A memory // Rick Gribenas
I mentioned in this space last week the dire financial situation of local sound artist Rick Gribenas’s family as he was undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma; yesterday morning, Rick passed away. I knew Rick as a friend, not as close as some, but close enough to have spent a good bit of time with him…
Robinson campaign REALLY gets started
Carmen Robinson first announced her campaign a few months back, but she only had her first formal press conference today. And she began by hitting that classic theme of the mayoral challenger: a grievance about how the city spent too much money on “big businesses and large real estate developers” — and not enough on…
MP3 Monday: Good Night, States
A year ago, Good Night, States released their debut album, Short Films On Self Control, and I wrote a feature on them, calling it “a notch above most everything similar that’s being released locally at this point.” I stand by that assessment, and the regular internet releases GN,S has been producing since then have lived…
Where are all the music blogs?
Elsewhere in the country, the problem is an overstock of music blogs — everyone and her brother is posting MP3’s and chattering about the alleged contents of the possibly-legit leaked track list of the forthcoming Wolfdeer EP or whatever. Here in Pittsburgh — seemingly not so much. I can think of one or two music…
Ron Padgett at the International Poetry Forum
Padgett is a fine, venerable and very funny poet from New York City who read at the Carnegie Lecture Hall. But it was impossible to attend this March 11 event without recalling the Forum’s own impending demise — which seemed almost emphasized by the fact that neither Padgett nor Forum founder Sam Hazo made any…
Unfettered Sorrow
Well, it was only a matter of time: Now CNN has done its own story on hardscrabble Braddock and its mayor, John Fetterman. So for those keeping track at home, Fetterman and Braddock have recently been featured by CBS, The New York Times, the Colbert Report, CNBC and I think Fox News as well. All…
The COR of Belief
For 40-plus years, the Community of Reconciliation has shown how faith can bring us together — and how hard that really is
Timecrimes
In this latest mind-bending cautionary tale, a middle-aged Spanish man named Hector (Karra Elejalde) finds his lazy afternoon at his country home interrupted by some strange sightings beyond his fence. Through his binoculars he spots a topless woman and a creepy-looking man whose face is obscured with pink bandages. But going to investigate leads to…
The Class
Laurent Cantet’s two-hour film covers one school year at a junior high in a tough Paris neighborhood, focusing on one teacher and his class of 13-year-olds. The youngish teacher — François Marin (François Bégaudeau) — is dedicated, spirited and open to less-conventional instruction techniques; his students are a mixed batch in background, ethnicity, enthusiasm and…
The Watchmen
Zack Snyder tackles Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ influential graphic novel, set in an alternate 1985 during the Cold War. In it, a group of outlawed costumed crime-fighters try to track down a killer, and confront world annihilation. The award-winning novel was lauded for its dense multi-generational histories, overlapping narratives and meta-commentary that operated as…
The Pittsburgh Jewish-Israeli Film Festival
The annual festival offers 22 films from Israel and around the world representing Jewish experiences from the comic to the dramatic to the inspirational.
Following republication of a collection confronting motherhood in wartime, poet Alicia Ostriker visits Pittsburgh.
In “Song of the Abandoned One,” Ostriker writes, unflinchingly, in the voice of a mother who wants to “kill the baby,” with its “rubber arms and legs and ugly doll face.”
This Just In: March 12 – 19
Highlights from the local TV news: Horsing around at the Carnegie.
Popped Art
Does the city have more art than the economy can support?
High Note
Used instruments have new songs to play
Blog Role
New site seeks to turn bloggers into citizen journalists
Sobering Defense
What’s the best defense when you kill someone while driving drunk? Try being a terrible driver when you’re sober.
Pittsburgh n’@
Dispatches from the blogosphere: Something for Pirates fans to look forward to.
Locals Seven Color Sky release full-length Goodbye to Gravity
If anything, such ’80s inflections are more in fashion now, which could bode well for Seven Color Sky.
New Amsterdam
Fancy cocktails and frog’s legs herald a new sort of bar on Butler Street.
Sausalido
Casual but refined dining is part of the youthful transformation of Bloomfield.
Painter and illustrator Arthur Szyk’s obsession with Nazism fascinates.
Szyk’s work was often macabre, even surreal, featuring pasty Hitlers marching beside monstrous S.S. soldiers, piles of grimacing corpses and winged Axis dictators buzzing through the air.
Forward-thinking local band Drugdealer releases Tits EP
“Our first couple shows, we were really noisy and a bit too loud, but we’re starting to get better in controlling that.”
Mystery man Blank Dogs performs at Howler’s this Sunday
Blank Dogs always covers his face with a mask or sheet, thereby retaining complete anonymity, a la The Residents.
Playwright Mark Clayton Southers discusses I Nipoti, the latest in his “culture-clash” series.
While I Nipoti does offer some racial philosphizing, Southers intends it to be “just enough that someone will walk away with two things they didn’t know before.”
Iolanthe
You can get musical satisfaction in a good early duet between Rachel Myers and the capable Justin Thomas Zeno, as Strephon, or in a charming second-act quartet.
Butch Walker rises from the ashes with the introspective Sycamore Meadows
“It doesn’t do any good to try to turn a pop diva into Bob Dylan.”
Britain’s acclaimed Ballet Boyz return for the first time since 2003.
“Sometimes they will be working together and sometimes against one another and trying to out-dance each other,” says Trevitt.
At Wood Street, Chico MacMurtrie and Amorphic Robot Works find the architecture in nature.
Over a period of minutes, the birds flap their wings slowly and then randomly deflate, becoming moribund-looking husks that simulate life’s foreshortened trajectory.
A Burning Disparity
Pittsburgh has just 11 female firefighters and hasn’t hired a new one this century
Savage Love
My husband and I have been together for about four years and have been married for a little over a year. He’s 31; I’m 27. We started out as friends and soon began a long-distance relationship, until I got pregnant. We have a great friendship, and honestly I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else.…
Chaos in District 4
Yesterday, the Pittsburgh Hoagie reported allegations involving vote fraud in the Democratic Party’s endorsement vote for city council district 4. Blogger Matt Hogue alleged that a vote may have been cast in that race by someone merely pretending to be a committeeperson. Hogue surmises that the vote was most likely cast for Patrick Reilly, who…
