3 posts tagged “pittsburgh”
it is a pittsburgh art-blog. when john invited me to post, he asked for stories about "urban life about town" here in pittsburgh. it took me forever to articulate exactly what material i am going to post. but it is definitely the complexity with which i experience pittsburgh: its patchwork of neighborhood, its layers of communities self-sorted by gender, race, sexual orientation, class, religion, and generation.
there is a tendency for people to articulate place only in terms of their own use of that place. when so many different people with so many different backgrounds tread the same streets, one place is no longer one place.
i want the america i live in to be one that can tolerate its own actual reality. there is a particular kind of psychological violence in the perpetuated illusion of a homogeneous "american" culture. frankly, the childlike illusion of safety in sameness (of consumables, of skin color, of religion) needs to be discarded.
blogging from the complex reality that there are as many worlds as there are individuals should be an interesting challenge. there are so many amazing and interesting perspectives, so many individual belief structures and points of friction (or not) between them. what glue is there besides the convenience of location that holds us together as a culture? what are our points of connection?
on current, with commentary
A nonlinear map of the echoes of loss still ringing through the greater Pittsburgh area, via images of Braddock and stories I've collected since I moved here in 2002.
Pittsburgh documentary filmmaker Chris Ivey has been making documentaries about the 'revitalization' of East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh for the last three years. He just released the trailer for the second segment and it looks to be as interesting as 2006's East of Liberty.
