Caravan Theatre's production of a new play about the cult-hero science-fiction writer whose works inspired movies including Blade Runner and Total Recall concludes this weekend. Here's a short review.
Tags: Caravan Theatre , Philip K. Dick , theater
One of this town’s many fine smaller stage troupes, Caravan Theatre of Pittsburgh, does itself proud with this strange and ambitious play about the cult-hero science-fiction author.
Even if you’ve never read a word Dick wrote, you know his concepts: Films from Bladerunner and Total Recall to Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly are based on his writings about the blurring lines between humans and androids, memory and falsehood, the future and the present.
Victoria Stewart’s play 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick smartly and imaginatively summons the author’s spirit with a play whose form is adapted from Dick’s own aesthetics.
The play is largely set in 1982, on the very day Dick died, in his San Francisco flat. But it’s built around a divine revelation Dick believes he had several years earlier, and his efforts to write and publish a massive “exegesis” on God.
Just as Dick wrote about the present collapsing into the future, so in 800 Words does time seem unstable, with events from decades apart overlapping. And just like Dick made himself a character in his fictions, so does Stewart herself show up as a major character in Act 2, to hilarious if ultimately unnerving effect.
Caravan co-founders John Gresh and Dana Hardy play Dick and his long-suffering wife, Tessa. (“It’s just words,” Tessa says of one of her husband’s promises; he responds, “That’s all I have.”) The often manic action involves puppets, including Dick’s talking cat. The excellent supporting cast is expertly directed by Martin Giles.
A Dick fan I ran into at the show, staged at Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Downtown venue, said the play had inspired him to dig back into Dick’s writings.
Here’s Michelle Pilecki’s review for CP.
There are four more performances starting tomorrow, including a Sunday matinee. Tickets are $15-20.
Tags: theater , Philip K.Dick , 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick , Caravan Theatre of Pittsburgh , Program Notes
In light of questions arising out of the Jordan Miles civil lawsuit, the Pittsburgh Citizens Police Review Board will hold a public hearing at 5:30 p.m. to look into the policies and procedures surrounding the Pittsburgh City Police's undercover units known as “99 Cars.”
Miles was a senior at CAPA High School on January 12, 2010 when he was walking from his mother's home on Tioga Street to his grandmother's house to sleep at about 11 p.m. Miles says he was approached by a speeding, light-colored sedan and jumped by three men inside who demanded “guns, money, and drugs.” He was then severely beaten, arrested and charged with aggravated assault among other charges.
Tags: jordan miles , pittsburgh , police , CPRB , saldutte , sisak , ewing , pittinger , Image
This nationally touring exhibition, now at the Carnegie Science Center through Sunday, strikes a nice balance between razzmatazz and education, hands-on experience and the reflected light of celebrity.
Modestly titled GUITAR: The Instrument That Rocked the World, it was organized by The National GUITAR Museum (which is intent on avoiding confusion with The National ZITHER Museum).
There’s plenty of stuff for music, science and craft geeks, including pre-assembled versions of both acoustic and electric guitars; a station exploring the differences between catgut, nylon and steel strings; and various displays explicating the physics of sound.
The show’s core, however, is display of 60 stringed instruments, starting with ancient varieties. But it’s mostly devoted to the multifarious makes of electric guitars, from a mass-marketed 1962 Sears Silvertone (with the amp fixed in the case!) to the Eddie Van Halen-inspired Superstrat, and even a model with a video screen in the body. Well-written ccompanying text places the instruments culturally, musically and in business terms.
Among my favorites is the USSR Rostov Stella, made in the 1970s and ’80s, before you could legally import guitars from the U.S. and Japan into the Soviet Union. The industrial-strength looking axe sports no fewer than 13 knobs and switches. (See, the Soviets really did appreciate consumer choice!)
You can’t touch any of these guitars, obviously, but there’s plenty else to handle, including an interactive display on pickups, the magnetic coils that turn the vibrations of plucked strings into electronic signals. Visiting this Sunday, I even saw folks reading the text on these exhibits, which is rarer at museums than you’d think.
Meanwhile, though GUITAR is all-ages-friendly, the iconography is deeply ’70s-rock-dude-centric. In other words, the photos and videos feature way more people who resemble Jeff Beck than otherwise.
Given the gender politics of popular music — where girls with guitars remain more notable than routine — not to mention its racial divide, that’s not unexpected. But why no funk or soul players, for instance? Or even Prince — he’s a pretty good picker.
To its credit, the exhibit does broaden the discussion, with performance video of not only Steve Vai and Johnny Winter, but also the likes of country master Chet Atkins; classical guitarist Liona Boyd; bluesman Mississippi John Hurt; and, perhaps best of all, jazz legend Django Reinhardt, seen in a grainy 1939 clip.
Finally, here’s a brief and amusing account by CP’s Margaret Welsh of touring the exhibit with local rock guitarist Dave Wheeler.
Tags: Carnegie Science Center , GUITAR: The Instrument That Rocked the World , exhibits
Story of the day: "It's possible there could be an injunction here," says Commonwealth Court Robert Simpson in a re-hearing of the state's voter ID law. This despite the fact that the state has, yet again, issued an eleventh-hour attempt to make registration easier. I've got a column out today arguing that the more of these contortions that politicians engage in, the more obvious this slap-dash law's failings become. But of course, as the blog North Pittsburgh Politics observes, even if the law is shelved for the upcoming election, it has already served a partisan purpose, by forcing Democrats to spend time and energy on preparing for it.
Meanwhile, though uncertainty over how will vote continues, the preferences of voters themselves is becoming clearer. New polling out today shows big leads for Obama in Pennsylvania, as well as widening margins in Obama's favor in other swing states. A somewhat more ambiguous poll result: While Bob Casey leads Tea Partier Tom Smith in Pennsylvania's Senate race, the margins there aren't as wide as you might expect.
Wait a minute here ... you mean it is possible to get nonprofits to regularly pay for government services after all?
OK, there's an ongoing legal battle ... zoning issues to work out ... arguments over public financing to resolve ... but other than that, a Strip District development project is gonna be great!
Workers are calling for an extension of a federal renewable-energy tax credit, which has existed for two decades. The tax is set to expire by year's end, and advocates expect lost jobs from windmill plants and the like. Also, there's that whole thing about the ice caps melting and fossil fuels running out someday.
And finally, WPXI is reporting that state troopers will no longer be carrying pepper spray. Apparently, the move was prompted by a training incident in which cadets suffered injuries while using the stuff.
Max Blumenthal, widely known for his reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, gives a free talk tomorrow at Pitt.
The talk, titled “The Strange Death of Liberal Zionism,” is hosted by Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine.
Tags: Max Blumenthal , Israeli-Palestine conflict , liberal Zionism , Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine , Image
Localism is our weekly-ish blog series highlighting some interesting crowdfunding projects based in our around Pittsburgh. Here's what we've got this week:
"DropKicker" has a name that's kind of similar to an idea I once had (for an anti-crowdfunding site called Kickstopper, in which you paid to have someone not record an album/have an event/etc.). But it's a lot nicer than that. DropKicker is an app/system for kicking bad habits. Brought to you by some of the folks behind Obscure Games, Dropkicker is kind of like a high-tech string around your finger. If your bad habit is forgetting to contribute to useful Kickstarter projects, break it for this one.
Maybe it's because I'm a drummer, or maybe it's because I like the Steelers, but this one appeals to me: Help outfit a Steelers drumline! Now, yes, I do think the NFL should probably have enough cash money to outfit a drumline. But since that doesn't seem to be something that's happening, it's a worthy cause. There's 22 days left on this $7500 campaign.
The local band Una de Luna is working on something big for its album release: a 360-degree video webcast. They need your dollars to make it happen, natch!
And sculptor Richard Michaux, who recently successfully funded some Santa sculptures, is going to the next obvious artistic quarry: presidential candidates! If you get an Obama, it'll likely be a little nicer than that Chia Obama you got for Christmas last year. I dunno if I'd want Mittens staring at me in my kitchen ("That macaroni and cheese came from the local Sheetz, didn't it? You didn't make that yourself, did you?"), but someone might.
Texture Ballet is trying to raise funds to go to NYC for a dance festival there; that Indie Go Go campaign has only a few hours left, so act fast if you want to help out a new and innovative ballet group.
And here's a weird but cool idea: an Online Food Swap. I may or may not be cool with eating someone else's food that I saw was available via the Internet; I guess I have to think about that! But we'll never know if it doesn't get funded, eh?
On the heels of the release of his film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, local-boy-made-good Stephen Chbosky returns to the scene of the crime, in a sense, for a special movie event.
Ironically, it’s not a screening of Perks, the Hollywood film Chbosky adapted from his best-selling young-adult novel of the same name, and which was shot here last year. Rather, it’s a showing, at Dormont’s Hollywood Theater, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Chbosky will introduce the film, and the screening will feature the Junior Chamber of Commerce Players, “Pittsburgh’s official Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast.”
The 1975 audience-participation cult classic figures prominently in both Chbosky’s book and film: Screenings are a cultural revelation for his awkward adolsecent protagonist.
As Chbosky wrote in a primer on the film on shmoop.com: “Just like Planet Fitness, Rocky Horror is a judgment-free zone. Charlie can wear a feather boa and a gold speedo and no one says boo. Fitting in is so important to Charlie (and to all high schoolers, let’s be honest), and Rocky Horror makes Charlie and the gang feel like they belong.”
The Hollywood — one of Pittsburgh last single-screen neighborhood movie houses — likewise figures in the film: Its Rocky Horror scenes were shot there. And apparently, Chbosky, a 42-year-old native of Upper St. Clair, had his own formative experiences there in the late 1980s.
According to a press release from the Hollywood, Chbosky “had seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Hollywood Theater as a teen, and in an interview with Hollywood.com, he said filming at the historic single-screen theater was an ‘incredibly meaningful’ experience.”
Chbosky went on to credits including writer/producer on TV’s Jericho. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Rent.
While the Hollywood usually screens the film at midnight, this week’s showing has been moved back to 10:30 p.m. Sat., Sept. 29.
Tickets are $7, and you can buy them here.
For more information, call 412-563-0368.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by the way, opens Friday; look for CP’s review tomorrow.
Tags: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" , Chbosky , "Rocky Horror" , Hollywood Theater
After sitting dormant since 2003, there have been signs of life in recent weeks at the former Lord and Taylor Department Store (which was the former Mellon Bank building).
PNC Financial Services purchased the building earlier this year for $3.8 million.
Lord and Taylor was originally supposed to be part of the city's Fifth and Forbes retail corridor to help spur economic growth in the downtown corridor. At the time it was one of several large downtown stores that included Kaufmann's Department Store (now Macy's), Lazarus and Sak's Fifth Avenue.
Lord and Taylor closed in the summer of 2003 after just three years and after the city spent about $11 million to change the building's interior to be suitable for retail. Lazarus closed the following January and Sak's Fifth Avenue pulled out earlier this year.
PNC plans to house 800 employees at the building and has said it will seek the environmentally-friendly Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. he building is expected to open sometime in the next 19 months or so.
Tags: PNC , Pittsburgh , Downtown , Fifth and Forbes , Lord and Taylor , Kaufmann's , Macy's , Lazarus , Image
Story of the day: Mayor Luke Ravenstahl issues his proposed 2013 budget. For the most part, revenues and expenditures alike track pretty closely to last year's numbers -- with no tax increases in sight -- though it's conspicuous that payments from nonprofits are slated to drop from $5.5 million to just under $3.2 million. State-appointed financial overseers have, in fact, recommended that the city investigate whether nonprofits should be doing more -- now there's a novel idea. But so far, the real story seems to be the city's plan to shore up pension and health-care obligations by using casino tax revenue.
Plans to develop a 55-acre riverfront parcel in the Strip District may be derailed -- arr, arr -- by the Allegheny Valley Railroad. The railroad has sued Buncher, the would-be developer, claiming its plans violate promises made to the railroad 30 years ago. This is the latest chapter in a long-running dispute, much of which we wrote about two years ago.
I think we all saw this coming: A new West Carson Street strip club, located a stone's throw from an alcoholism-recovery centeris having a little trouble fitting in.
Here's one of the uglier stories (so far) of the election cycle. A Republican attack ad has tried to pull a Willie Horton on state AG candidate Kathleen Kane, accusing her of "going soft" on a rapist who later attacked two other women. The ad has been widely castigated -- including by one victim's family -- because Kane had only a minimal role in the cases in question. Republicans agreed to pull the ad last week, but it was apparently still airing over the weekend. A new, slightly modified version of the ad has now been released, but justice delayed is justice denied, friends.
Meanwhile, over in Philadelphia ... despite mounting evidence that the state's Voter ID law burdens even retired CEOs, Mayor Michael Nutter has decided not to get on board to with a plan to issue local, easier-to-get IDs. According to an e-mail sent by Nutter aide Michael Abernathy, the city is focusing its resources on registering people under the state's rules, rather than endorsing an approach whose legality, the city contends, is unclear. (Though as I wrote last week, it's already been endorsed, however reluctantly, by state officials.) The plan was first hatched in Allegheny County, where Allegheny county Executive Rich Fitzgerald is hanging tough. Last night, he tweeted me with the news that the county is "not concerned with our position. Even state has indicated that is legal. Goal here is to help everyone who wants to vote." By the by, the state Voter ID law will get its second round of hearings in Commonwealth Court this morning. Stay tuned.