Signs.

There are two primary qualifiers for the great American city.  The first is the presence of decent Ethiopian food.  I like Ethiopian food, I'm not nuts for it.  Probably why I find it such a reliable indicator, that in its failure to arouse me personally it still manages an emissarial statement.  The second is that of at least one annual birthday dance party honoring Morrissey.  

Pittsburgh, I learned today, qualifies on both terms.  

Lately I've found the signage of this city curious.   The first example concerns our annual birthday party honoring Morrissey.  Among the selling points of the bash, listed first in fact, is 'Fresh Pastries.'  But then at some point after the sign was posted--the copy I saw was posted in the vestibule of Brillobox, 'Delicious Pastries' had been crossed out.  Barring either a myopic act of vandalism or an equally bizarre tribute band named 'Delicious Pastries' I had to conclude that there was a falling out between the venue and the baker, or between the party-thrower and the baker.  Or perhaps between the three of them.  It amused me to imagine--whatever the cost to actual human emotion, the fraught exchange, the revoking of baked goods, and finally, the revised notion of a Morrissey dance party with no baked goods, as had been promised.  Even bakers have problems.  But in the end we all stand to gain from celebrating Morrissey's birthday.  Here's hoping they patch things up in time.

$$$

The other rash of signage I mention touches on a sensitive subject here in Bloomfield:  three slain police officers.  Before I come off glib let me, for the sake of all due respect, say that officers Eric Kelly, Stephen Mayhle and Paul Sciullo III died valiantly on Saturday April 4th of this year, killed by an enthusiast of the Second Amendment and outspoken opponent of our Zionist state.  Infamy being a kind of fame only vaguely--and I'd say imperceptibly, dimmer in apprehension I'll refrain from repeating his name.  Sufficed to say the community has, as the saying goes, come together in the face of it.  There was a service up the street with bagpipes and a choir.  I took Ella for a walk and watched the procession.  I wrote to my parents, and recall a sense of grief I had not felt for fallen law enforcement since September 11th.

In the time since the shootings I've witnessed a distressing proliferation of flyers papers nearly every store front along Liberty Avenue.  It started with one that appeared, as do candidate election placards in regular distribution.  But over the weeks more personalized ones have popped up--a barbershop down the street posts seven--and a sandwich board.  The message, though given to slight variation consists of three basic tenets:  we show gratitude; we remember (vigilantly staving off the abnormality that is a forgetful mind); and we take single-faith comfort in knowing the slain police officers are with God now.  Several businesses have taken to peddling "Fallen Heroes" bracelets.  They're $2.00 each.  

There really is no way to segue through to my point now without coming off as a cynical, aloof collegiate liberal.  So fuck it.  The fact is these signs, these advertisements and souvenirs have become highly distressing.  They fetishize the grief, ignore the very valuable banalities of living, but most importantly they trivialize the world of death that surrounds just these isolated three.It s a funeral that refuses to end--an abnormality.  What began as personal expressions of grief and gratitude for honorable service has turned into a drone loop masking several unsettling elements of the crime and how it affects the community below its surface.  

First, when not mourning slain police officers many of us, to varying degrees of course, live in fear of them.  It makes the slayings no less tragic, and in fact as cop-fearing citizens many of us reveal our unconditional sympathies in just such moments.  We too were moved to great sadness.  The deferment of our fears has lasted nearly as long as the fundraising efforts. 

Another aspect of this incident which has been obscured is the poor custodianship we have, on so many levels, made of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  As a gun-owner myself it wasn't until the Cheney-Bush Administration's Department of Homeland Security was instituted that the real impetus for this provision was felt in earnest.  Til then I just took it as an outdated entitlement to personal and organized defenses against the government (which it is) misused to ensure unstable persons will, on principle alone, be able to buy dangerous weapons (which it does).  I remain convinced that the Amendment is valuable to individual freedom.  But the all or none approach, as this incident bears out does not work.  Furthermore the one-sided focus on the victims is an unjust distraction from a great problem: The criminal element responsible for, and Constitutionally enabled in, the commission of these heinous acts.

I overheard a wingnut on the radio lay the blame on the police dispatcher for not giving proper advanced warning to the doomed officers.  Imagine the firestorm had air traffic been blamed for 9/11 as opposed to, you know, the terrorists.   

And you know I don't do myself any favors by writing things like that:  There are columnists and comedians who do it much better than do I, more articulately and fearlessly, with firmer insights into the framing legislation and debate.  But Jesus Christ, the signs.

So it is with a confessional heart and the sincerest desire to get off the burning path into the cool spring grasses of inconsequence that I come to the photograph included above.

Seen in the tableau are a bag of wheat flour, a bottle of Angostura bitters, a photograph of Truman Capote taken in the 1950's by, I believe Arnold Newman--or maybe Irving Penn, and in the foreground a plastic bottle of distilled white vinegar wearing an ill-fitting stopper.  You see, last night as I sat watching It's All Fair Weather at Gooski's with Dave & Sarah,  John, the bartender uncorked a bottle of Blanton's bourbon.  The cap is a  pewter racehorse--perhaps a subliminal emblem for its complementary effect on the mint julep, sitting atop a real cork stopper.  On removing it John said, 'I always tell myself to hold onto these.  But what would I do with them?'.  So I grabbed it, knowing I would wake up to find my hoodie pocket smelling of (a better brand of) bourbon the next morning.  So I awoke and so it did, and so it still does.  Somewhere in my reasoning too was the idea of creating a momentary piece of art in which the stately stopper was tucked into a cheap bottle of no real consequence.  King for a day.  There you have it.  I made good, but the effect, even I have to admit, is kind of poor.  I suppose there is some fabulous consolation in that I tried.  

Truth be told I discarded the stopper after snapping off the picture.  And I suppose that when all other messages of expression fail they succeed at least in lighting the end.

Update:  It's Delicious Pastries not Fresh Pastries.  Delicious Pastries.  They're a band.  Kinda sounds like they're in the wrong line of work.  I regret nothing.

Time machine.

Bo Bartlett-Young Life (American contemporary)


Say the money just ain't what it used to be
Man how we used to tear apart this town
Put a dollar into the machine and you'll remember how
-M, Ward, 'Post-War'

There have been good jukeboxes before in this civilization. Even a few comparably great ones--the Mom's jukeboxes in Philadelphia spring to mind--3 between two locations, each finely tuned to suit the room, each impossibly good. I like Grumpy's in Minneapolis, The Grog Shop's in Cleveland. But the Gooski's jukebox is something else. It feels like a tv show that's been on the air all my life, with characters coming and going. Some of them reappear after years of absence. A few were there when I first tuned in and have remained. What distinguishes it from so many others is how so many people have put their mark on it. Originally it was, I imagine, Marcus, who filled it. He's the one who changes it. But over time Bob and John put in. I got a few numbers in it myself--no one's particularly happy with my hidden Lil Wayne tracks. I imagine there are others as well who have found their way in.

An acrid book could be written on the subject of the tunes that should never again be played. They come up every fifteen minutes. People like em. They get to stay. Sadly, they get to stay. MGMT is the latest, but the list is as old as the jukebox itself: Johnny Cash, the Pixies and Black Sabbath...But why dwell on those.

At the risk of feigning impossible authority these are--if not the ten best, then ten tracks that make it what it is:

1. George McCrae-I Get Lifted

2. Clinic-The Return of Evil Bill

3. The Sonics-Have Love Will Travel

4. Nerves/ Blondie-Hangin' on the Phone (yes, both versions!)

5. Bo Diddley-Hey Bo Diddley

6. New Pornographers-Myriad Harbour

7. Love and Rockets-Kundalini Express

8. The Strokes-Someday

9. The Vibrators-Baby, Baby

10. Roy Orbison-Workin' for the Man

ED fROM OHIO SIGNED THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

I was thinking the other day about knowing when to stop:  Cooking, paintings and even these little memoirs, have shown me so readily how a late regret can materialize unannounced, and irreversible.  I know immediately I went too far.  If I had laid the brush down, not introduced red, killed the heat, undoubled the metaphor, perhaps it would have been perfect.

What reminded me of it was a poem by Leonard Cohen--actually I think it first appeared as a song on his Recent Songs album, but I only know the poem.  

I came so far for beauty

I left so much behind:

my patience and my family,

my masterpiece unsigned   

There have been days when I was so in love with a handmade thing (lately it has been a series of absurd show flyers papering Gooski's) that I felt with authorial certainty in bursts human artifice was superior to nature.  It wasn't til I begrudgingly recalled the discipline I'd alternately neglected and lost that I realized I had been wrong.  Not in the superiority of handmade things, rather the sacredness and the accidental way I came to the Hill. 

Gooski's.

I put to you that album covers are more patriotic than the flag.  The archaeologists will look back and say, see, look what they loved.  How they loved it!

These are ten things I learned and observed while cleaning the bar, Gooski's, Polish Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, yesterday, Saturday February 14th, 2009, beginning at 2:15 PM, ending at 3:05 PM.

1.  I am most likely sterile from a single application of the caustic sanitizing formula used to mop the floors.  Effective as it is, if you drop a fork when eating there do not observe the five second rule.  Let it go.

2.  The lozenge I found beneath the Dark Knight pinball game machine, it turns out, is hydrocodone.  Initially I mistook it for a Runt.  Do you remember Runts?

3.  One should never abuse opiates.  Abuse leads the direct way to the obliteration of self love.

4.  Music helps distract from the odor of fetid revelries.  I like Slayer's Haunting the Chapel or Schoenberg, as their abrasive qualities--and only their abrasive qualities, can surpass the annihilation of those fetid revelries of Friday.

5.  Emptying skunked beer trash bags in flurries on Polish Hill has a humbling Bruegelesque quality to it.  Also, the visual gratification of seeing one's own breath at the mouthing of the words: fuckin a.  That's also nice.

6.  Women, by volume and weight, produce significantly more lavatory garbage than do men.  Also, their graffiti is better.  Also, their minds are spectacular and dirty.  

7.  By 2:00 AM on any given Friday gravity will have brought roughly $4.65 in spare change back to the damaged Earth from which it was augured.  

8.  Oh, and a $1 bill.  But believe you me when I tell you I compromised when I fetched it from the swamp.    

9.  The sobriety of a ping pong player can be determined, after the fact, by whether or not he or she sat the paddle at a cant atop the resting ball.  The sober always do.  And, need I clarify, by sober I mean serious?

10.  There is simply no stifling the gag reflex when changing a soiled urinal puck.  The monastic humility fostered in the act is transcendent and rewarding. 

The walk home thru Heaven on Earth, Bloomfield and the afterhours place ideas.

It could be Bloomfield cast in lead by Anselm Keifer.  Last night or, rather, this morning, around 4:30 when I inched home from a nightcap or so at the Castle the entirety of our neighborhood was encrusted in an infrared ice tundra.  Detailed mottlings of ice rain pools obscured the basic boundaries between curb, sidewalk, Liberty Ave.  It was something.  You might as well nail it above the Squirrel Hill Tunnel:  Pittsburgh:  Where Nothing Beautiful Is Ever Kind. 

Just a quick shot now to cut the heady stuff I've been laying out lately.  Not sure how I feel about it, or what the future will hold.  The frigid assaults on Pittsburgh have awakened a wild Coleridgean energy and on so many fronts I have been exhilarated by new ideas.  Tag along.  

One thing about which I am confident is this Sunday.  The Super Bowl has compelled us to double the Gooski's stock in wings and all things fry-o-latable.  There have been rattlings in my dreams, trying to satisfy some vegetarian friends' game day cravings.  I forecast roasted serrano and baby eggplant involtinis;  a freak show tent cross-pollination of the falafel, hush puppies and beans and rice.  You won't catch me saying it aloud but I think this unnatural fritter will carry the moniker, the Pinto Puppy.  I know, it's fucking silly.   

Omnivorous notions too have abounded.  After nearly a week of brainstorming the very simple concept of the Caesar salad--done right one of my favorite foods, I think I arrived at a nice spin.  Not an innovation exactly, after all a proper Caesar is perfect as it is, more like a pairing:  classic romaine heart, anchovy and parmesan mayonaise dressing with garlic croutons (all par for the course)  heaped alongside grilled flatbread and deep-fried smelts.  To me that's ideal bitter beer drinkin' food.  that's Steelers stomping birdass food.

I'm still trying to refine my pizza crust technique, and am constantly on the lookout for disused bricks to modify Gooski's oven for a better pizza making environment.  That accomplished margheritas and pierogie pies will resume in the chewy glory for which they were conceived and destined.

I'll be trying out several new wing flavors as well.  No hints on those.  Sufficed to say one will be incendiary in nature.  And in general expect to get my ass handed to me at halftime.  I must say little could excite me more.  The aggressive temperament of this winter bodes well, I say, for the Steelers' hopes.  More to the essence it evokes the best of the city.  It snows, it rains, there are golden towels in the air.  When the elements converge it is out of a harsh and most reliable love.

   

Dark for the first time.

Melanie Stidolph Boy (2004)


And people's houses across America really did go up in smoke.

And fear stalked the land.

If you guessed that those lines belong to a poetic vision of the apocalypse the likes of William Blake's you're right. But those words are not in fact Blake's, they concluded Roger Cohen's portent-filled op-ed, "Nixon, Bush, Palin" in The New York Times a little less than two months ago. As markets lose life-blood pints by the day, pillar industries crawl to the Senate's heels for the financial methadone necessary to keep on keeping on, and the parabola of George H. W. Bush's abysmal unemployment rate finally returns to earth in his son's America (a hale 16% of us are jobless) it is no wonder op-ed writers are beginning to sound a little spooky. But its not all bad...

We return to the senses and really confront them in the dark. While were waiting for it anyway. I've personally been writing little--no, I don't count increasingly self-indulgent bursts on Facebook! Along with the aforementioned portents of Roger Cohen I've gone back to Richard Wright, and the American Hunger; to Ninotchka and the Soviet spirit of an omelet; to Stanley Tucci's fantastic Big Night; David Mas Masumoto's enduringly poignant memoir, Epitaph for a Peach; to Fergus Henderson and Irma S. Rombauer. To the first two pages of Remembrance of Things Past--i never made it past, which does nothing to diminish the effect on my stomach and imagination.

With hardship comes renewed focus on food. On how to fill the empty spaces.

As difficulty brims on us there is a soft glow to it. Folks seem better inclined to share what they have--I can barely keep up with the recipe sharing circles I've been kindly tipped into in emails; and certain fortunate Sunday afternoons at Gooski's, Tim lifts the moratorium on traditional Polish food by laying out a steaming casserole of stuffed cabbage and beef with noodles.

For my part I'm in the germinating stage of a d.i.y. ramen noodle base: you buy the noodles for like $.35, discard the msg flavor packet and use some mojo I'll hand you in its place. Flavors are being brainstormed, refined and taste-tested into the lightless hours...

As I see it we may not be ramen noodle poor yet, but when we get there it'll at least be palatable. More on that in a while...

You and yours folks, me and my folks.

A wild weekend has come and gone, and one thing is certain. The long windy season of brown liquor and ice-colored skies is back. Of late I'm finding it somewhat difficult getting back to my ALS voice, having spent the last month sacking out on Facebook and basically writing whatever bullshit comes to mind. Not entirely unlike now I suppose.

But in that time I've had a number of small, but enjoyable, breakthroughs, most notable among them a renewed fascination for my old pal, Larry, a Gooski's lifer with a soft-spoken pugnacity and entirely strange disposition. He hates liberals--all those dudes do, loves a good wine, and is a close reader of the regional Amish newspaper. Given a change of heart on the subject of gun ownership, he'd surely join a community; He already has the hat.

I'm trying desperately to get him to agree to be interviewed. I'll keep you posted on that as developments break.

For now let me state simply, and in my best Auld Lang Syne writing voice that I am confident in our prospects for Election Day; the Democratic Party seriously owes Barack Obama a Rolex and a trip to Hersheypark for the rejuvenating effect he's had on the party and voters alike.

On the subject of music I can't say enough nice things about the new Rosebuds record, or for that matter this mash-up. Four Men With Beards continues to impress me with their vinyl reissues, most recently Funkadelic's dark funk classic, Maggot Brain. Never heard it sound this clear before. Last Thursday's show at Garfield Artworks, a double-headliner with my pal, Jack Rose, and U.K. folk legend, Michael Chapman, was revelatory. I keep waiting for the spell to be broken with Jack, having seen him enough times for the magic to wear off, but the man is full of surprises. He is given to moments that to me recall the funniest of the Hoosier Hotshots or Thelonious Monk; for whatever reason I turn back into a kid, giggle, and wonder how that silly music happens. Man, it's good stuff! Chapman sounded like John Martyn, with a bit gravel in his throat. Gone are the days of these superb lyricists. It's heartening to hear a guy who can write, play and sing with such narrative clarity and magnetism. After the gig the guys crashed on our couches and Chapman regaled us with stories of his days in academia, catching gigs of then-unknowns, Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll and a youthful Stevie Winwood getting off the train for his shows with the Spencer Davis Group still wearing a school uniform. The whiskey flowed and the Jerry Reed records went round well into the hours.

Finally I'm honored to have fulfilled a long-standing ambition to have an ALS mix in the Gooski's jukebox. In my grad school days it was the paragon of boozy late night cool, with the first Strokes record, lots of Fall, and the Runaways. So you can haul ass up Polish Hill, have a ko-bossie and a Newcastle, and take in the sounds of the ALS. Just don't get Marcus started on politics.