First published by email, February 14 2024
Chiaroscuro Days ||| Weeks 1-6, 2024 ||| Pittsburgh, Penna
Black-and-white scenes with little hints of brown are the classic look of Pittsburgh in Snow. Part of the effect is the thin, washed out light that filters through the heavy cloud layer, muting what colors remain.
They call winter the "thin part of the year". It gets dreamy and mistlike in here, a kind of hibernation-hangover that affects humanity. Ancient calendars used to peter out in December and start again many dozens of days later, at a reasonable, stable daylight cycle. Marking 'January 1' was an annual guessing game, and a vital one, as the ensuing lunar calendar set the tempo for the human activity surrounding the upcoming growing season. The Roman addition of July and August to mid-summer does more than praise two emperors- the two months push the once-floating January 1 all the way back to the fixed day-after-December 31, eliminating the 'timeless' winter of rest and imposing the imperial (solar) math of the stars.
In medieval Europe, winter engendered a 'second sleep', with many extant letters referencing the late hour at which they were written - two candles of domesticity in the deep night, between two distinct sleep cycles. We all adapt to winter in our own ways. The challenge is not 'how to stay productive' so much as 'how to get through these dark, short, cold days.' Survival is paramount.
I leaned on my positive habits through January and early February. I drew and wrote, and I took long walks on the Montour Trail, a 40-something mile trail that rings Pittsburgh on former rail rights-of-way. The post-industrial landscape is strange, inspiring, and a little bit haunted. In February, I'm looking forward to seeing my friend Fungi Flows bring the world record for freestyle rapping to Pittsburgh - he's going to rap for more than 2 days straight.
Curb Divit ||| Bumper Sticker
Pittsburgh is called the Iron City, and one of the unique markers of the place is a tendency for the road edges (whether sidewalk, loading dock, building edge, or retaining wall) to be reinforced against damage by heavy traffic - trucks and big machines. One peculiarity is the use of metal angle-irons to reinforce curbs.
An example of an iron curb. Note the jagged edges where the metal has failed, just left of the telephone pole.
During one of the snowy evenings in January, one of these curbs took some chunks from my passenger-side front tire. Snowy narrow roads at night. The city demands sacrifice. What surprised me was that the tire was not blown out. It held air for 10-15 hours at a time after losing all this external material. That said, I stopped driving immediately, and had a totally new tire installed the next day.
My old tire, now replaced. The larger divit could have a US Quarter placed comfortably inside the excavated area.
It was hard for me to really feel regretful or sad about this accidental damage. I love how overengineered my city can be. And as soon as it happened, I reminded myself of a particular mantra, from my own neighborhood. There's a car that parks at the coffee shop I visit weekly, over in Avalon PA. It brings sage advice, which were the first words that came to my mind when I got too close to this one curb and it bit my tire so bad. Don't worry, Connor ...
✨ Hot Girls Hit Curbs ✨
Refrigerator Roundup
I am a man of habit and cyclical work. I try each day in January to make some fun art, really lightweight and joyous work, as part of #funaday , an annual month-long challenge to do just that.
Over 2023, I found a few strange collections of refrigerator magnets in my art supply gathering. For Fun-a-Day, each day I mashed business words and dinosaurs and construction magnets into clever scenarios & one panel jokes. I posted a few of these to my instagram, but here's the full set.
My favorite one is "Open Product Economy" because I like the idea of a space dinosaur underbidding SpaceX. "Business Problem" was the most-reacted-to of the ones I shared on my instagram.
Montour Trail Progress
The Greer Tunnel, a 'wet tunnel' characterized by groundwater leaking in from the ceiling. The entire tunnel floor is a deep bed of gravel for continuous drainage. When trains ran through here (through the 1980s), a team would have to walk ahead with sledgehammers to knock the ice columns out of the right-of-way.
I started walking the Montour Trail in July of 2022. I should finish out my walk by this coming July, if not sooner.
Here's what I wrote back then, right when I was in the middle of buying the house I live in now.
During July and August, to fill these stressful times of forced inaction, I made it a mission to walk the suburban Montour Trail system, a 46 mile belt of rails-to-trails walking paths which circle the city's core. I started at the north-most end, in Coraopolis, PA, and have walked the path in sections, down to the Enlow Tunnel outside Imperial PA - the first seven miles. These were solo walks, from a parking lot out and then back. If I continue in that style (rather than, say, walk one-way and take a ride-share back to my car), and explore some of the side paths, this will prove to be a hundred mile project. I'm excited to see how the seasons turn.
I'm more than half-way along the trail, walking through Trail Miles 30 and 31 in my most recent walk. I've been logging the plants and animals I've seen along the way over on iNaturalist. You can see the trail in the traces of my logged data, on the left and bottom portions of this map.
The trail continues all the way to Clairton, PA - I have 16 more miles to go, traveling east along creeks and under highways. It's a remarkable project, the result of decades of township by township project-work, innumerable Eagle Scout projects for systemic trail improvement, and a network of collaborators. The trail crosses out of Allegheny County into Washington County. It runs through many former industrial sites, from factories to coal mines. This last week, I walked over two shuttered mines, Montour #4 and #11, both now flooded underground lakes not economical enough to pump out and continue to mine.
Upcoming Events: Two+ Days of Freestyle
Show Poster by M. Pallas Studios .
Pittsburgh rapper and friend Fungi Flows has been working his way up to world-record durations of spontaneous freestyle rap. He began his training last year, working up from 6 hours to 12, to 24 hours, to 36! Now he's going for more than two days of continuous rapping, live and on livestream, using topics from every place he can find them.
He'll be doing this attempt in a bit more than a week hence, here in Pittsburgh at Codename Creators Next Door, 3pm Feb 23 (Friday) to 5pm Feb 25 (Sunday). Try putting that in your calendar app! There will be livestreams on youtube, instagram, and anywhere else fungiflows comes up in search.
Fungi has been making a name for himself in the city for a few years now, rapping outside public events, as a guest speaker and musician, and at festivals across the country. He is a gentle, wonderful man, who raps about the positive benefits of fungi, from food to mental transformation to physical medicine to environmental regulator to planetary mind-thread-mass. He seeks world peace, and uses the spoken word to bring people together. You can listen to the 36-hour Freestyle he did last month here on youtube.
If you have some funds to spare, please consider donating to the Fungi cause, to defray the costs of the space, the crew keeping the cameras going and the folks keeping Fungi fed and hydrated. This kind of spectacle is cheaper than you might imagine, but it's definitely four digits and not three. Most of the donations are in the $20-50 range so far - support adds up fast when the community comes out like that.
Right now, the Guiness World Record for durrational rap is held by a rapper in Japan, whose flows were not entirely freestyle - he used long segments of pre-written verses. Fungi is going to crush that record and do it with authentically off-the-dome lyrics for the whole two day experience. Help him bring the title home to the states.
I'll be attending for sure, both digitally and in person, though I am but a human, not a rap-mushroom, and will dip out sometimes. Think about it - Fungi will be there, rapping, that whole time. You eat, you sleep, you have a whole weekend of errands and events, he keeps it down for the culture.
I'll see yinz soon,
Connor Sites-Bowen
