the beat VALLEY BEAT
CITY BEAT
BY GEOFF GEHMAN
BY THOM NICKELS
When we visited Pittsburgh recently we found the restaurant world there to our liking. Popular are pubs with the kind of bar food you’d find at Standard Tap in Northern Liberties, only you won’t find breaded smelt—the most awful dish in the western hemisphere––in the Steel City. In Pittsburgh, as in Center City, popular restaurants mean long lines at places that do not take reservations. At one French eatery the lines were so long patrons lingered outside with drinks or sat at the bar until called. Our wait was so long the bartender offered a heartfelt apology. “I don’t know why people aren’t moving. They got their checks but they won’t go home.” The obsessive sitters didn’t care that other people had been waiting for more than an hour. We made the suggestion that the restaurant adopt a policy that customers not occupy a table for more than two and a half hours. One upscale Korean restaurant in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood already has this policy in place: “Please do not allow your dining experience to exceed two and one half hours” was printed on the back of the menu, although the service was so slow we came to see the time limit as a game in reverse psychology. The food at the French eatery with the long wait was mediocre, while the no-name, walk-in lunchtime Pittsburgh pubs we visited provided extraordinary dining experiences.
Jerry Seinfeld is a comic cosmologist who views donut holes as black holes. Appearing last month as the first main-stage comedian in Musikfest’s 32 years, he got plenty of yadda-yaddas out about such cosmic cultural absurdities as, well, donut holes. Seinfeld opened the hour-long show by saluting the developers of the SteelStacks site for making an entertainment center out of “a ton of rust.” A dead steel plant led to a riff on the crazy concept of a “deathbed.” The riff ended with Seinfeld imagining a store that sells death clock radios (“But there’s no snooze button. You get up or you don’t”). Seinfeld went postal on the Postal Service, alcoholic coffee drinks and—Sacrilege! Heresy!—the circus. He jazzed up routines with frantic hand waves, smiling grimaces and increasingly hoarse mock screams In short and in general, he played the righteously confused kvetcher. I laughed hardest at jokes about things I love. I remember childhood TV dinners as adult adventures and culinary vacations. Seinfeld remembers only leathery Salisbury steak and cracked-desert apple cobbler gobbled by desperate bachelors vowing to eat, and live, better. TV dinners have improved more lives, he reasoned, than life coach Tony Robbins. I laughed longest at jokes about things I hate. For me golf is annoyingly expensive and annoying. For Seinfeld golf is as pointless as “throwing a Tic-Tac 100 yards into a shoebox.” The game is good only as a good excuse to escape domesticity; hence the acronym GOLF (Get Out; Leave Family). Our aversion to golf was shared by the late George Carlin, one of Seinfeld’s heroes. Like Carlin, Seinfeld is a master at dissecting family dynamics. Comparing marriage to a TV game show, he insisted that husbands will never, ever win the category “Details of a Conversation We Had at 3 O’Clock in the Morning Eight Years Ago.” Seinfeld lacks Carlin’s buzzsaw irony, delicious sense of danger and hippie-dippy charm. He has plenty of Carlin’s sneaky smarts about the shifting nature of communicating. After listing the ways that smart phones have made talking nearly obsolete, he concluded that maybe he’d be better off just texting his gigs.
Photojournalist Neil Benson has been working in the city since 1970. His photographs have appeared in The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, Time, People and The New York Times. The opening of his current show at The History Museum attracted about 100 people. Benson talked about the early days of his career, when The Drummer paid him ten dollars a shot. He said that when he photographed Mike Schmidt of the Phillies, Schmidt rolled on the floor and pretended to make love to his baseball bat while repeating the line, “This is what you want; I’m giving you what you want.” From the thousands of negatives, contact sheets and photos that Benson donated to the Museum, about 140 images were selected for the exhibit. Faces on the wall include Judge Lisa Richette at the typewriter; Mayor Rizzo and Queen Elizabeth; a young Anne d’Harnoncourt in an antebellum-style dress chatting with two Social Register types who had no idea that the woman in front of them would become one of the Museum’s greatest directors. We liked the photo of KYWTV’s award-winning 1970s news team just before Jessica Savitch went national, but we’re sorry that Benson didn’t have his camera handy to capture PMA’s Joseph J. Rishel and Kathleen Foster, who were among those present. We hung out with beefy parking valet types at the opening party for Luxe Valet, an on-demand valet parking service. The event took place at Benjamin’s Desk, the former offices of Philadelphia Weekly. BD doesn’t have the best vibe in the city. Maybe it’s the utilitarian rectangular room that recalls a Cub Scout den or a Lion’s Club lodge, but something’s amiss here. Mayor Nutter joined the happy beer and white wine drinking crowd that munched on Italian hoagies and soft pretzels. Though we didn’t recognize a single face, at least we figured out that the reason why parking valet guys don’t make eye contact is because they’re trained to look for moving vehicles. The Dell Music Center packs them in. With 600 lawn seats and 5,284 reserved seats, you wouldn’t think there’d be much of a tailgating spillover. At Historic Strawberry Mansion, the city’s largest historic house museum (looking good after a recent two million dollar restoration) when there’s a Dell concert it means the museum gets trashed. Cars drive and park illegally all over the museum’s lawn, leaving ruts from tires, injured shrubs and violated flowerbeds. After an August 6th concert, a car backed into a fire hydrant, un-rooting it. Other tailgaters set up grills and tents along the edge of the museum’s lawn. The lawn becomes the go to deposit spot for human waste, garbage, stained napkins, beer bottles, diapers, chicken bones and Styrofoam food containers. The museum has made several complaints to the Mayor and to First Deputy Commissioner of Recreation and Programs, Susan Slawson, but to no avail. We think the city should at least send out cleaning crews and hire parking enforcers on the night of the big concerts.
A valuable exhibit teaches me at least three things about subject, treatment and history. I made at least six valuable discoveries during A Shared Legacy, a traveling show of folk objects made in America between 1800 and 1920. Displayed through Oct. 11 at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, it’s a magnetic map of revolutions of industry, commerce and manners. Most of the works are owned by Barbara L. Gordon, a big fan of sociological stories. Her collection includes strikingly symbolic portraits of children as budding adults. Thanks to Gordon, I had my first encounters with a boy holding a wallet, a wish for a wealthy future, and an infant leaning on an adult-size chair, a wish for a stable life. Rich oils of a well-appointed married couple come with a delightful surprise: the jewels the woman wears in her portrait. The spouses also appear in reproduced daguerreotypes, a novel medium that made people painters worry about their livelihoods. I’ve seen a few score of 19th-century cigar-store Indians. Gordon introduced me to a cigar-store woman holding a cigarette, a sexy mascot for male smokers and a sexist scourge for women forbidden to smoke in public. A Shared Legacy neatly balances comfortable items (carousel animals) with uncomfortable items (paintings of a church burned by Irish Catholic enemies). It proves that folk art can be profound without being plain or primitive.
An end-of-summer Friends of the Avenue of the Arts event took place in Macy’s Greek Hall where we chatted with FAA’s Tim Moore and met two Manhattan transplants who are making Center City their new home. Philadelphia is less expensive than New York, and there are seldom lines at restaurants. It’s a city overflowing with arts and culture. These ex-New Yorkers love the Barnes, especially the coffee in the Barnes café and say they don’t miss overcrowded Manhattan at all. The Avenue of the Arts was named one of America’s “Great Streets” by the American Planning Association in 2008. ■
The Karl Stirner Arts Trail in Easton covers a lot of good ground, just like its namesake. The 2.5-mile trail winds along Route 22, Bushkill Creek, woods, silk mill and dog park. For a quarter century Stirner has wound his way into his adopted city as a sculptor, curator, landlord, advocate, advisor and citizen. He specializes in recycling scrap metal and scrapped souls. In July the trail received two bursts of momentum. It hosted its first movie, St. Vincent, where Bill Murray plays a cranky, unlikely mentor to a lonely, savvy boy. The same month Lafayette College hosted an exhibit of proposals for sculptural installations along the trail. Paul Deery envisions a tunneling walkway of stacked stones by a path to the Bushkill, where he fishes and skips stones with his kids. Karla Stingerstein conceived a 17-foot-high pod for storing seeds for a “Polli-Patch.” On Oct. 4 Lafayette will host a second art auction to endow the trail. Renowned donors include printmaker Faith Ringgold, photographer Larry Fink and poet Gerald Stern. Visit karlstirnerartstrail.org for more information about making a path a better pathway. ■
Geoff Gehman is the author of the memoir The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons (SUNY Press). geoffgehman@verizon.net.
Thom Nickels is the author of Philadelphia Architecture, Tropic of Libra, Out in History, Spore, and recipient of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architecture Journalism Award. thomnickels1@aol.com
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