Pittsburgh had been immortalized by its own painter, John Kane, and as a young art student I remember thinking what a shame it was that he had squandered his obvious talents on a place where there was nothing to look at. Within the past 20 years, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, train stations have been converted to shopping malls and factories to residential lofts. On occasion, Graham's appreciation for Pittsburgh's history is subsumed by acute nostalgia for a time before the layoffs and the closings, when the ''bonds of home'' referred to in the subtitle were still intact. The desire to go backward, rowing against the currents of change, the longing for an enclave in which the old order still prevails, seem benign enough until this tribute to manual labor strays into the realm of men's supremacy and their entitlement. It isn't the food or the game that matters but the extreme bond of family. . . .
Men are in front of the firelight of the TV, women are in the kitchen comparing notes about kids.
I guess it must be. I wouldn't know. I was washing the dishes. The sheer physicality of the labor that Graham extols culminates in the image of surging molten steel as a metaphor for sexual potency. Indeed, ''Singing the City'' is a veritable anthem to virility.