PGH Pix

Here's a slideshow of residency highlights snapped from my incomparably crappy Samsung cellular phone!

New Altitudes

Acidic Vistas

Friendly Advice

Affordable Housing

Quick-Rising Infrastructure

Innovative Swedish design

Innernette

Protracted preaching to the converted:
In an impulsive spot of "guerilla advertising" I left a business card with my blog address and credentials(visual artist/mental titan) in a Chris Kraus book at the Big Idea (presumptuous, right?), only to have it discovered days later by internet poetess and performance artist, Laura A. Warman, somebody I already know and like. So much for slow media expanding social circles.

Laura, Stephanie Dax (filmmaker/well-dressed elf), Zoe McCloskey (interplanetary travel theoretician), and Gunner (comedian/playwright/author of Galloping Mountain) will be performing alongside me Saturday night at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse Writer's Showcase.

***
More favorite writers/favorite formats: Eileen Myles has created an online gallery of blurbs she has supplied for the backs of book jackets. As proven by the success of twitter poets, limited word count produces some of the best writing. Blurbs are dense nuggets of goodness, like sparkling geodes or some shit.

More Blogs about Buildings and Food

This month I've sampled some of Pittsburgh's sleaziest bars, like an Entemann's chocolate box. In today's gold doily is Rigg's, where all three of the other patrons are over fifty. The wallpaper's flocked and intricately patterned in a style ironically appropriated by more self-conscious bars. The lampshades are red and the macabre nightly news is loud, presumably to accommodate middle aged ears.
Last time I came in here to buy a six pack the soundtrack was "In my Room" by the Beach Boys and the patrons stared in a way that loudly declared me an Outsider.
You've gotta go inside to check this stuff out. The place could have a creme de menthe or cherry filling.
Offputtingly high prices ($3 a Yuengling) for how crappy Rigg's shapes up to be. I've been told there are neighborhood laws that preclude the sale of dollar beers to keep an unsavory element out of the area. This is the kind of jurisprudence that drives me into the arms of anarchist ideology, or worse, supporting my local militia. Let the invisible hand regulate the market; Let it unscrew the cap from the cold bottle of life at its leisure.
Half way into the trip my fellow drinkers start flinging change across the bar into glass receptacles. The weather's on now, calling for snow today and Saturday. One woman recounts the fun they had last year going on a snowmobile bar crawl. A lady in a puffy coat buying a pair of pounders asks if the bar will be open on Christmas. The barkeeper, an ancient woman with a beak-like nose, confirms that indeed, it will.

Everything is 100% of the Shots You Don't Take

Erin Drew
Dec 12 (7 days ago)

to whatsupeit

Hello Everything is Terrible,
I am greatly looking forward to your Pittsburgh holiday show date...but there are complications.
I'm in PIttsburgh for the month doing a writer's residency and my meager funds can't accommodate much more outside of toiling over my wretched manuscript and walking around a lot.
Is there any labor I could provide behind the scenes that could get me a discount admission rate?
Need help hauling Maguires?
Alphabetizing the youtubes?

Here's a link to some fan art of sorts on my blog to hopefully ingratiate myself.
http://extremeappearances.blogspot.com/2011/04/horn-of-plenty.html

Just thought I'd put this out there.
Thanks for considering it.
Erin K Drew


***
Post Script: NO RESPONSE!!!!

Limp

I'm getting lost less, or at least in different places. Feeling the stab of frustration in my gut of failed intuition; looking over the edge of something, seeing the totally unfamiliar- a cliff covered with bramble where I thought there'd be a skyscraper.
The route to Oakland isn't fun underdog, it's just abandoned and blighted. Boarded up storefronts of social services, crumbling concrete steps running into the hills. Just me on the streets.
I'm lonely and getting tired of exteriors. I've seen enough of the ice cream shop with the window display of paper houses. I wish the boy from the bakery with the truck that smells like cake and plays T. Rex would give me a ride somewhere.
Grating vagrancy. Sweat collects in the cuffs of my gray down coat, that Ian says looks like the one Karen Carpenter died in. I piss by the dumpster in the Strip District. The alley smells like fish. Behind me all the windows are black.

Girls' Room Graffiti

Kopec's, Pittsburgh

Green Glaze

Sick and sweet in the city. Wandering, words winding in on themselves, collapsed creative veins. Stop at a corned beef restaurant with mirrored walls and gold garlands reflecting my ratty hair. Wood studded with head shots of C-List celebrities. Morgan Fairchild's looping scrawl. Slutty handwriting. Ladies in green fringe with whiskey sours.
I run into Stephanie and Gunner going to watch the ice skaters. A glass castle on Market Street and trees clad in black leather holsters. Fake snow like the dry flakes on my donut. We pick through the frosting-smeared trash and get sticky hands.
Maybe I'll steal the plastic peace sign earrings at the cheap corner boutique, buy a pint of pissy bear. Green glass, cloudy piss. Sit at the Oyster House on the long leather booths. Directionless, I turn to absurdity.

Fake Printmaker

3-color silkscreen cobbled together at AIR, PGH for my reading at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse.
Bloomington, IN residents may recognize the signage appropriated from City Style hair salon in the Kroghetto Complex.
***

Also: The internet's a lonely planet.
Blogspot seems woefully doomed to irrelevance, and is definitely difficult to search for random writing blogs of interest. Should I get with the already fleeting times and do a Tumblr? Or head everyone off at the nostalgia pass and revive my Livejournal?

This is like the time I got really depressed after watching the Negativland documentary cuz I realized I turned to analog cut and paste methods out of poverty, not critical relevance.

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.

"Bookslut"

On vacation, reading for pleasure.

(Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism," 2012)

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.

McBarfer's Park

What I said in my letter to Matt...is trumped by the sentiment in my text to Ian: "Today Pittsburgh smells like pee and broken stuff."
I've been walking between garbage bars, intermittenly getting very fucking lost. Now so fucked up from a five mile walk that my legs wobble. Feeling like a bruised banana. I ate a cupcake I found in a smashed up box at a bus stop.
I might be dying.
What I said to Matt was that this trip might mark my unmaking. I start out as a hip but poor tourist--buying a beer here, a beer there--but wind up fucking destitute, wrapped in a nest of quilts, leaves knotted in my hair, loitering at the library indefinitely.
My mind is getting weird. I'm responding with interest to catcalls. A creepy hook-up can't be far around the corner.
I'm not sure if I believe in vibes, but I bet if I'm giving any off...that they're bad.
This depressive spike might be a chemical pendulum swing from yesterday's pot brownie. Wherein I merely lay crumpled on a stranger's couch at 3 am, mind racing, so horny I wanted to throw up.
If you believe in ghosts, pray for me.
If you're more practical, send mail and/or money:

EKD
1200 Boyle Street
Pittsburgh PA 15212.

Anxiety Cut-Up (with Anna Kavan)

I'm in residence in Pittsburgh at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse, indulging my whims. Today I attempted a Burroughs-style cut-up with an existential excerpt from my journal and a selection from "Ice," by Anna Kavan, a bleak surrealist novel I'm currently reading. I took the liberty of changing some tenses and inserting punctuation.

***

Knowing that there's just no good reason, the wearer's head was uncovered: her bright hair shimmered though thoughts all march toward the same destination. She had come too far and must hurry back. By night in the dark forest, fear was the climate she lived in, and metaphysical matters- psychic energy and the 9000 days she'd been alive--hurried on as fast as she could.

If she has ever known kindness to fall down, evolutionarily unwriting once became really frightened, terrified of being overtaken like silver fire, chain breaking prevented menace. The crowding trees unnerved her, of non-control in the universe. She said eleven Hail Mary's a day--glimmering in the forest. She feels better.

For your occupation of Planet Earth, for the fjord, failed to see it, lost her bearings and self. I shouldn't be alive. It's a dangerous hole, shutting her in. It was late, after sun, or it's an experiment. It would have been different.

After completing this task, nothing will happen, which always seemed full of obsession, anxiety, and "vibes." Something else from thought patterns. I think I try to prevent myselves into black walls, set. She said if she was nervous the conjecture is that in the deepening dusk every horror could be expected.

Resident

I am stoked to announce that I've been selected as the December Writer-in-Residence at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse cooperative in Pittsburgh! I blogged briefly about their Mr. God's Galloping Mountain Variety Show as one of my audiovisual highlights of 2011. Glob speed the plow!