Movement was the driving force behind the settling of the American West, and the long flat vistas that stretched toward the Pacific shaped the ideology behind this iconic embodiment of American architecture. Mirage opened on Februas a part of Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield. MIRAGE distills the recognizable and repetitious suburban home into the essence of its lines, reflecting and disappearing into the vast western landscape. Utilizing the form of a ranch-style suburban American house, the sculpture is composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. Its beer list is short: a smart move, I think, when you’re just starting out and when your brewery is in the basement of an old row house, in what used to be a garage.MIRAGE is a site-specific installation set in the Southern California desert. I visited three new (to me) breweries a few weekends ago, and Cinderlands definitely stood out among them. What?!)Ĭinderlands is part of Pittsburgh's craft-beer blossoming, and boy are they doing good work. (For the record, in 1978, there were forty-two breweries in all of America. That’s more breweries in my county now than there were in the entire country forty years ago.
Google, Uber, UPMC, and CMU’s robotics program contribute to Pittsburgh's survival to my eye, Allegheny County's fifty-seven breweries are also an important part of Pittsburgh's attraction. Similarly, my new hometown, Pittsburgh, is building something beautiful on its industrial history. There’s a similar beauty in Eliot and Fitzgerald’s descriptions of industrialization. The loveliness of the word “cinder,” though, as well as its fairy-tale allusion to Cinderella, make this history a lovely one, something to be mythologized rather than lamented. That’s what the name evokes to me, anyhow - a land of cinders, the embers of an industrial past - much like the barren wastelands that Eliot and Fitzgerald describe. I can’t find any press on why the owners of Cinderlands chose to call their venture "Cinderlands," but I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with Pittsburgh’s industrial history: a land of steel and smoke. Those haunting eyes of Eckleburg’s appear on the cover of this edition: They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their irises are one yard high. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. If so, this passage will ring a bell:Ībout half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. Maybe you analyzed the looming pair of eyes that float above the valley on a giant billboard.
Maybe you wrote a paper on what the valley of ashes says about industrialization or the post-war class divide. If you read Gatsby in high school, you likely remember the valley of ashes. Eliot’s The Waste Land comes to mind, along with the book that Eliot’s poem influenced, F. “Cinders Land?”Īfter three visits to this great new brewery, I’ve finally got its name down. For the first couple of weeks after it opened, I couldn’t keep its name straight. There’s a new brewery in my neighborhood: Cinderlands.
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