Fresh Airwaves
Somebody finally had the testicles to tell Ralph Nader to shut up and go away, and tell it to his face … well, at least to his voice over a telephone line. The fuzzyheaded sanctimonious egomaniac is again running for president, threatening to tip the balance in favor of the evil warmongers. Who had the…
It seems Pittsburgh made several grabs at annexing Old Allegheny and finally snared it in 1907, turning it into the North Side. What did Pittsburgh want so bad with Allegheny?
That Allegheny would be so desirable might have surprised the man who first surveyed it. In 1798, David Redick wrote that he found it “far inferior to my expectation. … [I]t abounds with high hills and deep hollows, almost inaccessible to a surveyor. … [I]t would have been far more suitable for residents of the…
Various Artists
Nas Illmatic 10th Anniversary Platinum Edition Sony/Columbia As the years go by it becomes more apparent that history is becoming a thing of the past. By that I mean, of course, the appreciation of history, though I don’t know if there was ever a generation of youth who had a great affinity for years…
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Reviewed By: BILL O’DRISCOLL For a problem as complex as poverty, there is no simple solution. Not even if that solution is a job. Because as David K. Shipler witnesses in his moving, thorough and quietly passionate new book, to merely be employed doesn’t guarantee you anything — even in the richest country in…
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Don’t put too much stock in the oft-quoted riff from Gil Scott-Heron: Some revolutions will be televised. Especially if a coup breaks out with a film crew in the house. Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain certainly had a run of their homeland’s fabled luck. In April 2002, they were in the Venezuelan…
A Place at the Table
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, came to Pittsburgh last fall as a visiting lecturer for the University of Pittsburgh’s English department. Raised in North Carolina and Georgia, Jeffers is a nationally recognized poet who paints vivid pictures of Southern black folk culture in her two books, The…
The Alamo
Like all historic dramas that money can buy, director John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo brims with authentic-looking 1830s period costumes and hair-dos on several actors never meant to wear them. It also has some miiiiiiighty fine fiddlin’, some of it from the former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton), who prefers to be called…
A Case of the Runs
Dear Mayor Murphy: Forgive this public address; I generally avoid open letters. My preferred means of influencing you — yelling at my TV set whenever you are on it and occasionally waving a mojo bag over copies of the city charter — are much less overt. But they aren’t working. No matter how…
Goodbye, Lenin!
For Christiane Kerner, an East Berliner who teaches school, and who lives and breathes glorious gray Socialist air, the personal is very political: When her non-Party husband leaves her in 1978 for an “enemy of the state” (i.e., another anti-Socialist), she throws herself into her sanguine, Soviet-styled, sloganeering Socialism with the vengeance of a woman…
Never Black and White
Mark Fatla spent much of the past 23 years at the center of the Woodland Hills school desegregation case — the last state-ordered district merger in Pennsylvania. In 1981, after a decade of legal resistance, it brought together the more affluent and more white Churchill, Turtle Creek, Swissvale and Edgewood with nearby General Braddock, then…
Road Movies
Sometimes you don’t know what you got till it’s gone on the road. Last spring, Jim Mueller and Scott Carney were traveling cross-country showing films and videos from Pittsburgh artists in a string of cities when it hit them: Taken together, Pittsburgh’s stuff is at least as good as, and usually better than, compilations of…
Cleaning Their Plates Again
On the second day of their hunger strike, laid-off janitor Harriet Bryant and Service Employees Union International Local 3 director Gabe Morgan seemed tired and maybe anxious. “Is it OK to drink tea?” Morgan asked, holding up a Starbucks cup with tea-bag tags dangling down the side. The pair’s white tent on Smithfield…
When the Spirits Dance Mambo
When Dr. Marta Moreno Vega saw a commercial on television for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, about an American girl in Cuba who stumbles upon the “forbidden” Afro-Cuban rhythmic cultures, she decided it was a movie she probably wouldn’t want to see. Having extensively researched West African sacred traditions and rituals and their effects on…
Putting the P.U. in Pulitzer
If there’s ever a Pulitzer Prize for pettiness, the Tribune-Review may have a solid chance of winning one. Like many media outlets, when the Trib printed a story on the 2004 winners of the Pulitzer Prize — the most prestigious award in American journalism — it relied upon an April 5 Associated Press wire…
Connie and Carla
Not that anybody should bother re-working one of America’s best-loved comedies, the 1959 Billy Wilder romp Some Like It Hot, but if you were going to, you’d be well advised to make it funny — and double-gender-bending is sooooo stale. Frowsy dinner-theater performers Connie (Nia Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) on the run from the…
Along Came Marry
Eric Miller is hoping Pittsburgh steps into the gay-marriage fray. Miller, 34, who lives in the North Side, late last month helped found the Pennsylvania chapter of Marriage Equality, one of only four state chapters of this advocacy group nationwide. Nearly their first act was to write to Mayor Tom Murphy and county Chief…
Kill Bill, Vol. 2
The second half of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga karate-kicks right in where Vol. 1 left off: The avenging bride and professional killer (Uma Thurman) has dispatched two of her five would-be assassins, and is hot on the dusty trail of the rest: bouncer Budd (Michael Madsen), one-eyed Elle (Daryl Hannah) and her former master,…
Walking Wounded
A year and a half ago, local arts collaborative the Industrial Arts Co-op unveiled the Walking Stick Rocket — the IAC’s largest-scale project to date: a massive dinosaur made from leftover scraps of Pittsburgh’s industrial past. But in early April, unknown to IAC members, the Rocket, stored at a scrap yard in Newcastle, PA, suffered…
Kitchen Stories
Swedish director Bent Hamer’s Kitchen Stories is one part Magnus Mills novel, one part quirky Euro-comedy, and one part Ikea. In other words, it’s as captivating as it seems slow; as drink-spit funny — and heartache sad — as it seems subtle; as complex as it is minimalist. It’s ’50s Scandinavia: The Swedish Home Research…
Kingsley Center Now on Track
When city and state government officials sat down with leaders of the Kingsley Association — the community service organization in Lincoln-Larimer) and state Rep. Joe Preston six years ago, they agreed that the 12th ward of Pittsburgh’s East End was long overdue for a recreation center. (See News Feature: “New Pool of Resources,” Dec. 17,…
Monsieur Ibrahim
In François Dupeyron’s period drama set in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in Paris in the 1960s, a neglected teen, Momo (Pierre Moulangier) finds an unlikely kinship with an elderly Muslim shopkeeper, Monsieur Ibrahim (Omar Sharif). Despite the disparity in their lives, each slowly opens up to the other in this bittersweet coming-of-age tale. In one…
Bush League
“Still Dreaming of Tehran.” Who’s up for another invasion? The neocons who brought you the make-believe premises of the Iraq war haven’t forgotten about Iran. They still don’t like it, and they want to use Tehran’s ties to Iraqi Shiite groups (among other excuses) to take a fresh stab at regime change. Robert Dreyfuss and…
A Conversation With Deborah Domanski
Deborah Domanski is a mezzo-soprano with the Pittsburgh Opera young artists’ program, where opera singers with the blush of youth develop their technique as their voices mature. Domanski, 28, a California native who lives on the North Side, holds a master’s degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music and has studied at Juilliard…
A Conversation With Deborah Domanski
Deborah Domanski is a mezzo-soprano with the Pittsburgh Opera young artists’ program, where opera singers with the blush of youth develop their technique as their voices mature. Domanski, 28, a California native who lives on the North Side, holds a master’s degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music and has studied at Juilliard…
