Down and Out Downtown
Dispatches from September Art Adjacency
It's the first September of the rest of my life. By which I mean, it's the first September I am not going back to school. Life is a black hole of dread, and the only bridge across this chasm is attending as much Arts Programming™ as possible. If I go to enough events I need not concern myself with the changing of the seasons or the dwindling of my bank account or my nine-month sinus infection or the labor market for recent college graduates.
I ended up in Downtown a lot this month—more than I'd like. I waded through a knee-high throng of lantern flies. A pigeon asked me for a cigarette. I waited at a bus stop for 20 minutes and when the bus finally arrived it drove right past me. I also met theater critics Sara Holdren and Helen Shaw and attended TQ-Live! at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Detour at Certain Death II, Dial M for Murder at Pittsburgh Public Theater, Indignity at the Wilkinsburg Civic Arts Center, The Cultural Trust's downtown galleries, and Untitled (Art Party) at CMOA.
I did it all for you, brave reader, so that I might share some boots-on-the-ground reporting of what's what and who's who in case you too feel the creeping dread of fall.
Wednesday, September 11th
I am late.
It’s 11:58 a.m. and I think I am two minutes early, but I walk in and see the rest of Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Critical Insight fellowship cohort already lined up with laptops and pencils and sharpeners and coffee cups and I understand that two minutes early is not early enough. "Zero unread emails" energy fills the room.
We're here to meet the theater critics from The New Yorker and New York magazine and I remind myself that these are in fact two different publications—though they are both, if you can believe it, based out of New York. It's a Zoom come true.
Our session with Helen Shaw and Sarah Holden is marvelous. Blessed with the gift of gab, they balance a healthy skepticism for the industry with a profound delight for the theater. They are scared and hopeful about the future of criticism. They are scared and hopeful about the future of theater.
We discuss the thin lines between theater criticism, institutional critique, belle-lettres, and cultural criticism. While each is distinct in form and function, they all share the quality of generating no viable income—but that's never stopped anyone, and certainly not me!
They give advice to us early-career writers. It seems, as always, that the way to get ahead in writing is to write a lot. Write as much as you possibly can and then write a little more. Read as much as you can and more after that. Mimic, poach, and pastiche. Understand genre and know when it should be flipped. Have capacity to work through a central thought, bouncing the sides of the argument across a percussive series of varied, precise sentences like a pinball machine.
Friday, September 13th
For tonight’s good ol' Arts Programming™, I start out attending the party/performance/cabaret TQ-Live!, an annual celebration of queer artistry and community now marking its 10th anniversary, at Carnegie Museum of Art.
I don’t stay for the entire event, but I’m moved to tears by the odd and impossible movement of one Theo Bliss dancing, accompanied by live ambient music from GLO-TREE. When I watch Theo, I remember why I love watching dance. Their face becomes a small focused bird. The lines of their body bend and I'm shaken.
TQ-Live! is well done, and I am seriously impressed with the energies of the performers. The Carnegie Museum of Art is a lot of things to me (boss, lover, enemy, friend, employer), but one thing this building sure knows how to do is curate a damn vibe.
By 10:30 p.m., I’m leaving the museum for a trip to Certain Death II where Detour is playing. I missed their release show two months ago even though I wrote about it, so I've wanted to figure out what they're doing for a while.
We arrive and nobody's there. The music isn't necessarily bumping, at least not yet.
"This sounds like low-fi hip hop beats to study and relax to," I scream at my companions, so we head outside. We make friends searching for a lighter. The new friend informs me that, "The sex bus is gone."
"The sex bus is gone?!"
I turn around and sure enough, the decommissioned school bus proudly stocked with couches and beds is nowhere to be found. I don't even see the playpen for the men in the leather dog masks anymore. The only thing left is the giant flame in the corner that spurts at irregular intervals. Summer's really over, I think.
Saturday, September 14th
I am yet again heading downtown to Pittsburgh Public Theater, this time to go see Dial M for Murder. I arrive two minutes late because my car got stuck behind a rickshaw carrying three generations of drunk men in University of Pittsburgh gear, donning matching Pirates caps.
I wonder if all the men in Pittsburgh are secretly communicating with each other telepathically by wearing Pirates hats. This is the real neuralink we must fear, I think to myself. If I could develop a Pirates hat that announced live updates from the Pittsburgh police scanner Twitter account directly into men's brains it would make me a million dollars.
Anyway, I'm grateful for weird traffic because it gives me something to talk about during intermission when folks ask me my opinion on the play. "The play? Well, actually I saw a rickshaw on the Warhol Bridge today. I nearly missed curtain!"
The truth is, I have both too much and too little to say about Pittsburgh Public Theater's production of Dial M for Murder. The show bored me so thoroughly that even trying to describe what bored me about it makes me bored. It's a cookie-cutter, standard-issue, paint-by-numbers production—the type of theater that makes me break out in a rash and get all restless.
I imagine that this production would make a fantastic audio drama—the actors sound great, and nothing that occurs onstage feels necessary or interesting. The clarity and enunciation—technical gems of dialect work—delight me here as they would anywhere, but the relationships feel empty and the stakes seem low. The play centers around a lesbian couple and the only two women on stage act as though they have never held hands. The precision of the language, the excessive decor, and the inconsistent sound design feel like they have been overworked to mask the fundamental vapidity of the script. I only laughed once, when a man got stabbed.
I exit the theater and walk to the bus stop to begin the interminable wait for the PRT and pass by the windows of 820 Gallery. It's night and the gallery is dark, but the curtains in the window billow and beckon. I make a commitment with myself to finally go check it out.
Wednesday, September 18th
The Wilkinsburg Civic Arts Center is just as bombed-out and broken-down as I hoped it would be, and I am over the moon. Peeling paint, moist and moldy wall-to-wall carpeting, a giant freestanding cross. I'm unsure if legally we're even allowed to be in the building.
But today I’m visiting the Civic Arts Center to see where my work will be shown in an upcoming art show entitled "Indignity". I meet with Jacquet Kehm, an art handler by day and an artist-meddler-peddler by night.
We discuss the install of one of the video art pieces I am contributing. I agree to perform at their “performance night,” though what I will perform, I have no clue. I'm at the point where I'd agree to go along with just about anything provided it's interesting to write about.
Thursday, September 19th
I bravely stumble back downtown to hit the Cultural Trust's galleries. I start at 820 Gallery where I finally see “On Air,” a “long-form film depicting a collage of over 1,000 clips from films that feature wind.” The show is good, if you're into watching a 24-hour video of 1,000 clips of wind. I still found it more entertaining than Dial M. But I digress.
I appreciate the sense of humor and the simplicity of artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’s artistic investigation. My favorite detail is the anemometer—probably almost seven feet tall and striped candy-cane red and yellow, it spun and spun and spun incessantly. It’s so tall, yet so small, yet so proud, yet so silly. My anger at hauling myself downtown dissipates in the wind of the HVAC system. I leave the gallery feeling lighter.
The next stop is SPACE gallery where I see the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 110th Annual Exhibition. I post it to my Instagram with a fire emoji, because it is fire emoji. This group show, featuring 27 artists, is described as reflecting “the interplay between art and sports, activity and movement, rest and play.”
Pittsburgh has out-Pittsburghed itself with this show. Penguins, Steelers, Pirates all make an appearance. The visual language of sport gets broken to its basic materials and re-assembled into satisfying juxtapositions of hard metal surfaces and soft images, vinyl sheets and crisp photography, plastic trinkets and epic memorials.
I’m delighted to see three different video art pieces included, a healthy double dose of sculptural works, and a truly impeccable selection of painting with a variety of scale, material, and medium. But my favorite piece by far is Tony Balko's “Eternal Champion,” a sculpture of second and third place sports trophies stacked and fused on top of each other making one massive “Runner-Up” award.
The engravings at the base of the trophies age up, with kindergarten awards composing the base of the sculpture and moving through middle and high school near the top, without a single gold, without a single winning award.
While I am not an athlete I am hit with an ache and I cry. I know the feeling of stacking your achievements one on top of the other and still not feeling like you're good enough. Lately all I do is sit on my computer molding the bronze of my life into little bullet points to load into my gun and fire at employers until they hire me.
This is a major recommendation. I wish I had a Pirates hat so I could telepathically inform the sport-going public to attend.
Friday, September 20th
I close my 2-week art binge by sneaking into the Untitled (Art Party), a fundraiser for the Carnegie Museum of Art. I’m working a wedding at the other end of the building but my boss generously gives us breaks to go and scope out the proceedings. I want to know what these guests are laying down $150 a ticket for.
The CMOA website says that “guests are invited to define their own narrative.” The narrative I define is getting as many free bao buns as I can physically cram into my hand. Since I'm working, I can't drink, so I wash down the buns with a mustard-bread-cheese situation that has me sneezing clots into the Carnegie-branded cocktail napkins. I silently apologize to the font Carnegie Soft in my head as I spot heads turning towards me, curious as to who emitted the trumpeting blare.
I spot the museum education director, the museum director, and the executive director of Kelly Strayhorn Theater laughing together in the pink light, and it strikes me that not since middle school have I attended a party where I so acutely desired every single person there to like me. They all have a “zero unread emails” energy and my mouth feels dry and wet at the same time. The education director tells me that I am standing with the “gay triangle of power.” I know.
Saturday, September 21st
I miss my flight back to Maryland. So I have to go downtown. AGAIN.
The Greyhound bus is running four hours late, maybe more. The drive to Maryland is only three and a half hours.
And there I am, again, on Liberty avenue. I am crying and not because I am seeing beautiful art. I am down $180 in bus and plane tickets and I have no way to get home. I've achieved a new level of self pity, so I walk my mopey ass back to 820 Gallery so I can look at wind inside instead of outside.
I don't know why I wanted to see that piece in particular but it feels right. I sit and watch the wind on the screen in the gallery and let myself feel everything. I am homesick but I don't know where home is. Maryland doesn't feel like home, but Pittsburgh doesn't feel like home either. I don't feel at home in the art galleries, but I feel even stranger in the lobby of a theater. I see myself in the objects but feel like I'm on a different planet from the people who made them. No matter how much this city endears me, I'm not from here, and I feel constant embarrassment that the gatekeepers of the art and theater world can see right through me. Do I even enjoy art anymore or is it just a temporary relief?
I've chosen Pittsburgh, and I'm willing to go to bat for it, but I don't know if it's chosen me back.
I go to Maryland for two days and I am bored out of my mind.
I come back and decide even if Pittsburgh hasn't chosen me yet, it will. Or else!
Looking forward to this month…
If you too are feeling the creeping dread of fall, here's some events and things that can get you out of the house:
Friday, October 4th: Unblurred: First Fridays on—get this—Friday (I am particularly excited to see Sophia DiRenna's graphite works in-person at Inter, and Lucia Riffel's work at Bunker Projects!)
Saturday, October 5th: A night of readings at the Wilkinsburg Civic Arts Center (5-7:30 @ 710 Mulberry St) in support of “Indignity,” an art show, currently showing, with yeah, my work in it, so I highly recommend (plus programming October 19th, and Election day…)
Friday, October 4th and Saturday, October 5th: Though I allegedly have the aforementioned events planned during the exact time of both the performances, I am also determined to make it to Yusef Shelton’s KST Freshworks project Barbershop Talk this weekend as well. I can be in two places at once through sheer willpower.
The show features live musical accompaniment to original songs exploring the therapeutic experience of going to a barbershop. I’m not gonna lie I am obsessed with this music video to his song grateful. Just watch it and you’ll understand. Local legend.
Thursday, October 10th: Adaptation-Local Notes opens at the Tomayko foundation, with some really fantastic emerging and established artists from the area.
There's also a film screening happening October 16th in partnership with Silver Eye Center for Photography. “Moving image and sound works”—not sure how that's distinct from film—will be on display. Looking forward to this in particular, these are some really brilliant local names.
Sunday, October 6th: I am going to go see the matinee of Crocodile Fever at Barebones Productions. It is marketed as “Tarantino for feminists.” Your guess is as good as mine whether that is a good thing. Hopefully I’ll get a little bloody.
Sunday, October 13th: You can technically go see The Trees at Pittsburgh Playhouse anytime you want, but after this particular matinee there will be a facilitated conversation with playwright Agnes Borinsky and director Adil Mansoor, which I want you to go to!
Thursday, October 17th: Nearing Each Other is having its opening celebration at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Presentation of the works of Pittsburgh artists and a “curatorial toast”—whatever that means—but I loved the AAP show at SPACE gallery, so I'm excited.
Friday, October 25th: Cultural Trust GALLERY CRAWL! “Art Olympics” is happening? Fascinating.
Tons of great assorted heads doing interesting food, visuals, and music.