At 18, Josh Pollock is already fed up with politics.

He says that's the reason he will run for mayor of Pittsburgh this spring.

"We're going to have some fun with it," said Pollock, a senior at the Pittsburgh School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Pollock, a guitar player and member of the band Five8Five, will announce his candidacy Saturday during a performance at Coolpeppers Hothouse in Lawrenceville.

He plans to petition his way onto the mayoral ballot in February, though he's not sure which party he will try to represent.

"Most likely it will be Democrat, but we're still not sure," he said of his advisers, some of whom are younger than he.

Pollock has no campaign platform yet, and he even lacks a decent photograph of himself for his promotional handouts and Internet site. What he does have is an aversion to Democratic Mayor Tom Murphy, and the belief that plenty of people share his feeling.

"I'm not a fan of Mayor Murphy, not at all," Pollock said yesterday.

He rattled off a string of criticisms about Murphy's performance, including his insistence on publicly financed new stadiums for the Steelers and Pirates, and his now-abandoned plan to revive Downtown with more than $100 million in subsidies for retail businesses.

Pollock, who lives with his parents in Squirrel Hill, said a mayoral race between Murphy and a likely challenger, City Council President Bob O'Connor, would bore him senseless.

"It would be the kind of thing where I would look at the ballot and say, 'I don't think there's anybody worth voting for.' I'd just skip it."

About the only way he could get excited about the race, he said, was to run himself.

And so he is.

Referring to himself in the third person, the candidate said this in his maiden press release: "Josh Pollock is a character with whom the youth of tomorrow can identify with, and he will provide them with hope and leadership -- or at least some nachos."

He pledged "different ideas" for city government, but said yesterday they are not yet baked enough to discuss.

One issue Pollock is passionate about is his opposition to capital punishment. In a letter to the editor published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a year ago, Pollock wrote: "It is long past time that the racist and classist death penalty be abolished."

He is a member of the Western Pennsylvania group that is trying to free death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal was convicted in the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Pollock said he believes Abu-Jamal is "a principled man," and he admires his writings from death row.

Though Pollock may not care, his support for Abu-Jamal will not win him any support from the police union. Officers everywhere regard Abu-Jamal as a cold killer and his supporters as empty-headed people who have chosen the wrong symbol for their crusade against capital punishment.

Pollock said he has one limitation in his run for the city's top job -- his "inability to stop caring."

His parents, David and Rita, know of his long-shot campaign. "I have yet to get a good reaction out of them," Pollock admitted.

But he hopes to do better with average voters. He says many of them might be willing to trust a bright high school student before they would give Murphy another term.