Quests of Nerdery

I’m in Pittsburgh on my own for a week. I’m essentially house sitting while the person I’m staying with is on the West Coast for Thanksgiving. This is a new experience on this journey. So far everywhere I’ve stayed there has almost always been someone around, someone to give my exploration of a place a nudge in one direction or another and someone to report back to at the end of the day. “Today I did this, and saw that thing, and visited this establishment, and learned this little factoid.”

Here, in Pittsburgh, there’s no one to tell stories to about what I saw and did (at least, not until next Tuesday) and I’m enjoying that freedom, that lack of accountability. I’m also trying to resist the urge to just stay in with the two softest and cuddliest cats and watch Buffy and whatever “classic” movie I can find that’s streaming on Netflix.

Pittsburgh is one of those places, like Portland, ME, that takes up more of my mental geography than it has an actual, physical presence in the real world. This is mainly due to Michael Chabon. The only thing in Pittsburgh I knew I wanted to see when I arrived was the Cloud Factory. Upon discovering that Dogma was filmed here as well enough of my interest was piqued to drive me away from the continuing angst of the Scooby Gang and out into the streets of Pittsburgh yesterday.

Pittsburgh is also the first place I’ve explored by car, again, because the person who lives at the place I’m staying flew away, so she’s left her car in my charge for the week. I can’t say I like it much. It seems every freedom that is granted by a car is balanced out by some restriction. Sure, you can get anywhere, but then where do you park? I still managed to go miles in the wrong direction and had to turn myself around half a dozen times to get myself back on course. And in a car it’s easier to go farther out of one’s way and harder to get back on it. There are illegal U-turns and a plethora of one way streets to herd you in the wrong direction. Out of curiosity I plotted the path I actually ended up driving. It looks like some sort of strange, dancing horse. It didn’t help I suppose that I was finding my way around with directions scribbled from Google Maps and then my own, slip-shod map copied from the same. (Before you mock, that map is actually how I managed to find my first destination after Google’s directions told me to turn on to a street that didn’t exist, or that I couldn’t find at least.)

After seeing more of Penn Ave than I’d ever intended to (it may very well turn into the street that I learn Pittsburgh by) I finally managed to make it to St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. This is the church where Cardinal Glick introduces Catholicism Wow in Dogma as well as the site of the film’s final show down. I had to go rewatch the two above clips to reassure myself I had actually been in the right place. The church I remembered from Dogma is a different beast than this building. The one in my head had a large, sprawling yard out front, and just one door in the center of the building, not two side by side. I spent the whole time I was wandering around the grounds of St. Peter and Paul slightly ambivalent, not quite believing I was in the right place. (And in case anyone is using this post to try and find the church for themselves, the address is 130 Larimer Ave. It took me a ridiculous amount of internet digging to find that out, so I’ll try and make it easier for the next explorer. Also, don’t trust Google if it tells you to turn on E Liberty Blvd.)

I wasn’t there long before I let the Lego Fellowship (of five) out of the Eclipse gum container they’ve been living in so they could muck about.

I was thinking–as I drove around the seemingly endless St. Mary’s cemetery wondering if there would ever be a road I could turn off on that would get me back to Penn Ave–about our need to take pictures of the places we’ve been. Ultimately, I suppose, it serves as a sort of proof. “Look, look, I was here. I was within a hundred feet of this thing you see on TV all the time. I stood within touching distance of this pop culture relic.” And I guess that’s why we shove ourselves into pictures so often. After all, if we’re not in the photo, then it could be anyone’s picture of the Eiffel Tower. I’m still rather perplexed by this desire to place yourself in front of cultural monuments in vacation snap shots, sometimes it is taken to such extremes. Like the friend I went to one of DC’s art museums with who kept asking me to take pictures of her standing in front of different art works, or the two children I saw one Fourth of July who were so enamored of looking at the photos that had just been taken of them, smiling, with their backs to the fireworks display, that I’m not sure they saw a single fire work explode. But then I realized I’m using this Lego Fellowship (of five) in the same way. Sure, I may not be shoving myself into every picture, but I’m using them as my stand in, my signature, so that I have proof that I took this picture of the yard where God did a hand stand, not anyone else.

 

 

The church was falling apart. It hasn’t been used in years. I wondered what shape it had been in when Dogma filmed there, and whether the production had done touch ups on its facade to make it shine the way it did in the movie, or whether thirteen years ago it was still in decent shape. I didn’t check to see if the doors were locked, already feeling like I was trespassing, even though all I’d had to do to get to it was walk around to the side of the wrought-iron fence. Every time someone walked past I felt foolish, and I wondered whether  the locals noticed a lot of people taking pictures of this place.

 

Years ago I went on a bit of a pilgrimage to Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash and the Quickstop, and it was blatantly apparent that the man working there was used to people like me, with my backwards baseball cap and disposable camera, tromping through and disrupting the place with their strange photo ops. St. Peter and Paul felt a little more out of the way than that though, a little more unknown.

Eventually I went to try and find the Cloud Factory. There were a lot more circles to be driven in, and tracks to be retraced, and one way streets to discover, but no Cloud Factory was forthcoming. I got frustrated and gave up after awhile, returning to where I’d started from with relative ease. I’ve since discovered I was looking one block in the wrong direction for the Cloud Factory, but, with just my scrawled map and written directions to guide me I didn’t feel confidant enough to nose around a bit. Every time I deviated from what Google commanded I seemed to end up in a neighborhood where all the houses huddled close together and the curbs squeezed you along like hands gripping a tube of toothpaste. Tomorrow though, I’ll try again, and see if I can continue to match up the storied Pittsburgh of my imagination to the physical one of brick and asphalt.