[ART REVIEW]
IT’S UNCLEAR WHO’S THE OBJECT OF HIS GREATEST DISDAIN
TIMELESSNESS {BY JAMES LANIGAN}
INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
REMEMBERING PITTSBURGH continues through May 21. Lantern Gallery, 600 Liberty Ave., Downtown. www.trustarts.org
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER
[BOOK REVIEW]
A North Side church, circa 1978-82, as photographed by David Aschkenas
In 1980, an amateur film called Downtown 81 was shot in New York’s Lower East Side. Lost for years, it was found, restored and released in 2000, but it’s much better ethnography than it is cinema. Everything from the film is now gone. The Lower East Side, then desolate and destitute, provides a powerful sense of the passing of time. Now trendy and prosperous, it is unrecognizable as the drab setting of the movie. David Aschkenas also happened to be working a camera in 1980. That year, the photographer received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to document Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. Similar to Downtown 81, many of the negatives were tucked away until recently. After they were found, Aschkenas turned them into Remembering Pittsburgh, an exhibit at Downtown’s Lantern Building. The collection spans 1978-1982. Unlike New York, which routinely bulldozes the old to make room for the new, Aschkenas’ photographs exhibit Pittsburgh’s remarkable resistance to change. Pittsburgh has been built with an attitude of austerity and durability. Emerson once wrote that a necessary feature of great art is a “good-humored inflexibility.” Pittsburgh passes the test. Featuring mostly Pittsburgh’s East End neighborhoods, Remembering Pittsburgh suggests a collection of 62 stills from a film set in the 1970s but shot in Pittsburgh today. The Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle is the same, save for the dated advertisements. The shops and delis have the same family-owned theme (though the window displays are notably different: I found myself wishing candy and cigarettes were still displayed with such elaboration). The architecture, hillsides and people are all rough-cut and shadowed from cloud cover: features of a timeless Pittsburgh. In wall text, Aschkenas recalls thinking how many of his photos felt like they could have been taken in the 1940s. The Pittsburgh remembered here is the essential one, one that Aschkenas’ subtle and stoic photographs appropriately capture in black and white. And if Pittsburgh’s inflexibility is the key to its art, then its roots are the key to its durability. By capturing simple moments of the quotidian pulse of Pittsburgh life and livelihood, Aschkenas keeps these admirable qualities from slipping away. Aschkenas is restrained behind the lens — his photographs don’t do the work for you. But they inspire a curious mind. Remembering Pittsburgh invites reflection on the images and stories that stitch together Pittsburgh’s rich sense of identity and history.
GOING OLD TESTAMENT {PHOTO COURTESY OF CHANTAL FERIA BONITTO}
{BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
I
F YOU WANT to set a novel up for failure, one way is to frame it as an “update” on a classic story. Often, the new work will be found lacking because it’s either too like the narrative that inspired it or too different. In any case, readers might spend so much time thinking about how the novel diverges or doesn’t from its source material that it simply proves a distraction. But here comes Jacob Bacharach, announcing that his second novel is nothing less than a contemporary take on the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac — the one where God orders the aged patriarch to sacrifice his first-born. Happily, however, The Doorposts of Your House and On Your Gates not only avoids such pitfalls, but proves Pittsburgh-based Bacharach to be a novelist of depth and reach, and
05.03/05.10.2017
Jacob Bacharach
certainly no one-hit wonder after his entertaining 2014 debut, The Bend of the World. The new novel centers upon morally compromised architect Abbot “Abbie” Mayer and his family. Abbie’s an indifferently observant Jew but a literal visionary: He’s a pioneer in environmentally sustainable architecture who believes that God told him (more or less) to build himself a big “green” house in the woods. But naïve, idealistic Abbie, who starts out in New York City, ends up working in Southwestern Pennsylvania with his older sister, Veronica. There he becomes entangled in shady land deals involving, among other things, such ripped-from-the-headlines matters as the Mon-Fayette Expressway and fracking for natural gas. The story, set mostly in Pittsburgh proper and Fayette County, spans three decades, from the 1980s to the present. And much like
the Old Testament, it’s heavily concerned with both land ownership and matters of paternity, the latter especially involving Abbie’s wife, named Sarah (of course), and his son, Isaac (ditto), a dissolute young gay man who’s arguably both the novel’s most entertaining character and its most tragic. As Bacharach writes, the young man “professed to believe in whimsy as a guiding life principle, though he practiced something more akin to thoughtless inconsistency.” Bacharach’s tone is often comic, even socially satiric, Tom Wolfe by way of Wilde. When Isaac parties in Pittsburgh with his friend Isabel, another key character, Bacharach writes: “They’d been drinking, and they’d done some lines. … Isabel had the rictus of approximate fun that occludes the face of people over thirty who are acting if they’re still under it.” Bacharach skewers most every character’s pretensions, and he’s also at wittily limned details. When depressive, alcoholic Sarah is introduced, for instance, she’s wearing a “diamond tennis bracelet … [that] shone as if it were reflecting a bonfire made of all the paper money