I don't know the gender of Gunner or the preferred pronouns, and I'm only in the state of mind to talk about such things as pronouns b/c my friends/social media/personal self-education are becoming more and more gender-conscious over the years, more focused on that new brand of activism/ social justice/ trans-ness which I don't know how to google search for a term broad enough to summarize. My own relationship to the movement is this weird cis-y het white maleish side-to-side lean-y thing like the dance new husbands do at weddings... un-hip by default, the stick bug watches the butterfly emerge from zer cocoon... albeit my metaphor fails b/c as much as I am a part of the process, I do not understand my role in it... a totality of meaning that kind of empties itself out when examined, like some parts of quantum physics.
All of this is relevant to Gunner's art... see: "Teleportaterz", written by Gunner, a musical put on over at the Spirit Lounge, more or less about queers in a science-fiction dystopia, a narrative that "disintegrates like a thomas pynchon novel" according to the bearded lawrenceville hipster guy I only sort-of know who lambasted me after the performance for criticizing the sloppiness of the second half of the musical . Sloppy is by nature part of Gunner's work: last night at the tail end of a samey hardcore punk show organized by Jackson Boytim as part of his last-minute Dumb and Also Bad Fest, Gunner + Caitlyn Bender (previously featured on this blog) + other friends did a little five-ten-twenty-minute-long performance titled, as I was able to awkwardly extract from Gunner a few minutes after we (the audience) stopped watching Bender lie motionless on the floor whilst medium-loud feedback played, after Bender gave up apparently on the expectation of us just leaving her there and got up turned off the speakers and got dressed, after that I was able to learn from Gunner who was sitting with a friend outside the venue, City Grows, a small independent gardening store in Lawrenceville curiously hosting this hardcore-y punk show, with the clerk at the front counter, maybe just the after-hours clerk or not an employee at all, being somewhat subtly rude to me I thought, me going to the venue that night wearing a bright pink striped button-down shirt, large white khaki pants, and flip-flops, in a style Jackson described as "cuban grandpa", this clerk not giving me my 50c change for the water I had purchased until I had to yell over the punk hardcore music that I wanted my 50c, the clerk then sort of edge-of-perception disdainfully handing me the two quarters, the rudeness therof I didn't know what to make of and may just assume was the clerk's reaction to my outfit but who knows(?), I was smiling a kind of strained smile much of the night due to having arrived alone but by the end of the night I felt pretty comfortable, partially comforted by the performances including the last, weird, caitlyn-bender-lying-on-the-floor-reciting-the-alec-baldwin-monologue-from-glengarry-glen-ross-the-movie-comma-not-the-play-while-gunner-sang-christian-church-music-and-occasionally-distributed-strange-objects-to-the-crowd-at-one-point-bringing-out-a-cake-which-in-its-center-had-what-appeared-to-be-bloody-testicle-like-objects-wrapped-in-a-female-condom-and-ate-part-of-the-cake-then-placed-it-on-the-staircase-such-that-several-punks-almost-stepped-in-it-while-another-of-gunner's-friends-wore-a-tinfoil-hat-that-had-a-second-tinfoil-hat-attached-to-it-like-a-satellite-and-got-audience-members-to-wear-this-attached-satellite-hat-while-they-looked-in-each-others-eyes-all-this-while-a-recording-of-bender-reciting-the-same-above-mentioned-monologue-played-over-a-loud-amplifier-but-was-schizophrenically-edited-such-that-a-phrase-would-only-be-uttered-every-couple-seconds-all-of-this-with-a-trigger-warning-at-the-start, and being so comforted by the veracity and inclusiveness of this performance I was able to extract from Gunner who clearly didn't want to have a conversation with me, sitting on the stoop outside the venue and kind of turning away from me and facing towards Gunner's friend while I sort-of half stooped to let them know I wanted their attention, it being obvious at this point b/c of the body language that they did not want to give their attention to me, I was comfortable enough to be able to emit a loud sort of squeaky yawp to formalize my request for Gunner's attention, which worked, and when I asked, "did that thing have a name?" Gunner looked at me and not unkindly replied "pokercake... the name was pokercake" (paraphrased) and I said "thanks" and walked away.
I haven't seen much else in PGH along the same lines of Gunner's work, Sunshine Ears the touring performance artist being a close exception. Gunner was also present at that performance over at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, which like a true Apocalypse has lingered threateningly on the edge of my Pittsburgh experience... always threatening my perceptions of the PGH art scene with strange, young, appealing art from persons like Gunner. These people aren't from New York. I don't see them at (most) of the poetry events I go to. Did they all meet in college? Are they the remains of some other scene? Is there stuff in Lawrenceville I don't know about? It's disconcerting... The artists crawl out of their hole, put on some sort of insane display for no money, and go back. I don't think it would be necessarily impossible to crawl in there with them, but, as I think I talked about above, in my case there has to be some level of self-purification and -destruction to even get up the courage to ask. Jesus, the plot thickens--poetryburgh@gmail.com
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