Pittsburgh: Sculpture, Macedonian wedding music, outsider art, and baseball

Cindy and I spent whirlwind weekend in Pittsburgh with our son, Patrick, and his wife, Jamie Agnello, both of whom have embedded themselves in the city's rich art scene. He in music, she in theater, voice work, and more.

After they finished up work on their day jobs on Friday, we went to hear Patrick's quartet play at the Con Alma jazz venue. 

The next night we went to the workshop of James Simon, a well known Pittsburgh sculptor, who hosted an unusual musical event in the courtyard next to his workshop, which is filled with finished and somewhat finished works.

The music was by Bombici Akustic, which performed festive tunes from the Balkan region (description here and here). It featured Ben Opie on the soprano saxophone, Rich Randall on tapan (a Macedonian outdoor drum), Andrew Hook on sousaphone, Colter Harper on guitar, and Patrick Breiner on the C melody saxophone. 

The music has complex time signatures in measures of 7, 9, and 11 rather than our more familiar 2/4 or 3/4. 

Both Colter and Rich are ethnomusicologists. Colter taught at the University of Pittsburgh and now at the University at Buffalo, while Rich teaches at Carnegie Mellon.

 

On Sunday we took in a Pirates-Mets game at PNC park. It was pretty hot. The game went four hours. I've seen the Pirates play at the old Forbes Field in the 1960s, Three Rivers Stadium in the 1970s, and now the new PNC Park.

PNC Park. A fan who remembers one of the Pirates greats.

 

On the way to the ballpark, we walked through Randyland, a quirky art museum, and had a chance to have a bit of a conversation with the unique Randy Gilson, who has created an outdoor museum of found objects and has transformed many of them into colorful shapes. 

Randy is all about collecting the objects we manufacture through mass production and then throw away. He puts them into a context that makes you notice these objects and their potential for artistic expression. The museum itself is one of those old things (a building) in the old part of town that might have been torn down and thrown away.

Randy has restored this house in his own unique style. The outdoor museum is in the lot alongside.

This video captures a lot of the flavor of the museum.

We also visited the Frick Museum. Great stuff by Rubens, Fragonard, and others. They had a display with the history of women's fashions for sports. 

I also liked their Car and Carriages Collection. 

Pittsburgh is a pretty cool town.

The year I spent in the darkroom

My darkroom experiences came back to me recently in a dream filled with anxiety. Not bad enough to be a nightmare. Just bad enough to recall an uncomfortable feeling of things not going quite right. And I felt like it was all my fault. 

In my dream it seemed as though I was trying to develop a roll of film in my homemade darkroom, and failing. All the workarounds and all the cheapo rube-goldbergian improvisations I had devised made me feel ashamed. Why had I created this half-assed darkroom. Why had I settled for this. This isn't a sordid tale. Just a small mystery.

I woke with that uncomfortable feeling of some unfinished business. Actually, I had improvised that crude darkroom in the unused shower stall in the basement of our house in 1966. And I really hadn't given it much of a thought for more than 50 years. In the dream world, one image conjures up another. People and events merge and divide. And the memories we create are for stories we tell ourselves. They may not have much to do with reality.

What led me to outfit a darkroom? It began when a sophomore classmate told me about the photography club at St. Ignatius High School. The school had a darkroom on the top floor of the old classroom building. A biology teacher, Mr. Flynn, was showing students how to develop film, just like private detectives did in the movies. With only a red light to work by, they would put a blank piece of paper in a tray of liquid, swish it around, and an image would appear. Cool. Could I learn to do this?

At 15, I was impatient and impulsive. The first skill we had to learn under the tutelage of Mr. Flynn was how to thread a roll of undeveloped film onto a stainless steel spool.

He had us practice with rolls that had already been developed. We tried it first in the light and then in total darkness. Any light would mar the images preserved on the film. You had to squeeze the edges of the film and guide it into the spool so the edges fit into the slots. The flat surface could not touch itself at any point or it would spoil the development of the negatives. I couldn't get the hang of it. This short video shows how you had to do it. We didn't have YouTube. I eventually took the easy way out and bought a plastic spool whose hubs rotated in opposition to each other so that the film advanced onto the spool via friction with the outside edges. But that was later.