by Chris Conroy
Starlight Park, the Bronx, circa 1921. G.G. Bain Collection
Thanks to all those high school missions into the Bronx for weed, I find Crescent Ave in a snap. Clockers are leaning up the huge rusted gates that surround what I guess are the basketball courts; to my right, directly across from the gates, is number 612. I circle the block a few times in hopes of finding a parking spot, but all I really do is stir up the dealers, so I double park Mike’s Jeep in front of 612. To play it safe, I secure the club and hit the hazards, but before I’m halfway out the door I’m confronted.
Read More →
by Ben Nardolilli
Times Square, 1943. John Vachon. Office of War Information.
This rain, is it even
Rain? This rain is water
Hanging itself, precipitation
Suicide, a survey, a taste,
The perfume of the clouds,
This rain is not heavy,
Like gnats and flies,
Wet swarming, a dark
Bag of diamonds, a confusion
For the meteorologists,
What to call this weather,
What icon to slide it by,
What are the weatherpeople
Supposed to say? This rain unable
To even give Noah a slight case
Of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Read More →
Scrubbing Bubbles. 2009, 24” x 28”, oil on canvas.
“The themes I explore in my paintings, commodities and currency, serve as social connectors, embodying universal qualities. I create totemic images that reveal the fetishizing nature of capitalist economies. My work battles the hegemony of the commodity, and the economic order that has made this state of affairs possible.”
Read More →
by Peycho Kanev
Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928
I can’t see anything but wasted faces,
broken bodies, tired souls and as I walk
in the morning to my job
the streets seem full of ghosts.
oh these factories sucking slowly our lives
away and all those guillotine-jobs killing our
precious time.
I am ready to start my live all over again but
on what price?
who’s going to fight for me this time?
I’ve lost all my battles against the existence
against all the factory owners
against all odds.
and later in my room
I turn on the TV and they show me how to become
A millionaire,
easy.
I turn it off
and lay in the bed and I know
that all our heroes have been wrong:
the dark is empty.
Read More →
by Gary Beck
Jack E. Boucher, 1974, Library of Congress
“I didn’t go back for twenty years.
What a change, citizens.
I had lived in Germany,
walked the ruins of World War II,
saw defeated ghosts of the Vaterland,
heard the laments of destruction,
met a madman, crooning for the lost “Fuerher”, rushing crazed through Stuttgart streets, chanting:
‘The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.
The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.’
What does this have to do with the Bronx?”
Read More →
by Gint Aras
Karolis Gintaras Žukauskas
I swear right now that everything your gonna read in here happened 100% true. Cauze when I used to look back at all this crap that went down with me, sometimes I wouldn’t even believe it myself. I used to trip a lot on shrooms and acid, plus get high off weed or hash in weird places which can mess up how your ass remembers shit. (Though shrooms can help you with other stuff, but I’ll tell you about that later.) The thing is, when you start writin’ down a story from your life, it totally makes you sort shit out, so I’ll admit I’m doin’ this to understand what the fuck happened myself. Still, for anybody who wants to read it, it’s a real good story even though there’s parts in here that get kinda wigged.
Read More →
