The tail end of my week off from my day job. It was Holden Caufield attempts a bacchanal. Or some such thing. Drinking makes me sharp the next day. It's a lucid focus, but I'm not purporting some devotion to a drunken master style of art making. It's a method. Nothing more.
The aviary on the North Side of Pittsburgh is pretty impressive. The first birds you see are goofy-looking eagles and macaws. Then penguins. They've been slaughtered by superstitious folk in countries into which they've been imported because they were thought to be trolls. True or false?
I went there with Ange and her kid, Sophie. It was great. I was hazy and jubilant.
Gina and her kids were there, too. Her kids seem to like me more than Sophie. I think I freak her out.
The aviary folk were feeding maggots to some of the birds in the large tropical room. Musty and pulsing with airborne fluid like a giant mouth.
From there to great coffee and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. It's an early novel of his and it's quite good. Some passages flow like honey and gold.
Over to The Society for Contemporary Craft. It's tucked away in the Strip District near the golden-domed church. A ceramic show. Eden imagery. Some of it really knocked me down.
A long walk up Smallman to Butler, up Butler past some teenage hecklers and into the Allegheny graveyard. My first wander around the grounds. What a sight! The overcast and merciless light was perfect. And, like an audible fart in a French cinema, the infamous JAWS gravestone:
I got a little lost for a while but I certainly didn't care. Will Oldham in the ears, sharp, cold light, wriggling trees desperate for the sky, and coagulated earth. Lose me. Ideas came on like the stickiness of gracefully delivered but shockingly bad news.
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