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.

Baseball at Nationals Park in Washington, sacred sites in Mexico

I was two days too late to see the Nationals´ new phenom, Steven Strasburg, in his major league debut, in which he struck out 14 batters and created national buzz.

Thursday night was just another bad night for Pittsburgh, as the Nationals
beat the Pirates 4-2, and completed a three-game sweep.

What I like about baseball in person is the space reserved for the game. A ball park and the diamond it contains have a kind of perfect beauty and orderliness that the messy reality of daily life does not. The simple rules of the game -- and this is true for any game, including soccer -- create a ritualized form of reality, a more ordered version of it, in which what men and women do can affect the way the world turns.

Today´s athletes are heroes in that they act out our myths and beliefs about life, and because they have replaced the gods. Mexican wrestling matches have this kind of mythic battle of good vs. evil, gringos vs. Mexicans, etc. (See the next entry on this blog.)

When you explore archeological sites in Mexico, most of them have a ball court where a game resembling soccer was played. The game had a sacred significance, but it is also true that people played the game for fun.

The ball court at Montealban in Oaxaca, which we visited in December.

Supposedly Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor defeated by Cortez, would strap on his belt and play with his nephews for fun.

At some sites, evidence suggests that the losers of a ball game were ritually sacrificed.

No one was sacrificed after the Nationals-Pirates game, but they were subjected to press interviews. Basically the same thing.



I´m in DC and Boston for a few days, training Knight Journalism fellows and getting some training myself.