Enjoy the art, culture that Pittsburgh has to offer

I received an e-mail last week from a young woman in town for the day who wanted to meet with… I received an e-mail last week from a young woman in town for the day who wanted to meet with me to talk about life in Pittsburgh. She stressed that her boyfriend was here for a conference, perhaps assuming that I’d otherwise confuse her with just another of the many sultry coeds clogging my inbox with e-mails eagerly demanding a furtive tryst with their favorite Pitt News columnist.

Or more realistically, she knew somewhere deep down that any guy who used his column space for a tribute to Shel Silverstein was probably about as threatening as a fluff-duster. At least I’ll always have my delusions.

Alexandra, I later learned, was considering Pitt for her graduate work in communications. She was passionate about writing, music and the arts. But like many potential students who have never lived here before or spent much time in the city, she was a bit skeptical as to what Pittsburgh could offer her in terms of her writing career and the local cultural scene.

As I held forth from a table in Panera Bread that afternoon, I tried my best to assure her that those antiquated notions of our city as a polluted, uncultivated wasteland — once described by Boston journalist James Parton as “hell with the lid off” — could safely be put to pasture.

Yet I knew she wasn’t alone in her slightly misguided beliefs. Pittsburgh, as many have noted, has recently been going through something of an identity crisis. Now that many of the old mills have been razed and replaced with athletic training facilities and office buildings, athletic clubs like the Steelers and Pirates have grown to be our most effective points of mass-identification.

But few outsiders are in a hurry to recognize the transition. The Steelers, to them, are not just a symbolic representation of the blue-collar ethic that once formed the backbone of our steel industry. Instead, it’s a sign that we are blindly clinging to an increasingly outmoded past.

Whenever I run into old friends from home, I find myself instinctively going on the defensive, faced with the Sisyphean task of convincing them that our aging steel city epithet is not something that we take quite so literally these days, in the sense that our skies are no longer blackened with soot and our cultural districts are actually flourishing, even as the city totters precariously on the edge of bankruptcy.

Students from the Philadelphia area understand well how people who have never ventured beyond Scranton tend to envision the “gateway to the west.” Sometimes they invoke the words of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who, when asked how he would go about improving Pittsburgh, replied, “Abandon it.”

The next time someone questions the cultural value in this city I’ll have my answer prepared. In just the last three weeks, I’ve been invited to an Iranian New Year’s festival at Carnegie Mellon University, complete with food, music and dance.

And thanks to our friends at Pitt Arts, I took the 61C Downtown and saw a beautifully choreographed performance of Faust — all without paying a cent. I’ve heard lectures from screenwriters (Ron Nyswaner), authors (Z.Z. Packer), comedians (Louie Anderson) and filmmakers (Wes Craven). I’ve visited the Carnegie International and the Warhol — again, free of charge.

Last year, Rolling Stone magazine named Pittsburgh the “number one city to rock” without being ironic. There are bands I’ve heard this semester that are more innovative and talented than the best of The X.

Better yet, most of them are willing to play without charging students a cover. Just imagine the possibilities if the Pitt Program Council had sponsored another concert in front of the the Union using a fraction of the thousands hemorrhaged on a useless ice rink — but that’s a story for another column.

It would be the understatement of the millennium to say that Oakland is not Manhattan. Art won’t sneak up on us here the way it will in bigger cities. We have to be willing to find it. It’s the work that we put into discovering, say, a small, intimate venue like Mr. Small’s in Millvale or the Pittsburgh Deli Co. in Shadyside that gives us the added pleasure of feeling we earned the experience.

By now it’s no secret that a majority of Pitt students will flee the city for job opportunities elsewhere, but when we arrive wherever it is we are going, we should remind our friends and colleagues that there is more to our alma mater than bridges and smokestacks.

There is a culture here unlike any in the world. And it’s waiting to be found.

Michael Darling loves feedback, especially from sultry coeds. Send e-mail to mdarling82@yahoo.com.