Ephemeral Distributed Semantic Poetry and Entropy

8.25.2014 29m

Started off at the Bastille with S quite early. Rode around to North Street and Reseca to see some new artwork described in a recent Post-Gazette story:

Walked around the building checking out the artist's windows, and noticed a sign over the back door, fancy engraved-metal but I didn't understand what that was all about. Riding around the neighborhood, working our way around to RandyLand, we noticed other homes with words written on them:

Eventually on Sampsonia Way, between the City of Asylum buildings, we found the same words in Rivers of Words, a sort of community distributed semantic poetry project.

(protip: If you're not familiar with City of Asylum or Randyland, these five blocks are a Pittsburgh snow-globe of their own.)

The words start off by themselves all around the neighborhood, then join together to make meaning in the street.

Found this on Monteray, another little free library and now I'm thinking, I'm going to have to start carrying a book on the bike and make deposits:

I was thinking about the wording of the sentences in the River of Words. A few of the sentences began, Once there was a word... and it struck me this wasn't too different from John 1:1 in the Bible, generally rendered as "In the beginning was the Word" so I went back to check out the phrasing.

Upon our return we found a City work crew with a power washer getting ready to remove the painted message from the street, because it was supposed to be an ephemeral artwork and it's lasting too long. It seems a terrible shame to wash it away, on a street that's not particularly well maintained. It shows so much community effort, and such thought. Perhaps washing it away is a demonstration of the meaning-entropy lifecycle. Arggh.

Found this at 221 Alpine Ave, eleven years old by George Gist and looking great:

Rode across the 16th Street Bridge. Rode inbound on Penn to check the work on the new ABRs (artsy bike racks). Saw a really fancy taxi-limo across from the Convention Center, sporting VetsTaxi livery and stopped to check it out; a Tesla-S model. The driver gave us a briefing on the car, very nice gentleman. Teslas for limos, moving-on-up.

Rode out to Costco in Homestead, and back to the NorthSide and the Bastille just as the day was warming up to something near normal for August. Very nice ride A good ride, literally.

Also, this is possibly the most unlikely blog post title for a bike blog evah.