Rolled into Pittsburgh and washed up at a cocktail party like angry sailors. We spotted Dave Conrad (Pat [trick] of Arc Along the Watchtower fame) charming the Ladies of PIttsburgh at all ages and stages and spoke of theater and Shakespeare and drank a little Glennfiddich and somehow the subject turned to Art and how we should go over to Mattress Factory (annex?) and put something into the show Graham Shearing and Michael Olijnyk currated, called “GESTURE”. Connie convinced himself and me and then Graham (who was at the party and so there for the convincing) that putting it into a show three weeks into its month long run in the middle of the night would be part of the gesture. Also part of the gesture was having no actual art materials and no idea of what we we wanted to do and a belly half full of Scotch and wine and raw meat (Carpaccio… mmmmm). It was sort of a Genghis Kahn barbarian invasion of the Pittsburgh art world. Conrad magaged to scrounge up a box of sidewalk chalk and a black whiteboard marker. “My kingdom for a brush and some ink,” quoth I. But we knocked up chalk and marker drawings in three spots in the rambling old house, now serving as an art space. Half the fun was spelunking through the dark midnight rooms, bumping into sculpture while clawing for a light switch. Ended up tracing the actors instrument and it’s shadow, etc. The work felt at home in my Library Project mode as it was sort of literafitti (or literary grafitti: Connie documented all the books he started reading this year, but never finished… the romantic in me likes to think it was because he was called to set and just never quite got back to the book, the realist in me knows that I’ve started a ton of books this year and I don’t think I got all the way through any of them… I think maybe our attention spans are getting fucked by things like blogs and youtube and video games, or we are getting old and lazy). It was also like the Library Project in that we maybe didn’t make the best work we could have made, but we made different work than we would have had we worked alone and more important, we had a lot of fun making it and documented the physical event digitally. Still I’d like to score some materials and return to the scene of the crime and work things a bit. However, the next day was Christmas Eve and then we blew out of town like bitter dust on Christmas day, so rather than great art, the thing is a gesture….as I suppose it is meant to be. The song in the video is David Bowie’s “Cracked Actor”. I padded it with various movie samples from various e-books and tried to contemplate the dangers of Hollywood performance…. and, yes that IS Connie getting a thumping from DeNiro at the end. It’s a bit of mash up from the first run through of OMegg, where DeNiro stands in for M. Tristan beating up Pat. All things that go around come around like particles in a Large Hadron Collider… etc.