The Shield: The Long Goodbye
I’m a pretty emotional TV watcher. Not that I cry or laugh excessively, but I get pretty attached pretty quickly to certain shows. Sometimes my infatuation lasts and other times, it wanes as soon as something even a little better comes along. I had a brief infatuation with the NBC show Chuck and I’m really…
Palin in Comparison
Well, Sarah Palin’s ascension to the status of GOP vice-presidential candidate has accomplished one thing at least: It’s given the media yet another “identity politics” debate this election season. And it’s given the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette an excuse to plug the “PittsburghMom.com” site the paper recently acquired. In a front-page story by Mackenzie Carpenter today, the…
McCain Flips For His VP pick
Well, so much for experience. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, having beat up on Barack Obama’s callow youth for months now, has chosen a vice-president who by any standard is far less experienced than the Democratic nominee. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as you may have heard, hasn’t even served a full term as governor…
Overseas Business: The Apprentice U.K.
Add CNBC to the growing list of cable channels cheerfully dumbing down. (Remember when Bravo and A&E pimped high culture and not endless bitchy and sleazy reality fare, respectively?) Now the business-news channel has returned from the international-TV clearance sale with a three-year-old reality series, The Apprentice U.K., which is also, as you’ve likely guessed,…
Living the Dream
Barack Obama, it is true, is a transformational leader. But he needs a transformational movement to become a transformational president. He is transformational not only by his charisma and brilliance, but by embodying the possibility of an African American being chosen president in the generation following the civil-rights movement. Whether he wins or loses, the…
Dinner Dream
A poem by Leslie Anne Mcilroy.
Elegy
When Manhattan college professor David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) becomes enamored of a new student, the distinctively beautiful Consuela (Penelope Cruz), he waits until the grades are in before bedding her. That’s the measure of Kepesh’s minimal maturity in the pursuit of his frequently triumphed personal freedom. Isabel Coixet’s (My Life Without Me) drama, an adaptation…
Death Race
Webteaser: This prisoners-race-cars-to-their-deaths actioner from Paul W.S. Anderson is a loose update of the 1975 drive-in classic Death Race 2000 (which added anarchic dark humor and hapless pedestrians to the mix). Now it’s the year 2012, and in the hard gray light of cinematic dystopia, we follow our anti-hero, Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), as he’s…
This Just In: August 28 – September 4
Highlights from the local TV news: News you can booze.
JD’s Pub
A comprehensive menu of familiar pub grub fails to transcend
Rent star Anthony Rapp’s new one-man show about loss and hope world-premieres at City Theatre.
“I was afraid of death and didn’t want to think about it and shoved it away.”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Not that Chris Bondi, Jessica D’Arcy, Virginia Wall Gruenert and Scott Sortman aren’t good; they just haven’t embraced the play’s wild ride.
Pittsburgh n’@
Dispatches from the blogosphere: a roadtrip to Pittsburgh.
Hard to Sustain
On May 1, Point Park film student Caroline Savery moved into a small tent in some city woods. It was the first day of what she called “Sust-Enable” — an attempt to live for three months at 100 percent environmental sustainability, or zero impact on the planet, and to document it all on video as…
Activism: POG lending a hand at RNC blockade
The Pittsburgh Organizing Group, regionally famous for its various protests and blockades, is taking its show on the road to the Republican National Convention.
Crime Prevention: City approves surveillance cameras, but who’s going to be in charge of the tapes?
The city has approved the use of surveillance cameras, but are community groups really the ones who should be playing the role of Big Brother?
Up on the Roof
Just about the only thing green on the roof of the City-County Building is the blue-green patina covering the copper vents. And the closest thing to wildlife is a cobweb dangling from a speaker-box that plays peregrine falcon sounds to scare away pigeons. Gray pipes and wires shoot up from beneath the gravel surface. “It…
My Winnipeg
The Winnipeg-based filmmaker Guy Maddin’s work is a maddening mix of Chris Marker, Jean Cocteau and John Waters. He’s always at once highly intellectual and yet something of a put-on, creating art films that unapologetically, even gleefully, deconstruct themselves. Our protagonist (Darcy Fehr) is, like Maddin, a Winnipeg native. But it’s Maddin the director’s voice…
Hamlet 2
This account of a disastrously bad high school play, directed and co-written by Adam Fleming (Nancy Drew), trundled along missing its comedic marks for over an hour, before resolving in an over-the-top, 10-minute-long set piece that would have saved us all a lot of trouble if it had just been posted to an Internet funny-film…
Peter Oresick’s Warhol-O-Rama is a tour-de-force homage, in verse.
The Pittsburgh-based poet’s pop-epic suite of 53 verses is a tour-de-force of slyly constructed and fully inhabited postures and poses.
The Miller Gallery’s internationally renowned new curator, Astria Suparak, debuts her first Pittsburgh show.
Her hiring, in March, makes her arguably the biggest underground art star to move to Pittsburgh in years.
With cabinetry, glass and tableware, the SCC highlights past masters of the arts of craft.
What makes these trays extraordinary is that Cederquist has used anamorphic perspective, so that the trays, although two-dimensional, appear 3-D when seen at the correct angle.
Bad-boy Brits The Fratellis offer laddish jams with Here We Stand
The Fratellis are tagged as a “lads’ band,” but the coy writing is far sharper than any favored by America’s askew-ballcap contingent.
Oakland’s disquieting avant-rockers Xiu Xiu visit Garfield Artworks
Ches Smith is actually credited on one track for playing the guillotine.
NYC groove-masters Ratatat keep it simple
Guitarist Mike Stroud and synthesizer maestro Evan Mast quickly develop a groove and explore it like a dentist looking for cavities.
Indie legends Silver Jews make a rare stop in Pittsburgh
“To tell you the truth, I was afraid I would be accused of stealing land.”
Spak Bros.
Healthier pizza and subs sure to please veggies and meat-lovers.
Locals band together for The Key Party Presents … Playing Favorites
“Many bands share members, some share roommates and most everyone involved knows each other.”
Stop the Madness
The Port Authority has its problems: rising fuel costs, a protracted battle with the drivers’ union, that irritating woman on her cell phone … But part of the problem with public transportation is … the public. Consider this fact, revealed in a Port Authority “peer review” comparing itself to transit agencies in nine other cities.…
Savage Love
So I have been in a relationship with the same guy since I was about 16. It’s been a little over four years now, but I came out to him a year ago about the fact that I’m bisexual, which he has no problem with. So since then, I have had wild fantasies about a…
