And Now …Ladies and Gentlemen
Bittersweet love stories don’t get much more contrived, pretentious, amorphous and enjoyable than And Now & Ladies and Gentlemen, a mishmash of melancholy, metaphor, music, crime and axioms from Claude Lelouche, the French director who earned himself a small dot on the map of international cinema in 1966 with A Man and a Woman, and…
Songs in requiem
There’s a kind of fellowship of experimental film. While the world at large casts its gaze elsewhere, the community of people who create and appreciate avant-garde cinema has tended to stick together over the years, out there on the frontiers of art. In 1970, pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage left his base in the Colorado…
So Many Anti-Murphy Protests, So Much Time
“I’m not personally excited about getting all these jobs back,” says Mark Rauterkus about the 731 recent layoffs in the city. “As volunteers, we can do things.” The one-time mayoral candidate and perpetual South Side organizer led two public venting and protest prep sessions last week attended by a total of about 70 city people.…
Class Remiss
On the same day Pennsylvania released a report labeling 169 Allegheny County schools as deficient on some part of the state’s standardized testing — or as so deplorable the kids deserve a free pass out of them — a slew of local government officials gathered at the Hill House to face the issue. At the…
Repair and Contrast
“It is possible,” said Biko Agozino, a criminology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, that classified ads in the pre-1830 Pittsburgh Gazette touting the sale of slaves could create a local case for reparations for blacks. Agozino and veteran activist Dennis Brutus of the University of Pittsburgh’s Africana Studies department were featured speakers recently at…
Too Much
Generals, it is said, are always preparing to fight the last war. And so are peace activists, if an August 14 presentation by the Independent Media Center was any indication. Before a lecture on media consolidation by University of Pittsburgh Professor Jonathan Sterne, IMC activists demonstrated to the audience of 18 why they feel media…
Rage Against the Mean
Last summer, the Thomas Merton Center on Penn Ave. in Garfield was preparing to host its annual Rock Against Racism event in Schenley Park, just as the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative was in the throes of readying its own Penn Avenue Festival. As both were going into promotions overdrive, each one realized that they had…
A Point There
Point State Park is still so confusing to navigate that even those working on a park re-design “couldn’t decide what was the front of the park and what was the back of the park,” said chief designer Marion Pressley, landscape architect and owner of Pressley Associates, the Cambridge, Mass., firm hired to rework the decades-old…
Warholas at Work
On several occasions in the early 1960s, Andy Warhol found himself surrounded by a cadre of eager young people. They were full of chaotic energy, and had come for no other reason than to hang out and have a good time. Sometimes their behavior could get crazy, but they meant well. To give them something…
On His Own Terms
The city began laying off 731 workers last week, and for many Pittsburghers that is 731 too many — and one too few. That’s why Lawrenceville resident Jim Genco was at an August 15 protest on the steps of the City-County Building, holding petitions demanding that Mayor Tom Murphy be impeached. Pittsburghers are “fundamentally dissatisfied”…
When asked by city leaders if he had any ideas about improving Pittsburgh, Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Abandon it.” How did city leaders reply?
Pittsburghers seem to seize on quotes about their town’s past ugliness with a strange pride. Wright’s quote is remembered almost as fondly as the description of Pittsburgh as “Hell with the lid off.” But if the latter comparison does a disservice to Hell (which has a more active bar scene), the myth surrounding Wright’s quote…
Client
The members of Client desperately want you to desperately want to fuck them, but dancing to them will probably do adequately — as long as you’re desperate about it. Because in the end, this anonymous femme-fatale duo’s coldly passionate, poppy electroclash isn’t so much about sex as the desperation that sex sometimes entails. Likewise, despite…
Tom Waits for No One
I feel I’m as qualified as anyone to psychoanalyze Tom Murphy, because I don’t know him very well — and neither does anyone else. Is he an enigma wrapped in a riddle trapped in a conundrum? Or just a prickly condescending Irishman who doesn’t understand why all these yahoos don’t get it? Or a little…
A conversation with Olga Maryamchik
What do you like about ballooning? The part I enjoy most is going out into people’s environments, interacting with people. Actually I have a triple life. There’s no one I know [socially] that sees me do balloons. The balloon part lets me do the other stuff. When people ask me what I do, I say…
Dirty Pretty Things
From the moment the camera spots Okwe soliciting fares at a London airport, you can see he’s no ordinary African cabbie. More than freshly laundered, impeccably groomed and well-spoken, Okwe has bearing. He knows he’s more than the equal of his potential customers, and it’s clear he understands a good deal more about them than…
The Trip
Could two good-looking people ever meet cuter than the destined-to-fall-in-love-and-break-each-other’s-hearts lovers of The Trip, Miles Swain’s retro-romantic-tragi-comedy-cum-gay-semi-road-movie set in California during the optimistic post-Stonewall ’70s? (Hyphenates, by the way, are the sine qua non of post-modern culture.) Alan (Larry Sullivan) is a freshly minted and ultra-stuffy (but in a cute way) UCLA Republican “heterosexual,” interning…
Cinemania
As compulsions go, there’s something almost quaint about the one explored in the documentary Cinemania. In an day when it’s possible to indulge nearly any audio-visual obsession ad infinitum from the comfort of one’s couch, the New York film nuts profiled herein demonstrate their love mostly by actually going out to theaters. Indeed, they’ve got…
