Your Beef with Pittsburgh

Whether you’ve been living here all your life, or you’ve only been here for a few months, you’ve likely found yourself puzzled by some things here in Pittsburgh.  Just this past fall, you may have asked yourself, “Why does Luke want to tax college students?” or “What’s up with the so called ‘T?’”

In this next post, I’d like you to begin thinking about your Argumentative Documented essay.  This week, take some time to look through the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review and find 3-4 local issues that you think you might want to handle in this next essay.  For each option that you’re considering, tell us a bit about why it interests you.

You may also choose to handle an issue from your hometown instead of one here in Pittsburgh.

Harnessing Your Inner Wolfe

Class,

This week we took a look at an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s “The New Journalism,” and we talked a bit about his use of point of view throughout some of his work.  This week I’d like you to harness your inner Wolfe.

Think about someone who is your total opposite - a bizarro you - and write a description of yourself from that person’s perspective.

Wednesday Students Only:

For this week’s Tumblr post I’d like you to talk a bit about the paper you started writing this week.  As you’ve been thinking about different places to write about you’ve probably eliminated some choices because they were either too obvious, or have had a lot written about them already (ahem, Primanti’s!).  Remember, you’re trying to come up with a unique angle on the place you’re writing about.

In this post, I’d like you to address 2 things.  First, which places were you considering early on that you ultimately decided would not work for this piece?  Why didn’t you believe they would work well?  In what ways had you seen these places already represented in other media? Be as specific as possible.  Secondly, what place did you ultimately choose?  Why do you think this place is a better choice than the others?  And finally, and perhaps most importantly, what is your angle?

The Pitt of Zombies

kaywebs:

I had many impressions of Pittsburgh before I actually came and saw the city for myself. First off, I kind of expected the city to be an average American city, filled to the brim with things to do and bustling with activity at all hours. This, however, is not the case at all. Every night as soon as all of the white collar office workers go home for the day, downtown Pittsburgh winds down and quickly dies out. Most of the shops close and if you need to get anything done in the evening, you’re basically out of luck. This impression was purely based off of what I’ve seen in other cities that I’ve been to and New York City in particular. Although, comparing Pittsburgh and New York City probably isn’t very fair because NYC is clearly in a league of its own.

Sundays are especially creepy here in Pittsburgh because it feels like a zombie apocalypse just hit. There’s almost literally nobody around anywhere in the downtown area. Speaking of zombies, I would have to assume that a lot of people associate Pittsburgh with George Romero’s zombie movies, since they were all shot and set in this area. I, however, have not had the chance to actually watch any of his original movies so this is an association that I cannot make.  However, one association with zombies that I can make about Pittsburgh is where most of the levels in the video game Left 4 Dead are set. In the first chapter of the game, No Mercy, the survivors have to make their way to the roof of Mercy Hospital to get rescued by a helicopter. It was interesting coming here and seeing a lot of the similarities of the game environment, including the actual building that the hospital in the game was designed after.

In another video game, Fallout 3, a downloadable add-on was released that was directly based off of Pittsburgh. The add-on, titled “The Pitt”, has players making the trip to a post-apocalyptic version of Pittsburgh in which the abundant steel industry is still present. The Pitt had a lot of landmarks in it that were directly modeled after their real-world counterparts here in the city. When I first started to explore the city on my own, I was excited to go and seek out the landmarks I had already discovered in the video game. Such locations included the South 10th Street Bridge, Cathedral of Learning, Mellon Bank building, and PPG Place. One interesting thing that actually came out of all this media exposure about Pittsburgh is that I still constantly refer to the city as The Pitt, and I’ll probably never stop.

Great response from Korey!

To My Students:

Last week many of you wrote about ways in which Pittsburgh differs from your hometown.  This week I’d like you to think about how you imagined Pittsburgh before you moved here.  That is, what kinds of things influenced your image of the city?  Were there books, films, news stories, television representations, etc. that made you think of Pittsburgh in a certain way?  How did they represent the city?  How did those representations and images of the city hold up once you actually started to experience the city? (I suspect that images of Pittsburgh sports have had some influence on your perceptions, but please be sure to mention non-sports related influences as well.)

For those of you who grew up in Pittsburgh: How do you see Pittsburgh represented in different media? Film? TV? Print? Music? What discrepancies do you see between the ways the city is represented and the way that you actually see it?