BRADDOCK

About 4 miles south of where we live in Wilkensburg is Braddock, a once-thriving steel town that with the demise of the mills found it’s population dwindle down to somewhere under 3,000. From the right angle Braddock looks like another riverside mill town, busy, determined, salt of the earth. Yet it’s really something of a strange and beautiful artifact, a post-apocalyptic vision with blocks of empty storefronts, filled with the remains of their occupants, collapsing in on themselves with their own sad neglect. So bleak is the impression it’s small wonder the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had some filming done here. Unless otherwise informed, one could easily overlook it’s hidden history of French-India war battles featuring the future president George Washington and the country’s first Carnegie library, complete with empty basement pool that once hosted splashing aquatic enthusiasts. It’s a haunted place, of memories and people who once tread it’s sidewalks in happier more economically viable times, where now it’s no surprise to see a drug deal or feel the urge to stay away as night falls. Now artists have moved in, promoting a revival through art and the promise of cheap studio space, and their work pops up in hidden places, like the plastered image by Brooklyn-based artist Swoon who's done some work here. The same library mentioned above hosts a dedicated ceramic studio in it’s former public bathhouse, and the two enthusiastic gentlemen who run it are active participants in the ceramic water filtration project promoted by Potters For Peace, manufacturing these simple, effective devices for shipment throughout the world. Braddock demands repeated visits and a closer look.

THE BARN

UNTITLED

BLOOD IS HARD TO BURN

HALLOWEEN

For a city filled with as many churches as it has, Pittsburgh takes it’s Pagan rituals rather seriously. Our Regent Square neighborhood alone was filled with enough house parties and Trick or Treaters to make a horrified Evangelical think the end times were on their way. Even the police, who cruised the streets from 6-8 for a little oversight, provided a strange soundtrack to this memento mori that's my aboslute favorite holiday of the year.

FILM PORTRAITS

It being the Season of the Witch, I’m tending to watch more horror films these days, courtesy the low rental fee of our local Red Box crap dispenser just up the street. Movies this issue (from top): Halloween (not crap) Trapped Ashes (crap), and Day of the Dead (poo).

LAURA HEIT

Most of two short pieces by the wonderfully wonderful artist Laura Heit from last weekend’s rather mixed Black Sheep Puppet Festival at the Brew House Association on the South Side. While Heit’s performance was all the things experimental theater should be: engaging, stimulating and absolutely entertaining, much of what we saw seemed haphazard and something of a shambles. We walked out after enduring enough of one excruciating performance that hardly featured much puppetry at all.

HALLOWEEN HOUSE

Over on the South Side is a magical place where all your very special Halloween dreams can come true. The price of admission is merely YOUR SOUL!

SWEEPING CHANGES

Taking another break from all that naughty yelling he does, our neighbor gets busy. Perhaps the most touching part of this tender event is when he takes the rubbish from the lawn and throws it into the street, which I guess for some is just one big fucking dust bin.

A FOREST

Somewhere in the Ohiopyle park.

FILM PORTRAITS

I’ve made a deal with myself to draw every day and my method is to stop whatever film I’m watching and draw directly from a still. There’s no real resemblance to whom these renderings are supposed to be representing, but there’s something to be said about the practice of practice to get any results at all.

MOVEMENT

It was a few weeks ago, the end of summer. There was water in my camera, and we were heading somewhere on a very warm day. Seems so long ago. I made the music for something else but it seemed to work just fine for this.

HOUSE

The apartment just turned a hundred this year. It’s something like a perfectly preserved time capsule and aged to perfection. Residuals from the previous tenant are everywhere, accumulations of some other life.

NACHT MALERIE

A long walk home after a movie, spooky nocturnal settings and a bike light.

NIGHT GALLERY

Unseasonably warm weather came through last weekend, the evenings were sultry, with a thick haze hanging in the air. I took a walk after midnight.

ANDY WARHOL, ROBERT FORSTER,
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, ETC.

Last Friday evening we went down to the Warhol Museum for an intimate evening of music. The gallery was open late so we had around an hour to take in some of the work of Andy and other featured artists. Andy is always inspiring, not just for the volumes of ideas he brought forth, but also for the seemingly endless energy he dedicated whatever he was creating, even if he was taking amphetamine to stay up all night doing it. His early illustrative commercial work in NYC has inspired countless contemporaries, which is just another reminded it’s truly impossible to do anything original with scores of other artists who carved out the path decades and decades earlier.

With Grant McLennan’s death a few years ago, I would have never thought I’d get the chance to see Robert Forster perform again, the last time in Seattle with the two of them together, a few months before Grant passed. Much has been said of Forster’s difficulty in losing his musical soul mate and reticence to perform Go-Betweens material. He has a new solo album out, The Evangelist, much of it dedicated to the emotions he’d been going through since, and couple of previously unrecorded tracks he co-wrote with Grant. It’s gentle, understated, thoughtful, a beautiful tribute. He played a few of these cuts at the end of the show along with a couple of Go Betweens songs, nothing Grant would have done vocals on for obvious reasons.

The first hour was a charming, if not rough-around-the edges-series of covers to The Velvet Underground, complete with a rather silly rear-projected film by Andy Warhol of VU members milling around The Factory circa 1960-something. Forster, the ever-refined and debonair rocker, along his band featuring long-time bassist Adele Pickford, were a little wobbly at first but pulled it together about halfway into things, just barely drowning out some trio of asshats off to the side who wouldn’t stop talking through most of the set.

After the show Cara and I chatted up their young Aussie drummer who was excited about going to NYC, but lamented all the driving they were doing in the meantime. It was an inexpensive, intimate (120 person seating limit), somewhat magical evening, the sort of thing that’s made Pittsburgh a perfect place to reside.

THE GROUNDSKEEPER

If he's not too busy yelling and cursing at his wife, our fascinating neighbor Andy, leaves his place in front of his television and takes shear to hedge in this thrilling episode of Life In Pittsburgh.

FRICK PARK

It’s taken me over a week to finally leave the apartment and visit, a short ten-minute walk to this vast 600-acre jewel that runs in a small ravine southwards towards the Monongahela River. A brief hike to the bottom and all urban sound dissolves, you’re removed from the city, as if our neighborhood could ever really feel that urban with all its trees and insect melodies. These forests are filled with busy little dramas most people are probably unaware of as they jog the paths or walk their dogs. The small world rewards investigation.

NEW HOME

We moved again, out of our peaceful yet raunchy sublet and into a placid, permanent address. It’s technically a borough called Wilkensburgh, so we’re not even in Pittsburgh proper anymore. It’s a huge place, with hardwood floors and almost perfectly preserved from the last aged tenant who died a few months ago. I used to think I’d be up for a life where I was always uprooting and traveling from place to place, working wherever for short stretches of time. The truth is at some point the human body, mind and spirit has to stay put somewhere for awhile, things need time to reconfigure, restore. Otherwise you’re just an entity floating around and where you’re at any given time is impossible to know, and impossible for it to know you.

ALLEGHENY CEMETERY

More impressions from this wonderful place.

CEMETERY GATES

We took our bikes to the North Side today to the Science Center to see the Titanic exhibit, a production I’d seen a larger version of years ago, this one a bit smaller and oddly sterile. On our way home through the Lawrenceville neighborhood we decided to take a route uphill through the sprawling Allegheny Cemetery on the East Side, an eerie, beautiful thing full of beauty and wildlife. Along with a Great Blue Heron and flocks of Canadian Geese, we witnessed two small groups of deer foraging around the sprawling family plots, oblivious to what was underfoot, as if they cared if they knew.

HIT THE POLE

Whilst riding my bike in East Liberty I heard the unmistakable collision of heavy metal on wheels. It’s a sickening sound unlike any other, and instantly creates fascination. I was about a half block away and immediately headed toward the scene, obviously something was seriously wrong rather and I was rather amazed that not a single other person in my immediate vicinity made any attempt to put one lousy foot forward to investigate. An older man was in the car on the pole and slowly getting out, I asked him if he was OK and all he said was the other car came out of nowhere. Luckily there was a medical professional in the crowd to attend to him, so I called 911 and was put on hold for at least five minutes when a firetruck arrived just as they took my call. The other driver, a woman, was trying to get a witness, and unbelievably seemed like she was having some difficulty getting someone to come forward. In fact, with all the attention the older man was getting, it appeared nobody was even bothering to ask how she was. Her car was in pretty good shape considering, but she said the same thing the other driver did, the guy came out of nowhere. I wonder how you sort something like that out without witnesses. Whose word gets taken?

MORE HIGH-BROW CARNEGIE MATERIAL

Had a chance to wander over near the dinosaurs where this incongruous installation was resting on the third floor.

LIFE ON MARS

Like some love affair you never get over, I was a bit afraid to be away from my dear Metropolitan Art Museum or new friend MoMA, left alone in Pittsburgh to fend for art amongst the raw expressions of youth and rough gallery spaces. Life On Mars, the Carnegie Art Museum’s 55th annual international easily dispelled such silly kid fears. Major cities tend to get the focus for large curated events, and being in New York I was somewhat spoiled, skipping or dismissing shows for whatever reason, knowing something just as large and unruly would come along I could hem and haw about having enough time to see. Never take what you love for granted, it can be taken away from you in a moment’s notice.

To be honest, we actually arrived at the Carnegie Musuem complex intending to see the Titanic exhibit, only to find that particular complex was located elsewhere in town. I purchased a membership as an act of conviction, and it’s a hell of bargain for $100, which includes four museums, Art: Science, Natural History and the Warhol.

Cool spacious interiors of museums on hot summer afternoons are not to be taken lightly. We stayed put and went to the international. Eventually I would have found this out, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Mike Kelly and David Shriegley while falling head over heels for Matthew Monahan’s tremendous foam and mixed media sculptures. Thomas Hirschorn’s eerie artificial cave or cardboard, foil, tape and other media has got to be the high point for most given how spacious and interactive it is, even if they can’t make sense of it.

It’s a huge show, and in all honesty most of the time I prefer overwhelming, when it comes to art there’s satisfaction too much. Thank god for the robber barons.

GARFIELD ARTWORKS

Nondescript and two doors down from Kraynicks on Penn Avenue, Garfield Artworks is yet another reminder why I moved here, small independent venues whose cheap ($7) all-ages shows guarantee a reasonable bed time. Initial impressions however were something of a lopsided amusement, and proper fluid intake was a essential. Opener act Salieri’s long, droney riffs could have found no shame in misplacing their vocals and moving on as an all-instrumental outfit, but it was the spectacle of Autumn Leaves which made for some satisfying schadenfreude in an otherwise unbearable unventilated environment. Mercifully their first and last show, the entire fucking universe seemingly working against them, it was probably no fault of Manny The Soundman who by all appearances was doing the best he could with the raw, steaming materials heaped on the stage. It was one of those tragic things where by listening to the impromptu jams between songs it became obvious the players should have performed in a different genre altogether rather than forcing shit through a straw.

Parachutes, the headliner from Iceland, had mistakenly been billed on fliers with Jonsi the lead singer from Sigar Rós as a member. While Iceland’s like any other country in the quantity of shitty music it can produce, there is that one small faction of Múm’s and Sigur Rós’s and SeaBear’s (who I wanted to profile years ago for that redundant little magazine Resonance, always excessively absorbed in some unethical idea of Seattle fashion) that with the right signifiers guarantee some kind of satisfying experience even in a small, dehydrating space. So even with the scary recap of the previous debacle, once it all gelled the next hour or so was a kind of torpid, otherworldly experience with a lovely ensemble and bass player I had a hard time taking my eyes off of.

NIGHT GALLERY

Scenes from around the house in the wee hours of the night. Heths Way in back is particularly creepy in a comforting kind of way.

HIGHLAND PARK POOL

Just a short bike ride from the Garfield neighborhood we’re staying in, it didn’t take long to become a regular. Some bird took a shit in it during open swim the other day and the lifeguard calmly explained to one rather irate individual who wanted the pool closed and cleaned “If it isn’t human fecal matter there’s nothing we can do about it.” I swam once swam in the sea near Puerto Rico after a sewer main had busted and green foam was washing up on shore. I just swam through it to the clear areas and did just fine, even had a nice breakfast afterwards.

TEMPEST

Every other day or so some stormy thing hits in the afternoon.

MIGRATION

About a week ago we left New York City and moved to Pittsburgh. It’s safe to say the process has been going on for about a year with various exploratory trips to cities on the East Coast: Providence, Savannah, Athens, Chapel Hill, Asheville, with nothing really hitting us the way we hoped. We even thought Berlin, Germany might be an option, and our recent trip—in spite of my horrible sojourn into Pneumonia—seemed a long shot with no knowledge of Deutsch and a ridiculously week dollar that would have rendered any work from the States absurd. Tremendous city though.

It was a trip about two months ago to Pittsburgh, a long drive on a short weekend that had us sold pretty much the moment we arrived. The combination of quiet, shady streets filled with affordable, spacious housing, manageable size, a nationally-rated level of liveability and a remarkable warmth and friendliness of its people that called to us in the weeks after we had left.

The clincher in all this was we lost the New York studio and had only weeks to vacate. Neither of us wanted to go through the ridiculous hassle of looking for housing in a place we would never make enough money to really afford to live comfortably. I’d had absolutely zero luck in landing a full-time job in any book publishing situation whatsoever, and having been freelancing for the better part of two years I had gone what my illustrator-friend Leela Corman termed “Feral.” There was little hope in me really ever feeling comfortable in an office, the corporate culture had little appeal to me and my brief forays working production for the New York Time’s Sunday and T Magazines were the closest I’d ever felt happy being in a large building where the windows didn’t open, not to mention they had a great cafeteria and café.

We lamented the fact that New York had so much to offer but the energy required to continue living there seemed to take more than it gave. It was surprisingly hard to make friends in a city with so many people, but the fact was this wasn’t the New York we had hoped it would be. Rising costs and the superficial nature of life there made me feel alien to myself. As much as I loved it in my own way, it was a relationship that was not meant to be, at least at this time.

So we moved forward with our departure, said goodbye to those we knew, which was wrenching considering how long it took to establish those relationships. Once we got to packing there was no going back, and within a week boxed up, renting a truck, and with the help of my dear friend, the gifted actor Patrick Husted, we loaded up the Penske and got out of town.

Preparations were made in advance to stay in a sublet for three weeks until the beginning of September, and so here I sit outside tonight on the gigantic porch of a lavishly spacious though somewhat funky brick home in the Garfield neighborhood. Insect sounds fill the night, a whirring, clicking, buzzing, chirping chorus I hadn’t heard in ages. In many ways it’s much like coming back to the Chico, the town I went to college for, somewhat rural, filled with neighborhoods of various distinguishing characteristics, and though far from perfect I feel as if my body and spirit are starting to feel right sized again. For the past two years I had been confined to a standard of personal freedom New York imposed on me without my consent, though I eventually capitulated to. I’m filling up space once more, and space is filling up me.

The days have been idyllic: coffee and vegetarian food at The Quiet Storm Café; frequent trips to Kraynicks, a local bike shop that offers free use of its facilities and tools where I’ve been repairing two vintage three-speed bikes bought before leaving and long; long daily swims in a lovely 50m outdoor pool a ten-minute ride away in Highland Park. Work is already steady, and the evenings, lulling in their nocturnal activity, have re-energized my creative mind. I’m worrying less and feel anxiety slipping away. Since the house is temporary we’ve been looking for more permanent housing, having found something today that’s huge and unique in the Regent Square neighborhood for a mere $700 a month. No brokers or finders fees either. I’m also getting used to riding a bike again, something I’ve oddly been estranged from for some time. My ass is sore from it and it feels like something well earned, riding all over this place I’ve seen such a small fragment of so far.

CURTAINS

Streaming sunshine on pink plastic vinyl lasting only moments.

KID

After eating dinner on the steps of the statue in Columbus Circle on a lovely and lively Sunday evening, I started filming a some manic bike-riding child in a ridiculous jester’s hat going round and round through the crowd; his mother doing nothing to control him, the situation a seeming invitation for misfortune. Sure enough as irony gets what it wants, once we were ready to leave I wasn’t paying attention to where I was, and the little fucker ran right into my knee with his front wheel, then went sprawling onto the ground. He was fine, my knee was a mess, and the parents sitting nearby could have cared less.

DOGS

Normally I don’t pay much attention to professional dogwalkers, but this guy was working some serious voodoo on the kids. Totally worth a look.

CART

Whenever I feel like complaining about work or how hard it is to make a living, all I need to do is see one of these guys to flick the OFF switch on that bullshit.

FIRE

Some kind of disturbance on the block seemed a lot more exciting than it actually was, though one of the firemen actually saved a cat.

GLAUCOMA

Some Palm Springs hotel shots from a couple months back from while there for Coachella. With my Canon SD950 it's almost impossible to get a blurry shot on purpose, and I've resorted to some sort of mystical, impossible-to-repeat set up using the macro feature that somehow tricked the autofocus. It's a nice technique with the right subject, and this retro establishment had a dreamy melancholy that evoked a sort of fictitious memory.