Hello. As happens every year or so, Hot Metal Bridge is going through something of an identity change, with a whole new crew of editors and readers. With so much turnover every year, how exactly do you get to know who we are? How do we have an identity as a publication? It’s something that has been talked about often in the hallowed halls of the Cathedral of Learning and uh, we don’t know that we have an answer. Seriously, be very wary of anyone who claims to have answers about made up questions like this.

But one thing we will be doing is updating the site with blog entries, book reviews, and podcasts between issues. That way you’ll be reading or hearing a lot more from us. That should give you some idea of what we’re about, and since this is a student publication, it’s fitting that that idea could potentially change every week. Stay tuned.

We’d also be tragically remiss if we didn’t use this space to brag about the accomplishments of previous staff. Check out former Fiction Editors Julie Draper’s recent piece at Smokelong Quarterly and Katie Coyle’s story at Fiction Circus. You can also find recent work by Emeritus Editor Salvatore Pane’s in places like PANK, Annalemma, Metazen, and possibly too many other places to mention.

Congratulations should also go out to Emeritus Editor Ashleigh Pederson, whose story “Small and Heavy World” was shortlisted by Best American Short Stories 2010.

Besides the achievements of our compadres, what are we thinking about this week? Former Pitt instructor Cathy Day’s essay about rethinking the workshop model over at The Millions and how reaction to it got so contentious. AWP and how sometimes you wonder why you’re going – the chance to meet fellow writers and instructors and talk about the crucial issues of the day or the parties (Steve is going with the parties). What we would do if the government turned off our interwebs.

Just in case, we’re asking: What was your favorite pre-internet activity? Robyn recalls watching the Scream movies over and over again in her friend’s red-walled basement. Also, lining overripe garden vegetables in the street and watching cars run them over. Steve used to kick a nerf soccer ball around while imagining he was as good as this guy. How about you?

Our fourth issue is nearly set to debut! Like an anxious dancer it waits in the wings, pulling down its too-short tutu.
Barrring any kind of editorial/personal meltdown, the finest fiction, art, criticism, nonfiction and poetry we could find should arrive on your proverbial doorstep this Monday.

So tighten your suspenders, friends. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

Yours,
The Editors

Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.

The best part? No entry fee.

Full details here. Good luck.

Like jazz, the short story is a truly American art form. While Americans didn’t invent it, we honed it, much like the Italians did so many years ago when they looked at Chinese noodles and said: Throw some tomatoes and cheese on those bad boys and now we’re talking. Take a few blank pages and with some hard work, you’ve planted your flag of creativity and rosy optimism and made something out of nothing. Not to mention, short stories are SHORT, and considering the attention span of our current society being whittled away by video games, cable TV, ipods and high speed Internet, they are the perfect medium for a good ol’ shot of literature. A short story gives a reader the opportunity to, in one fifteen minute sitting, have a complete, complex, artistic experience. How many plays and movies can say the same?

Like many endangered critters, short stories have seen shrinking habitats (no more can they be found in The Atlantic; literary magazines have recently lost a major distributor, and will have trouble getting on to shelves). But there is hope.

Take, for example, the new Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King. It’s now in major bookstores all over the country, along with the entire Best American series (essays, science writing, sports writing, comics, etc). Best American Short Stories — which people in the know refer to by the fishy acronym BASS — includes stories by the venerable, funny, postmodern 77-year old John Barth and the 29-year old Lauren Groff, whose first novel is due next year. With that range, there ought to be something to love, right? And it’s a big, shiny turquoise book, hard to miss. Online? Excerpts from a few stories, natch.

The 1987 adolescents-battling-monsters classic The Monster Squad has just been released on a special 20th Anniversary DVD.

The film mostly lives on in memory for a scene where one of the monster-hunting kids kicks the Wolfman in a most sensitive region; the Wolfman doubles over in pain, and the kid, who’s shocked to see a supernatural being hurt by such a juvenile tactic, says, “Wolfman’s got nards!” My brother and I would use the phrase pretty much all the time; I don’t really think “nards” had any meaning before The Monster Squad, but it sure did afterwards.

Two Pittsburgh tie-ins to the movie and that magical phrase:

One, Pittsburgh’s Unicorn Mountain, a collective of artists, earlier this year published Wolfman’s Got Nards: A Compendium of New American Monsters in collaboration with another Pittsburgh entity, Encyclopedia Destructica.

Two, the writer of the Monster Squad screenplay, Shane Black, is a Pittsburgh native. He’s got quite the resume: Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight are all Shane Black scripts. However, film historians will no doubt remember Black largely on the strength of The Monster Squad.

Okay, perhaps not. But apparently the making-of feature on the anniversary DVD is longer than the film itself, so someone is taking The Monster Squad pretty seriously. (Either that or, as the AV Club review suggests, DVD extras are getting out of control.)

-Adam

That was my mental Polaroid of the troupe for a couple years, until my friend urged me to come to a show during my last semester. She said things were different, but didn’t elaborate, and I’m sure I didn’t believe her. 

But she was right. Gone were the easy, seemingly irresistible sex gags. Gone were the character-sketches-wandering-the-stage scenarios, with five hams mugging and grimacing all over the stage. Most of the show featured a long, improvised story involving a high school loser dating a Prom queen. Characters, setting, etc. were solicited from the audience beforehand and written on a chalkboard behind the stage for the troupe to work in.

Transcribed, the story wouldn’t have made great literature, but somehow, working together, the cast members created a story that kept the audience’s interest (including mine). The jokes that came up were organic, related to timing and character, and funny.

I’m thinking about this now because in just a few days I shall treat myself to the closest thing to that experience Pittsburgh has to offer. I’m talking about the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance, whose monthly event (this one is “Aftermath 2007″) will occur Saturday night.

The KSWA is a semi-pro wrestling federation that holds monthly events at the Lawrenceville Moose, a working Moose lodge. The wrestlers haven’t quit their day jobs: I spotted one, Shane Starr, in a University of Pittsburgh computer lab once. At the end of each show, “good” wrestlers (“babyfaces,” in industry parlance) like Kris Kash, Double A Anthony Alexander, the Snake Man, and Justin Sane help dismantle and pack up the ring elbow to elbow with “bad” wrestlers (“heels”) like Ali Kaida, the Bloodbeast, Biker Al, and “The Enforcer” Shawn Blanchard of the Blanchard Express (slogan: “Booze, Broads, and Belts”).

There are silly continuing story lines, like the prolonged losing streak of Joseph Q., previously the Drunken Luchador Joey Quervo, an obviously Caucasian wrestler in a Mexican wrestling mask who lost his wrestling abilities the moment he joined AA; there’s the King Del Douglas’s year-long indentured servitude to Dr. Devastation Lou Martin, who won a “Slave-For-a-Year” match in December. An essay I read over the summer likened this aspect of professional wrestling to a kind of soap opera for men, envisioning the continuing-story format as something like a rope with many knots, each length representing one installment of the series, which is, at least in theory, neverending. The essay, “‘Never Trust a Snake’: WWF Wrestling as Male Melodrama” by Henry Jenkins III (in a collection of criticism on pro wrestling called Steel Chair to the Head), name-checks Jane Feuer, a Pitt Film Studies professor who came up with this “knotted rope” metaphor to describe television melodrama. (She’s done a lot of work on “Dynasty” and “Melrose Place”)

But the connection I’m taking so awfully long to make is in the idea of people collaboratively improvising a story. That happens, pardon the expression, out the ass in the KSWA.

A friend reported hearing one wrestler, the Latin Assassin, say to another, Zero, “hit the pole,” giving his opponent a chance to brace himself for a head-first shove into the steel corner post. There are long, maddening moments where Referee Jimmie James patiently explains some minor point of wrestling law to ringside manager “Gentleman” Joe Perri while behind his back two members of the International Thugs tag team pummel another. The “yes and” principle of improv is alive and flourishing in the KSWA: if Baracus, an International Thug, throws La Lucha into the ropes, La Lucha goes with it, bouncing back and setting Baracus up for a brutal clothesline.

Perhaps most of all, the wrestlers do the same thing, essentially, those improv kids did, moving the story from point to point with a particular end in mind. I and every other spectator knows that fan-favorite the Latin Assassin will ultimately pin the newbie Zero, for instance, but in the meantime how are the wrestlers to arrive at that place, and how will they put the ending into question? That match spilled out onto the tile floor and featured Zero dashing a folding chair across the back of the Latin Assassin, who’d just returned from an injury.  I honestly wondered if Zero, scrappy underdog, might just surprise the staid old Assassin, even as I knew he wouldn’t.

That’s storytelling, and the wrestlers of the KSWA do it well, better and better each time I see them. It’s a soap opera, definitely, played out with kicks, chokeslams, elbow-drops, pile-drivers, and clotheslines. But to notice the improvisation, the graceful cooperation between the men acting out the roles of babyface and heel, is not to become cynical about the process of elaborate fakery that wrestling surely is, but to become part of the story in surprising and gratifying ways.

(If anyone is reading this locally, I cannot recommend KSWA matches highly enough. Read up on event details at www.kswa.net)