — and each day fall dramatically behind the Palisades. Only the bridge is constant and unchanging, as if tying the past to the future, as much as one piece of land to another.

It’s often said that as you get older, time moves faster.

This is undoubtedly true, except for when it moves more slowly than it once did.

I’m reading a book by Richard Rorty,* who — unlike Plato/Kant/Schopenhauer/Freud/Jung — argues that there is no greater truth to be discovered, either inside of us or beyond us, i.e., there is no “will” or “unconscious.”

Rorty is not exactly “tween-lit” — I will probs have to read it twice to really digest — and I’m only about halfway done, so I could be getting it entirely wrong!

There is only the changing/evolving language we use to describe our circumstances. As such, two observations — seemingly contradictory — could both be entirely valid.

In effect, there is only the arrangement of books and art — the exposure of the different threads that tie things together — which he calls literary criticizzzzzzzm.

What’s clear is that he’s not an artist, but a thinker.

There is a line in the photograph that clearly divides it; one half is bathed in brilliant sunlight and the other is frozen in the shadow.

Recently — in part because of reading Rorty — I have begun to have doubts about which side I would prefer to be found.

We planted bamboo a few years ago in a cement planter we constructed along the back of our garden. The concept is that it’ll grow about 100 feet tall and block out the apartment buildings behind us.

It’s also hardy to Zone 4, which means it’s safe to -25 or something like that. (Heat and humidity doesn’t bother it either.)

We sometimes wish that we were a stand of this bamboo, so beautiful and impervious to whatever extremes the world has to offer, and which only rarely expresses its impatience by softly scratching its leaves against the surrounding walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this weekend’s City Section of The Times, we learned that the city recently tore down the only luxury condominium development in Washington Heights, located on an undeveloped patch of land under the George Washington Bridge overpass. Nestled in the trees and rock formations, the site had promised a rare opportunity for prospective buyers to own “a slice of old-growth Manhattan,” while remaining close to the “world renowned” Columbia Presbyterian hospital complex. Residents of the new development were promised “easy access” to Wendy’s “gourmet” at 165th and Broadway and all of the other incredible cultural amenities of New York City’s “most vibrant” neighborhood.  Construction had already begun, which makes the city’s actions all the more perplexing. We attended an open house a few months ago and took some shots of the units.

Lush forest shades a gently inclining approach* to the residential complex.

*ADA compliant

Constructed of sustainable-yield hardwoods and recycled stone, the cutting edge of eco-friendly living.

Hudson River views and free tennis courts only minutes away.

RIP, Wahi luxury condos///miss u, 2k6.

[HT Carla]

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.

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