Femme Symbols in Iron City

Creepy femme imagery floats through the streets of Pittsburgh like a groovy pink raincloud. BEHOLD! a cabinet of uncanny terrors!

-Disembodied ballerina body parts Hans Bellmer could get into...

-Ghostly hands with ectoplasmic manicures and lousy roses...

-Ceramic flocks of mannequin heads...

And I'm happy to report that the bloody babe performance art scene is alive and well here.

Not pictured:

-Girls in lingerie giving strawberry milk massages
-Bearded ladies burning sage and reading tarot
-A small pile of underpants expropriated from the Warhol Museum

But I'm definitely missing the inimitable women (and not-men) of Bloomington.

Abject Snacks

I get a $2 eggroll and sit outside with it somewhere in the strip. As I peel back the silver wrapper around it the tinfoil seems to hiss:
"Kill yourself."

I eat the thing.
Now its evil is inside me.

I wander around the oriental grocery. A display of flocked orange ponies flick their feathery eyelashes away. But the vacant plastic face of a five foot Hello Kitty meets me head on and whispers:
"You should be dead."

I scan my brain, rerunning my malformed morning routine. Did i take my medication today? How long has it been since I popped one of those tiny chalky chunks out of its foil-backed case?

The medication came a month overdue and in sketchy packaging, covered with a million stamps. The mailman explained that en route from India, my name had been erroneously written in the area reserved for a return address. As he handed it to me, I made a mental list of potential enemies, half-expecting to find a disembodied finger wrapped inside. I could be the butt of some horrible prank. I was relieve to find the drugs factory-sealed, probably not containing anthrax.

The root of my unhappiness is chemical, but it's definitely exacerbated by the material world. The way I keep spending money makes me hate myself.

But Abject Snacks will make me rich. Abject Snacks will be the name of my anti-foodie food blog. There, I'll document the over-salted, hot sauce drenched concoctions that happen at the end of most of my nights. I'll sell a series of cookbooks enumerating the ill-begotten secret ingredients that make the meals. I'll plaster it with filtered pix of cold fries and curry sauce from the refrigerator's depths. Sprouted grain toast from the roommate's secret stash. A squiggle of gourmet mustard.

Abject Snacks will make my problems go away.

Modern Bummerism

The Allegheny Campus in Pittsburgh is full of grim, modernist boxes. Stained concrete and gray glass. I love it. It's the historical end of the nostalgia spectrum--the ideologically righteous side of design. The rain darkened walls of the Pruit-Igoo housing complex inciting residents to violence, lashing out to assert themselves in an austere, impersonal space. It's absurd and amazing how modernist ideology in architecture backfired.

I love the stark chrome-plated sculptures in the public parks...artists unburdened by the concerns of pluralism or process art. You can just picture unsupervised kids slicing their sticky paws on the metallic surfaces.

Liquid Compass (WIP)

My joke at work is to stonily insist that I not be addressed with metaphors.

Only staggering literality for me, thank you! I've already asked you once nicely.

But in actuality I can't ignore certain symbols.

The last time he and I hang out is near the causey way at Lake Monroe, while exploring an abandoned waterslide; in a liquid, transitional space, now choked with foliage. That day, we trip through the woods, examining the remains of the Zoom Flume. I slip down the fiberglass incline and land with my boots planted in a leaf-clogged depository.

We wander around a now-rotted geodesic dome home overlooking the lake, festooned with shitty spraypaint. It's another unabashed bummer symbol, this broken utopian structure, bleakly scrawled with Juggalo bon mots. In a somewhat accusatory tone, he asks me How's my eyesight? How bout my internal compass? And has this been an average week for me?

He's referring to heavy drinking in Halloween costumes. This after I'd escorted him through his first drunken hook-up. Am I tugging this kid down a mucky ravine?

It is a relief, in a way, that he is leaving, before he finds out that I am not always nice. He's already learned today that I can not climb a tree. This hasn't been an average week; I haven't picked up a pen. I want to draw with people, to strike a balance between art making and social, to channel a solid engagement with something bigger and longer than myself. But part of me is required to court oblivion, occasionally in costume. Part of me invites in the unwelcome guest, the liquid variable, the destabilizing factor to flood where boredom might root.


(Work in progress, possibly to appear as a longer piece in the print edition of Glob, my anti-blog, forthcoming in early 2013.)