The style of music John Adams is known for, and which he composed for his opera Nixon in China, will be broadly familiar to anyone who's heard a Philip Glass film soundtrack (like Thin Blue Line or The Ice Storm): spare clusters of notes repeated, often across stately chord changes, to somewhat hypnotic effect. It's usually called "minimalism." But if Nixon, excerpts of which Adams conducted this past weekend at the PSO (where he is composer of the year), is a pretty rich work, it's due not only to the music, but also to the fascinating verse libretto, by poet Alice Goodman.

The Jan. 16 Heinz Hall show excerpted the 1985 opera's opening scene, with President Nixon and his wife, Pat, arriving for their historic visit, to be greeted by Premier Chou En-lai. The singers merely stood in a row, the orchestra behind them, and only baritone John Maddalena, with his long nose and hooded glower, looked much like the historical figure he played. (Mao was sung by tenor Russell Thomas, who's African-American, his wife, Chiang Chi'ing, by fair-skinned blonde soprano Hila Plitmann.) "News has a kind of mystery," goes Goodman's opening line for Nixon, and she and Adams proceed to flesh out a man who perceives himself as an actor on a world stage, his sense of majesty banal but his paranoia honed to a fine edge on the stone of his political pragmatism. Nixon, especially, repeats lines of verse, echoing Adams' arpeggios but also suggesting a certain disquietude; when he sings "my hand is steady as a rock," the orchestra bursts in discordantly on "rock," as if to mock him.

Pat Nixon, too, is given a good deal of depth: Goodman provides her with almost surreal visions of the America she and her husband are representing. ("The Prodigal. Give him his share: The eagle nailed to the barn door. Let him be quick. The sirens wail as bride and groom kiss through the veil," she sings in one scene.) But in Act III, performed here entire, President reduces First Lady to decoration: "There isn't much that I can do, is there?" sings soprano Jessica Rivera, when Dick tells Pat her lipstick is crooked. "Who's seen my handkerchief?"

Later in the act, the music gets more complex, more traditionally "orchestral," as the presidential couple recall their World War II experience, Pat stateside while Nixon did noncombat duty in the Pacific. Goodman also gives Dick some poetic lines -- "Picture a thousand coconuts like mandrill's head or native masks ..." -- but mostly, we're being shown these characters' limitations, how they're most comfortable in, hence trapped by, the past.

Adams, a trim, cheerful and silver-haired figure, introduced the work as "an opera for Republicans ... and Communists." He prefaced the performance (whose second half was his thrilling Doctor Atomic Symphony) with helpful commentary, so that we could more easily pick out the big-band-style saxophones that gave voice to a president's nostalgic memories of the days before the Cold War.

Looks like the Burghosphere just suffered its latest virtual casualty. 414 Grant Street appears to have gone dead.

The blog's last post was in mid-December, if memory serves, and said something about taking time off for the holidays. While it pledged to return sometime in the New Year, it hadn't been updated in nearly a month.

Notable for criticizing City Council President Doug Shields almost as harshly as it did Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, 414 is the latest anonymous blog to go dark. It follows the departure of the Burgh Report and of course the famous Pitt Girl. 

Farewell, 414. We hardly knew ye. Or something like that. 

As first reported here (somewhat cursorily), Natalia Rudiak is running for City Council District 4, the seat currently held by Jim Motznik. She made it official -- or at least officially announced that she was going to make it official -- with a press release sent this morning. Excerpts of the release follow, but I'll just add the following.

Rudiak represents an interesting bridge betwen two worlds. On the one hand, to look at her resume, you'd swear she was living in the East End: She's a protege of the Coro Center and CMU's Heinz School, who boasts of having "professional expertise in management and technology policy." On the other hand, she's steeped in the South Hills: She's a product of Carrick High and treasurer for the 29th Ward, her father's an old union guy, and her mom works in a Brookline bakery.

On top of that, she's got a Rusyn background -- and those guys run everything.

If elected, in other words, she may be able to pull off the dream of some Pittsburgh progressives -- and at least one City Paper editor -- by uniting East Enders with the city's populous (and more populist) South Hills. It'll be interesting to watch her campaign.

Highlights from Rudiak's release follow below this campaign-supplied pic.

"On Thursday, January 29, Democrat Natalia Rudiak will announce to supporters that she will seek election to District 4 of Pittsburgh's City Council.

"I am looking forward to talking with my neighbors throughout the community about renewing our neighborhoods and business districts, restoring public safety, and reaffirming our place within the City of Pittsburgh," Rudiak said. "I was born and raised right here in our South neighborhoods, and a I want our children to enjoy the same close-knit support system that helped me to grow and succeed."

... Rudiak will also submit her campaign's 2008 campaign  finance report on February 2, which will show that, as of December 31, she  enters the race having raised over $16,000 in contributions and support from nearly 150 individuals. On January 15, the Allegheny County  Division of Elections reported that no other candidate has registered a campaign  committee, which allows them to raise or spend money in this  race.

Say this for Mayor Luke Ravenstahl: The guy knows how to keep himself in the public eye.

As noted here yesterday, the mayor has gotten plenty of attention for "changing" his name to "Steelerstahl" prior to this weekend's AFC Championship. And judging from this LOL-worthy post at the 2 political junkies, apparently Ravenstahl got national play for this stunt. No surprise there: Pittsburgh's sports fanaticism is a well-established media narrative, and Ravenstahl's stunt plays into it perfectly. 

And now he's done it again, getting a story from our friend Rich Lord at the Post-Gazette, thanks to a pledge to convince the Census Bureau that it is undercounting the city's population. Census Bureau estimates have shown Pittsburgh losing population for years -- to the point where the city now numbers only 311,218 residents. As Ravenstahl tells the P-G, challenging those numbers is "something that we're considering."

Credit where it's due: This is a vast improvement on the old Potemkin Village approach. In order to "prove" the success of Tsarist Russia, Grigori Potemkin had to go to all the trouble of building entire fake towns. Pittsburgh officials, though, are saving on lumber: All they're trying to do is get the Census Bureau to twiddle with some numbers on its spreadsheet. Voila! So much for claims the city is shrinking. 

And as the P-G previously observed, other cities have managed to tweak their estimates upwards already. In the process, they have been able to make the case for more federal aid. 

But a couple things are worth thinking about here. 

First, so far the evidence for a dramatic undercount seems spotty. City officials claim that there's been a ton of new construction in town, and surely this reflects growth that the Census Bureau should take into account.

The thing is, the Census Bureau already takes new construction into account. As a statement on their methodology explains, to get a population estimate, the Bureau compiles household population data that includes an estimate of total housing. And to track changes in the number of housing units, Bureau officials

use building permits, estimates of construction where no building permits are reported, mobile home shipments, and estimates of housing unit loss to update housing unit change since the last census

So showing the Census Bureau permits for Downtown condos, for example, probably isn't going to impress them -- they've already taken that data into account. 

But Ravenstahl apparently believes he has other evidence in hand, according to the P-G:

There's anecdotal evidence that the decades-long tide of population loss is slowing, at least, [Ravnenstahl] argued, citing increased enrollments at some public magnet schools.

But of course, overall enrollment for the city school district is down. If I was the mayor, I'm not sure I'd bring up school data with the Bureau. Census officials might just use it to revise their estimates downward.

Finally, is this really a smart use of time ? The P-G informs us that the city has already missed its chance to officially challenge the Bureau's estimates -- the deadline passed more than a week ago. And remember that an actual Census will be conducted in 2010 -- just a year away. It seems strange to raise questions about estimates that you can't change -- and that won't be valid for much longer anyway. 

Then again, if your goal is to get yourself a couple days' worth of headlines ... mission accomplished. 

Just when you thought Pittsburgh's sports fans couldn't get any more devoted -- and that its politicians couldn't get any more shameless -- we just received a mayoral press release with the following header:

Yes, that's right -- according to the release, "Mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced today that he will be ceremonially changing his last name from RAVENStahl to 'STEELERStahl'" until the AFC Championship game this weekend.

The STEELERS, you see, are playing the RAVENS this Sunday. And the mayor is concerned that people may be confused about where he stands. (Though, actually, if you look closely at that banner, you can see there's a trademark after the Steerlers logo. So unless the team is waiving its copyright, presumably the mayor's correct name is "STEELERSTMTAHL.")

So this morning, Ravenstahl went to the county's court-records office and adopted his new name. Immediately after that, he went up to the Elections department, where he ceremonially deposited a $50,000 check -- mysteriously drawn from an account in his newly adopted name -- into his political campaign.

OK, I made the last part of that up. 

In any case, the mayor said: "From now until Sunday, all references to my name will reflect Pittsburgh's love and support for our Steelers."

Well, maybe not all references, Mayor Ravenstahl. As the release points out, "stahl" already means steel in German --  a fact the mayor attributes to "a strange coincidence." (But is it really?) Which means his name would be the awkwadly redundant "Steelersteel."

But who am I to judge? The press release enlists a German professor at Pitt to assert that the mayor's new "name change [is] even more appropriate" because of its German root. 

The professor's name, incidentally, is John Lyon. Must be a closet Detroit fan. (Is there any other kind?) 

I started wearying of this whole Steelers-in-politics thing earlier this week, when -- during a press conference about campaign-finance reform -- a reporter asked Ravenstahl if he'd been able to collect on his earlier "bet" with the mayor of San Diego. But it's too much to hope that any Pittsburgh politician, Ravenstahl least of all, would pass up a PR "gimme" like this one.

So, if the Steelers go on to the Super Bowl, I'm expecting Yarone Zober to change his first name to "Frenchy." And start maybe promenading around in a pair of platform shoes with live goldfish inside.

For the three people out there who are still following my obsession with the future of print media, I offer a link to this recent piece by David Carr of The New York Times.

Carr restates a problem I've discussed here before. As Carr says:

For a long time, newspapers assumed that as their print advertising declined, it would be intersected by a surging line of online advertising revenue. But that revenue is no longer growing at many newspaper sites, so if the lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement.

As a report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research stated last year, "The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face."

Carr's solution: Create an "iTunes for News." Borrow from Apple's recently-revamped online music archive, which charged 99 cents to download songs that file-sharing sites once offered for free. 

Newspapers could save themselves, Carr says, by "convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspaper sites that it's time to pay up." He notes that some publications, like Consumer Reports, have already built online services that subscribers are willing to pay for.

It's not a perfect solution. For one thing, I worry about what happens to stories that, while important, don't have the same audience appeal as puff pieces. Once revenue streams can be attached to individual stories, would there be even less incentive to run stories that are important, but not necessarily popular? On a local level, could this mean more stories about, like, Ben Roethlisberger's latest bout of dizziness?

Too, Carr's solution would probably work best for national publications, like The New York Times. Charging pennies per view of a story makes sense when you have the kind of volume that comes from a national audience. But would a local paper be able to count on such numbers for a piece on zoning legislation?

On the other hand, even local papers could offer online extras that people might be willing to shell out for. I ask you, my three readers, what would you pay for, say, access to Rich Lord's database on campaign contributions and contractors?

Someday, maybe, the county will follow its own law and post a searchable database online, undermining any profits the P-G might earn. But in the meantime, there's clearly demand: City Paper once offered a free (if somewhat limited) online database of contributions made to city politicians running for office in 2007. I gave up maintaining the online database after the municipal elections were over, but I still get asked about it.

Here's the thing: Entering that shit took hours. And when it was done, it was posted in a format that generates almost no revenue to the people who pay my salary, the hosting fees for this site, and for the database program I used.

It'd be awesome to have some sort of crowd-sourced effort to pick up the slack, with a legion of citizen-journalists laboring together to maintain the database. But other than the indefatigable Bram Reichbaum, I'm not sure there's another local blogger who has the staying power. Hell, plenty of them have given up maintaining their own blogs. 

As Carr points out: "It's not that journalism is impossibly difficult; it's just that it takes enormous amounts of time and a willingness to stay with the story." That's got to be worth something, even if no one knows what it is.

Speaking of being uncertain about how much something is worth, I'm going to try to stop writing about this stuff now.

Network TV continues to plumb the reality-TV depths. On offer this week is ABC's True Beauty, another inane contest to see who is the hottest hottie, but with a twist.

There's the usual line up of totally plastic-looking "beautiful" gals and guys -- 10 in all -- but this show promises to judge not just the outer looks, but also inner beauty. Or to put it another way: Which self-absorbed, vain hottie is actually an honest, caring, considerate do-gooder at heart? Challenges will prove this!

This idiotic concept is the unholy love child of celebu-producers Tyra Banks (America's Next Top Model) and Ashton Kutcher (Punk'd) and not surprisingly it combines their two métiers: Tyra's pick-a-looker with Ashton's Candid Camera-style gotcha follies.

In the first episode we met the contestants, and frankly they struck me as the very worst people you went to high school with: the over-lacquered mean girls, the pec-flexing jocks, the mirror-worshippers and the deeply delusional ("I AM the most beautiful person").

They arrived inexplicably in fancy sports cars, and were greeted by a couple dozen out-of-work actors hired as ... beats me, greeters? As the gathered on the patio of Ye Olde Tacky L.A. Mansion, they began sizing each other up like a pack of dogs. That is -- dogs with eyelash extensions, blonde tips, stiletto heels and way too much eyeliner. Girls and guys were slathered in so much product, I wondered if, after all, inner beauty might not be more discernible?

Anyhow ... the contest begins. Our beauties are assessed by a L.A. doctor who take a bunch of measurements and ascertains how symmetrical folks' eyes are.

Meanwhile ... secret tests are underway to check for inner beauty, namely a bunch of set-ups that the judges watch to see how the contestants handle themselves. First, a clumsy waiter pours liquid chocolate all over them. Then, would the contestants, if left alone, do a little snooping in their competitors' files? And the Final Challenge, which tested the two up for elimination: Would they hold the door open for a dude laden with coffees?

The judges are a motley crew, really: a Miss Teen Something I've never heard of; 1970s model Cheryl Tiegs (billed here as the "first supermodel," take that, Janice!); and Nolé Marin, stylist and staple of reality shows, who looks like he's gonna be deliciously bitchy but always disappoints.

The final decision goes down in the "Hall of Beauty" -- and the first elimination proved entertaining. Miss Thing, La-Dee-Day-Yeah or whatever her name was, gave a lot of attitude and made that fatal reality-show mistake: denying that she'd done something. Honey, there are cameras everywhere.

When they showed her the incriminating footage of her shocking crime -- bustling past the coffee-cup dude without a kind gesture -- she immediately averred: "I'm a good person!" The judges shook their heads in pretend distress, and America had a little laugh, because it's fun watching stuck-up people get taken down a few pegs.

The final indignity: Two fat guys dressed like janitors came by with a wheelie bin and unceremoniously dumped the loser's portrait in the trash. Tonight, here's one less masterpiece in the Hall of Beauty.

There's a certain kind of blogger -- well, not so much the bloggers as some of the people who comment on their posts -- who relishes every omen that the end is coming for the dreaded MSM.

And we at City Paper live to give the people what they want.

So I'll point to Pittsburgh Rides, the Post-Gazette's newish motorcycle column. I started hearing some grumbling about this -- from both inside and outside the news room -- shortly after the column launched last fall. But I'll confess that last week's installment was the first time I really looked at it.

As with previous installments, this edition was written by Rocky Marks, a guest writer who, a tagline at the end of the article tells us, "is operations manager at Hot Metal Harley-Davidson in West Mifflin." (He also hosts a weekly radio program on 660 AM.) This would, no doubt, help explain why Mr. Marks' article asserts, "[w]hether you're a Harley-Davidson fan or a metric motorcycle fan, there is something to be said for the manufacturing of an American icon."

What the tagline doesn't say -- and what you can't tell from the online version -- is that directly beneath this feature is an advertisement by ... Hot Metal Harley-Davidson in West Mifflin. 

This is, well, unfortunate. It's what we in the business call "advertorial" -- a case where an advertiser composes something that looks like an article -- in everything but name. And yet ... I find that I can't get too outraged by it. 

For one thing, it's so obvious, with the ad right there and everything. It's not like anyone is trying to fool you ... unless you just read online to avoid paying for the print edition. In which case, as I've argued before, maybe you deserve to be fooled. (UPDATE: Plus, on further reflection, it's not quite as bad as all that. The current piece, for example, isn't really about how great Harleys are. It's about going to motorcycle rallies throughout the year. Though doubtless if you wanted to attend these functions riding a quality piece of American manufacturing, Mr. Marks would be able to give you some pointers about where to purchase one.) 

For another, you're going to see this kind of thing more and more often. The Tribune-Review has already run pieces by Jennifer Antkowiak, a former KDKA-TV anchor, that were thinly veiled advertisements for some of her business interests. And even papers that know better, like the P-G, are going to find it harder to resist these kinds of deals. In case you haven't heard, these aren't great times for the industry. 

Stuff like this Harley-Davidson piece is an unfortunate, but probably inevitable, response to the fact that newspapers haven't figured out how to make money from the internet. It's still the ads in the print edition that pay the bills. So the effect of the internet -- at least where print media is concerned -- is to isolate the consumer of content from the advertising that pays for it. In that sense, it's the print equivalent of TiVo, the recording device that makes it easy to skip through the ads on your favorite TV show.

In both cases, the content provider is responding to a new technology in the same way. TV broadcasters increasingly place the ads directly into the shows themselves -- I've noticed The Office is especially guilty on this score, mentioning Staples and other advertisers in the script. In the P-G's case, the advertiser is actually writing the script himself. 

Of course, it's just a column about motorcycles. It could be worse. The problem is that if present trends continue, it probably will be. 

Speaking of those trends, the Tribune-Review has responded to cutbacks at the P-G by planning some buyouts of its own: 

Trib Total Media, which publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and other newspapers in the region, announced a voluntary buyout for employees today.

...

It provides up to one year's pay, up to 36 months of health-care benefits and other payments to full-time, non-union employees who accept the offer.

"We are facing the same revenue issues everybody else has," said [president and chief executive Ralph] Martin. He described the current retail sales and advertising environment as "soft."

Unlike the P-G, who phased in a buyout plan by offering it to the most senior employees first, the Trib is making all of its 983 full-time employees eligible for the offer. 

But even at this grim hour, the Trib can't help buy take a swipe at its rival. Of the buyout Martin says, "We know it's one of the most generous because we've seen what many other companies have offered." And two paragraphs later, the paper launches into a recounting of the P-G's buyout offers -- taking time to note that its rival "also raised the P-G's newsstand price from 50 cents to 75 cents on Dec. 15."

Stay classy, Tribune-Review! We'll all be meeting each other on the unemployment line soon enough. 

It's unfair to single out just one piece in Fe Gallery's impressive In the Making: 250 Years, 250 Artists (which closed Jan. 10). The sheer scope and massing of the exhibit -- 250 (mostly) recent artworks by an equal number of local artists, hung salon-style on the Lawrenceville storefront space's walls -- all but precludes it. But I will mention one work which, though it might easily be overlooked, instantly struck me as potent.

Wendy Osher's "Fruit for All Seasons" consists of 20 orange skins arranged in a small grid. The skins, long aged to that rust color to which dessicated orange peels are fated, had been sewn back into spheres, but in a very particular way. These skins were arranged to permit gaps through which blossomed tumor-like masses of sickly pink polystyrene (like packing material, or foam insulation). The stitches, meanwhile, were in threads of deep red -- an aesthetic complement to the skins themselves, but also, when combined with the template of each leathery peel, suggestive of a baseball.

Osher's previous work, widely exhibited around town, often deals with our regard and disregard of nature. But this piece communicated to me more strongly than any of the others I'd seen. With the "oranges" embodying a rather pathetic human attempt to reconstitute, even reanimate the natural world, "Fruit for All Seasons" intimates warnings about tampering with nature in general, and about things like bio-engineering in particular.

And yes, I'm aware that most agricultural crops are the result of human-guided cross-breeding. But it's self-evident that initiating plant sex is a much more benign sort of intrusion than putting fish genes in tomatoes, say -- or polystyrene genes in citrus sprouts. Osher's shrivelled, malformed little baseballs manque are like seed pods stuffed with sterile faux flesh. With them, she viscerally suggests that with such techno-tampering -- in trying to remake the world to our ends -- we not only destroy our materials, but lessen ourselves as well.

Today, county executive Dan Onorato and Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced their new campaign-finance reform measure. And guess what? For a bill that's supposed to increase transparency, it's pretty murky.

Partly that's because they didn't even have the legislation in hand for their press conference today. But we'll get to that in a moment. 

I'll leave it to others to discuss the proposed contribution limits, and the constant fretting over the "millionaire's exception" --  how to deal with candidates who finance their own campaigns. For some reason, that stuff seems to obsess everyone, despite the dearth of millionaires running for local office.

Instead, I'll focus on a few other wrinkles in the legislation proposed. 

First, both Ravenstahl and Onorato want identical rules for both county- and city-level candidates."We want to see that both pieces of legislation pass identically," Ravenstahl said. When it came to councilors proposing amendments, "I don't want to rule anything out, but we would hope that our councils ... would understand the important of having a mirror-image [pair of bills]. We hope that they will adopt [the legislation] as submitted." 

The Pittsburgh Comet, and maybe some others as well, see this as a good thing. I'm not so sure. Insisting on parallel bills could constrain legislative efforts to improve the bills. Onorato pledged he "would be prepared to veto a [county] bill that had significant changes that I thought were unfair." And Ravenstahl, clearly, wouldn't sign a city measure if Onorato couldn't get what he wanted. Both executives, then, could hold each other's legislators hostage. In order to toughen a bill, councilors might be obliged to reach an agreement with both executives and the other legislative body. Good luck with that.

Second, none of these rules would apply to Ravenstahl's mayoral race this year. Ravenstahl portrayed this as an issue of fairness -- to his opponents. They, after all, would not be held to the limits in trying to compete with him. 

But before we get too worked up over this angle, it's worth noting that to the surprise of -- um, nobody whatsoever -- Patrick Dowd is publically weighing a mayoral run himself. So is Doug Shields. This is great news for Luke Ravenstahl, who can only be helped by a fratricidal struggle between East Enders. Who needs friends -- even friends with big checkbooks -- when you have enemies like these?

Third, Onorato and Ravenstahl had no specific legislation to show today. They promised a bill would be forthcoming Thursday, which is nice. But even so ... Ravenstahl vetoed a campaign-finance measure proposed by City Council in June -- half a year ago. He pledged to come up with an alternative measure at the time, but for months we heard nothing. Now, all the sudden it's necessary to hold a press conference TODAY? They couldn't even wait an extra couple days when they had an actual bill in hand?

If nothing else, this is a nice way to get a two-day bounce out of a story -- coverage of the press conference today, followed by news of the bill's actual language later in the week. But one wonders whether this is the latest example of a by-now familiar pattern with Ravenstahl: Wander into some sort of ethical minefield, blow your foot off by stepping in something ugly, and then try to bail yourself out by announcing "reforms" -- reforms that wouldn't have been necessary if you'd had been a bit more discrete about gaming the old rules.

The latest Ravenstahl headache, of course, concerns Club Pittsburgh, a gay "fitness club" where a patron died recently, touching off allegations that the city ignored sexual activity taking place there: The club's owners have contributed to Ravenstahl and other city officials.

Finally, I realize I'm the only one who gives a damn, but the county was supposed to have campaign contributions posted on an online, searchable database in 2007. At today's press conference, Onorato said that was a goal, but we're going to have to wait a little longer. At the press conference, Onorato said "we're not prepared to roll out" any legislation or action on creating an online, searchable database. "We hope to do that sometime in 2009," he said, but "we'll deal with that on a different day.

As I've written before, in 2003 the county passed a law requiring that this system be set up in January of 2007. Onorato didn't mention that, and reporters didn't point it out.

I'm glad to see the issue getting some attention. Still, it's ironic that we begin this reform effort by stepping around our failure to complete the last reform effort. Let's hope that's not an omen for what's to come.