I hosted an evening of performance art recently, funded by a variety of good agencies on the front line of the battle to keep Pittsburgh's art scene healthy. Native son made good (or maybe only so-so this season), I was supposed to grease the wheels of the show. But they fell off. I mean, I knocked them off.

		David Conrad, an actor in Los Angeles, grew up in Edgewood and lives in the Strip District.

The show was great: Three very talented, very challenging artists got up there and arted all they had. But me, I had a story to tell and I failed to tell it. I am here today to make amends.

You know how when you drive around here, you go a certain way? In New York, there are 65 ways to get from Avenue B to Lincoln Center, but in Pittsburgh there are usually only two ways to get from Swissvale to Bloomfield, or Whitehall to Oakland, and really to most people there's only one. We've made trails here, paths, like the deer that populated the place before we took it; hat's the way we understand the landscape.

An amazing thing has been happening around here recently: While the city is sliding into an economic quagmire, all sorts of people have been running around the place cutting new paths through the region. Artists, activists, organizers -- they've shown folks that there are new ways and reasons to get from one part of the city to another that they normally never would have gone.

The cultural stations of Pittsburgh's cross have been long clear. You go to Oakland. You go through the Strip, then hesitate near some Downtown galleries, so you can then be alternative on the North Side and finally end up on East Carson where it's too late to see anything so you shop a little and then get a meal.

But now in this supposedly downtrodden and depressed place, there are newly beaten paths to Etna and Millvale, Wilkinsburg and Homestead (the real one, not the mall), Lawrenceville and even, yes, Wilmerding.

There's more going on artistically than I've seen in years and people are running all over the place from borough to borough to take it all in.

What's happened is regionalism has turned inward. Instead of exploring outer space, we've begun to look at all the locales we always drove by on the way to the Carnegie and we've realized that they, too, are places where "culture happens." Instead of going out into the forests for fuel, we're tearing down our old fences and lighting the place from within.

This could serve as a lesson or a metaphor for the committee-research mania about which city Pittsburgh should try to be like. Are we Seattle-esque? Are we Austinish? Are we Louisvilian?

Enough. Just be the 'Burgh (a term only a snob could call derogative). Because the real question is: How do we revive our own heritage? How do we take the magic that still rises out of the ground here and feed it through a different furnace?

We're a wounded civilization. We lost our myth. We once made steel, the superstructure of the modern world. Now we don't. But before that even, we lost our self-respect for the agencies that enabled the myth to live.

People will often cite stories about the great Pittsburghers of the past. Billy Strayhorn, Gene Kelly, Andy Warhol and on and on: How did they all come out of this little town? The condescension is laughable. Sure, it's impressive to study the list of Pittsburgh's finest expatriates, but ultimately they are anomalies. The names I wonder about are the ones scattered across the graveyards and the fire houses, the schools and VFWs around the county. Names and stories nobody ever wrote much about. People who lived and died in this city as it reached its industrial zenith, who received few accolades, left few records and probably wished they'd run off like the odd Warhola kid down the street.

But they were the blood and the bones of the place. . They're the names in the obits column that tick by. There must be somewhere in the karmic order some accumulation of these peoples' spirit. We must somehow still learn from them.

I wonder if the slag heaps couldn't tell us something? The flamed-out cinders of the steel business, now the well-drained foundations of many a housing plan or mall. I've always imagined the stuff had some greater significance. It looks like type when you pick it up. My fantasy is that if you could sort through all the piles, read which letter was which and arrange them as they were once set down, you'd get the unprinted, unfiled stories of all the people who toiled here and passed on.

The record of those who through the valleys and hollows made this place a legend of work, a byword for industry and craftsmanship. You'd hear language and accents recently forgotten. Learn histories untaught in schools. See pathways light up across the region that folks have lost the faith to use.

And isn't that what these artist types are doing? Aren't they following old trails, committing to "dead" or "troubled" neighborhoods, scratching at the varnish in some old house to see if there isn't some trace of the people, their people, who went before, kind of like the grooves cut onto the wax of an album.

It is out there. I see these many young and not-so young artists trying to invoke the Pittsburgh that lives within them -- rather than trying to act like the Seattle without.

Lighting small fires around the city to remind us the roads are still open.

I watched "The Deer Hunter" recently, the Michael Cimino film made in the late 1970s with Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep and a host of other giants. It's set in the Mon Valley, Clairton mostly, with some South Side highlights (and an unforgivable interior that turned out to be a bar in Cleveland, but we'll forgive them that one).

The wedding scene in the film is what everyone remembers: a huge, operatic sequence of these Ukrainian kids tying the knot just before the men are about to ship out for Vietnam. By the end of it, everybody's drunk, dancing, laughing or crying. And then for some reason, the guy DeNiro plays decides to take off running through the streets of his hometown. His buddies trail him in their beat-up Caddy and watch as he starts inexplicably tearing off all of his clothes. What do you do with your drunk, naked best man sitting in the middle of the neighborhood basketball court at 3 in the morning? If he's also your best friend and you are Christopher Walken, you join him.

I say all this for one reason. These men, on the edge of the rest of their lives, with a ticket out through the war and through their own hopes for the future, sit on this dinky court and one of them says to the other, "It's all here, you know ... It's all here."

A nod.

"Yeah."

Whenever anyone asks me, "Why Pittsburgh?" or "What's there?" or "Aren't you glad you got out?", I shake my head. I tell them: "It's all here."

I've never found a better way to put it. I think -- no, I'm sure -- there are right now within a few miles of you as you read this, a hundred artists of all shapes and sizes working out a better way.

Find them. They may even remind you why you stayed.