Capote
By all accounts, Truman Capote was a horrible man: unhappy, self-absorbed and bitterly insouciant, albeit a delight at his generation’s It parties, where he dropped names, told stories (always titillating, sometimes salacious) and drank himself to death. His masterpiece, In Cold Blood, which invented a new genre of writing, the “nonfiction novel” — the name…
Café Euro
Location: US Steel Tower, 600 Grant Street, Downtown. 412-434-0800 Hours: Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Sat. 5-9:30 p.m. Closed Sunday. Prices: Appetizers, salads, soups $4.95-12.95; pasta $12.95-19.95; entrees $16.95-24.95 Fare: American steakhouse and upscale Italian Atmosphere: Cool, cushy, clubby Liquor: Full bar Until recently, the pinnacle of Pittsburgh dining — literally — was the Top of…
Stay
A good surprise-twist ending has lately become the Holy Grail of movie thrillers. Trouble is, the harder you try to come up with one, the less likely it becomes that you nail the important things. So you usually end up serving your audience cheap wine from a paper cup. In Stay, novelist-cum-screenwriter David Benioff…
Hair Today…
This November’s mayoral race is almost certain to be meaningless in two ways. In one sense, we’ve known who our next mayor is since the Democratic primary…but in another sense, we won’t really know who he is until January. The obvious front-runner, Democrat Bob O’Connor, has always had a Reaganesque quality, starting with the…
The Weather Man
At the risk of employing a weather analogy straight away, Gore Verbinski’s film, The Weather Man, is like one of those gray days that actually turns out to be quite pleasant. Verbinski, who’s better known for his noisier and more frantic flicks (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mexican) switches gears and delivers a small-scale comedy-drama…
Sex, Lies and Cell-Phone Bills
How did an attractive suburban Pittsburgh woman in her 30s — one who is right out of central casting for Desperate Housewives — find out her husband was cheating on her? Simple. “Guys are dumb,” she explained, a few minutes after starting an impromptu conversation with me at a local Starbucks. …
Prime
Meryl Streep hasn’t been funny now for a long time. In fact, she hasn’t even been very interesting. It hurts me to say this, for I practically had drinks thrown in my face when she was an icon back in the ’80s, defending her immaculate talent to boorish iconoclasts at cocktail parties. (What do untenured…
What does the symbol on the Steelers’ helmets stand for?
I live in fear of the day when somebody asks the question “Why are they called the Steelers?” Sounds impossible, but only a couple decades ago, no one would have needed to ask what the logo meant either. The design dates back to the 1930s, when our football team was awful and the steel…
DOOM
Video games are fun because they put the player in control: Open this, turn here, kill this, kill that. You rule, dude. Films based on video games pointedly leave the viewer outside the action, watching passively as somebody else cocks the Big Effin’ Gun and takes aim. But since even wildly successful video games such…
He calls himself Mingus Tourette. He drives a pink ambulance. He is from Edmonton, Canada, and has been photographed holding a cigarette and a shouldered shotgun. Tourette is another in a long line of literary badasses,
Pointy hats and eye of newt are so three centuries ago, but witchery hasn’t gone out of style. The chick in the Steelers sweatshirt ahead of you in line at Giant Eagle might be a pagan — or maybe the kid bagging your bananas at the end has tried his hand at Wiccan…
THE LEGEND OF ZORRO
Martin Campbell’s sequel to 1995’s The Mask of Zorro, which also starred Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, catches up with that masked nobleman and avenger of the poor. Here, the heroics of Zorro are set amid the ill-defined politics of California statehood, before being ramped into utter ridiculousness by a Scooby Doo-type plot involving killer…
Judgment Day
Judging Money Raising the Bar All in the Family Political Footballs This November, the U.S. Senate will have to decide whether Harriet Miers belongs on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senators will have to judge a woman they barely know, a lawyer whose qualifications are obscure, and whose judicial philosophy is almost a mystery. Allegheny County…
Submachine
“We’re about to have our fourteenth anniversary,” says Submachine guitarist Jeff Cherub in an interview on the band’s new live DVD, “which is way too long for a punk band, but we’re too dumb to stop.” Unbelievably, that interview — which, like most of Off the Rails, was filmed in or around South…
Afrirampo
Plucked from the ever-growing noise scenes blasting their way out of Osaka and Kyoto, this female duo of regressive ADD-rockers mixes nonsense, jittery mid-song freak-outs and combustible feedback-splattered guitar filth into a force that would most surely mop the floor with the White Stripes, the Black Keys or damn near any one of the growing…
Sunburned Hand of the Man
This double LP by the New England percussion-heavy collective does nothing to tighten the band’s reins or edit the sprawl found on previous releases. In fact, Wedlock is tribal-avant-stoner groove as field recording. Edited from performances taped either on the road to or in Alaska for a friend’s wedding, shards of conversation, piano plinkings and…
Slightly Shorter Shot
“If he had competition that was worthy, who was a Democrat, I would vote for that,” says Herman Jones, when asked about his support for City Council District 6 Republican candidate Alan Perry. “But I’m looking at these other people and I’d rather go with Alan because he has a good heart.” Jones, like…
A Conversation with Michael Browne
Ask a dozen local mountain bikers to guess the home town of Dirt Rag, one of the sport’s most respected and long-running magazines, and 11 will probably shoot for somewhere in Colorado, or at least the Southwest. But what’s the correct answer? Try O’Hara Township, right next to Hartwood Acres. That’s where Point Breeze resident…
Law Enforcement
As the city’s U.S. Attorney tries to get a purveyor of porn films prosecuted, she may be striking out against an obscenity target once thought out of bounds: the written word. The Pittsburgh-area home of the owner of an erotic tales Web site, Red Rose Stories (www.red-rose-stories.com), was raided in early October by the Pittsburgh office of the Federal…
Media:If They’d Wanted an Opinion Columnist …
An opinion columnist for Penn State University’s student newspaper has been fired by the editor in chief for complaining in print that editors have too much control over his opinion pieces. The piece that got him fired was edited and approved by a mid-level editor before publication. Now the offending piece has been…
Elections: Young Voters Group Endorses Nearly Blank Slate
“I just can’t get excited by any of these candidates,” Lindsay Patross groaned during a break at the first-ever League of Young Voters Endorsement Meeting on Oct. 18. Neither, it seems, could the nearly 20 other people who crammed into a room at the Union Project space in Highland Park. When the organization, which…
New Meaning to “Traveling Exhibit”
It took a bus-stop wait for Jennifer Gibson and fellow artist Fred Zeleny to conceive Art in Transit. Both are frequent Port Authority riders — Zeleny, for instance, reverse-commutes from Squirrel Hill to an airport-area company — and thus, he says, “We wait at a lot of bus stops.” The Art In Transit project –…
