SPdp’s Octavia at the Kelly-Strayhorn
One drawback to covering dance as a weekly paper is that most dance troupes stage shows for one weekend only. And just as with rock concerts, CP doesn’t run print reviews of shows readers won’t have another chance to see. So with exceptions, including Attack Theatre, that stage multi-week runs, we cover dance with previews…
Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Co.’s New Space
Congrats to Playwrights on officially opening its new venue, on the third floor of 937 Liberty Ave. Occupying the same Pittsburgh Cultural Trust-owned building where Bricolage Productions occupies the first floor is a big step up in both visibility and creature comforts from Playwrights’ former space in the parking garage at 6th and Penn. By…
Protesters urge Casey to aid jobless
Worried that Congress might not extend unemployment benefits set to expire at the end of the year, roughly 75 local unemployed workers, union members and Occupiers delivered petitions yesterday to the Downtown office of U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, urging the Democrat to support laid-off workers. “We want jobs or we want money! This unemployment crisis…
Bricolage’s Midnight Radio Voting
The ever-innovative, not to mention democratic, Bricolage Productions is putting the themes for next year’s fourth season of its signature enterprise on a ballot. Midnight Radio is a series of live stage shows produced as if they were radio programs, complete with sound-effects generated live in the studio and actors taking multiple roles (often with…
Op-ed: Do perp-walks serve a purpose?
Christian Rash stands accused of a variety of crimes: receiving stolen property, eluding police, retail theft, and driving without a valid license. He may also very well be a jerk, based on my very limited exposure to him and fellow defendant Larry Brown — which came by way of brief news segments on WPXI and…
The Imprint of War at the University Art Gallery
This student-curated exhibit strives to remind us of what it means to live in a war-driven society. The project — conceived and installed by students in the University of Pittsburgh’s Museum Studies Seminar — began with the University Art Gallery’s permanent collection and the 17th-century Jacque Callot print series Miseries of War. Chronicling religiously motivated…
WTAE reporters, anchors take labor dispute to the public
Ordinarily, reporters don’t like to keep mum about a potentially big story. But for months now, the news staffers over at WTAE Channel 4 have been doing just that — with a story that involves their own well being. Now that story is beginning to surface. And WTAE employees are asking for the public’s help…
About those write-in campaigns …
Assuming you haven’t obliterated the 2011 political season from your memory — and truly, who could blame you? — you may recall that activists were conducting a pair of write-in campaigns on the November ballot. In the District Attorney’s race, advocates for police accountability were waging a somewhat paradoxical “whisper campaign” to write in the…
Short List: December 1 – 8
Fri., Dec. 2 — Crafts This weekend, pop-up craft bazaar I Made It! Market celebrates the shopping season with I Made It! For The Holidays. Co-founders Carrie Nardini and Nina Marie Barbuto established the crafters’ collective that connects and supports local artisans. Stationed in Bakery Square this year, the market offers gift-card alternatives such as…
Excerpt from The Torah Garden
According to the laws of soil and rain,sunlight and luck and the gardener’s attention,all summer long the sunflowers grew,taller than our heads, taller than our house,so tall the farmers looked up briefly from their tractors and manure spreaders,and we crouched under leaves large as tabletops, large as living rooms, large as the hearts of saints. …
Seeing Double
When customers see a “beer cocktail” on the Park Brugges drink menu, acknowledges bartender Shaelinn Mace, “We get a lot of questions, of course, because it’s not that normal.” “Beer” and “cocktail” are, after all, generally thought to be separate drinks. But mixing beer into a cocktail is beginning to catch on in Pittsburgh –…
Eichner’s Farm Market
It’s just after 8 a.m. and the girls have already had a busy morning. Dozens of eggs — white and brown — line the trays outside of the chicken coops at the Eichner Family Farm. The farm, and its adjacent market, have been supplying the North Hills with fresh eggs, vegetables and sausages for decades.…
The Wine Loft
Wine holds a curious position in American culture. Not long ago, it was treated as the province of snobs, whether gourmands who obsess over “bouquets” or more-tasteful-than-thous who look down their noses at beer. Some politicians still talk about wine that way, hoping to bond with voters who don’t have the time — or the…
Savage Love
I’m a 21-year-old woman who sleeps with other women. Two questions: 1. My LGBT friends and I disagree about what girls who sleep with girls exclusively should call ourselves. Everyone else prefers “lesbian” and bitches at me for hating that word. Can’t I call myself gay? 2. I’ve been sexually active and into BDSM since…
On the Record With Anthony Silvestre, co-investigator of the Pitt Men’s Study
Since 1984, the Pitt Men’s Study has been leading the region in studying the history and progression of HIV and AIDS. The study has followed roughly 3,000 men over the years, seeking to get a better handle on the pathology of HIV. Anthony Silvestre, the group’s co-investigator and the director of the Pennsylvania Prevention Project,…
Bad Form? — Onerous paperwork could leave many with HIV without services
Once a year, Mike Hellman turns in a sheet of paper to the Shepherd Wellness Center to verify he’s in care for treatment of HIV. The sheet is simple: It asks for his physician’s name and the date of recent blood tests, and for a signature authorizing the release of information. Once it’s turned in,…
Yves Jean hopes for the best
While in the midst of making his new record, Hope for the Best … But Expect Nothing, Yves Jean was at home getting ready for a date. Suddenly, he was hit with the first notes of what would become the album’s closing song — “My Mother” — and began working the melody out on his…
Critics’ Picks: December 1 – 7
[ROCK] + THU., DEC. 01 He croons love songs with the panache of Sinatra and rocks incendiary guitar solos with equal smoothness. Raul Malo, a first-generation Cuban American, has been making lovesick rock music coated in country twang and just a hint of Latino sexiness for more than two decades. He cut his songwriting and…
On the Record with Claire Evans of YACHT
YACHT began as the solo music and art project of Jona Bechtolt; since 2008, Claire Evans has been YACHT’s second principal member. Evans spoke with CP on the final day of the band’s California stint with the Yo Gabba Gabba live show. A longer version of this interview appears on FFW>>, our music blog at…
Dallas Green focuses full-time on City and Colour
Usually, every smidgen of indie-rock success is hard-won through gigs in grimy basements, cross-country van tours on scrimped-together budgets, and electronic fliers posted on the walls of disinterested Facebook friends. Usually, but not always. City and Colour emerged as effortlessly as Athena leaped fully formed from Zeus’ forehead in Greek mythology: It’s the successful solo…
Gene the Werewolf returns with a new plan of attack
Aesthetically, the biggest change that’s come along with Gene the Werewolf’s second album, Wicked Love, is the shift from sleazy ’70s white-suit attire to grungy denim-on-denim and muddy boots. Musically, not a ton has changed. But the story of the band’s past two years is one of adjusted expectations. “Initially, we took a stab at…
Hugo
Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a $170 million 3-D spectacle that longs for the purity and simplicity of the cinema as it was in the beginning. “The movies are our dreams,” a few of its characters declare — and this from the guy who’s filmed some of the medium’s most graphic violence. (I hope never to…
Into the Abyss
For decades, Werner Herzog has wondered aloud about why people do odd, extreme or dangerous things — and in his quest, he sometimes lurches to the edge of the precipice himself. But he plays it safe with Into the Abyss, his tranquil and poignant documentary about the life and crimes of Michael Perry, who died…
The Skin I Live In
The first time the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas worked with his compatriot Pedro Almodóvar, in the disquieting erotic drama Law of Desire (1987), the director cast Banderas as the sinewy catamite of an older gay filmmaker on the verge of psychological collapse. Two more collaborations quickly followed. But for 21 years now, they’ve gone wildly…
Choreographer Staycee Pearl interprets the work of lauded science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.
In her short stories and novels, writer Octavia Butler used science fiction as a medium for social criticism and addressing the issues of humanity. Through her tales of shape-shifters, immortals and extraterrestrials, Butler mirrored such ills as racism, sexism, slavery, poverty and intolerance. Butler, an African-American woman in a field dominated by white males, won…
Defending the Caveman
As an observer of heterosexuality, I was recently watching Breaking Dawn and it occurred to me that while every girl in America is seeing this movie, all the boys are playing Modern Warfare 3. So I wonder not only why the 50 percent divorce rate isn’t higher, but how people even meet to get married…
Theatre Festival in Black & White
Compendiums of new plays are a mixed bag, sometimes with more tricks than treats. In its eighth incarnation, Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Co.’s Theatre Festival in Black & White — presented in two evenings of four one-acts each — seems to have kept its soapboxes but lost its edginess. On the plus side, it generally makes…
Two local stage artists retool Waiting for Godot from a contemporary female perspective.
Like most of Samuel Beckett’s work, Waiting for Godot takes place in a world of poverty, failure and loss. It’s a world over which figuratively looms the gaunt, hawklike visage of Beckett himself, iron-gray hair bristling, blue eyes piercing. Nonetheless — or perhaps inevitably — a few years ago, writer and performer Gab Cody announced…
The Miller Gallery lends the Pittsburgh Biennial a collaborative edge.
In a video projected on a half-finished corner of brick wall, Dana Bishop-Root talks about demolition. Demolition, she argues, is a process of raw destruction — of ripping apart neighborhoods and tossing them into landfills. Bishop-Root, her neighbors and her colleagues in the Transformazium — a Braddock-based collective of artists working in community and social…
Extended Interview: Claire Evans from YACHT
There’s a really short version of this interview in today’s paper; I talked to Claire last week when YACHT was on tour with Yo Gabba Gabba’s stage show. It was a really interesting interview, so I’m bringing you the long version! The band plays at the Rex Theater on Mon., Dec. 5. There’s a really…
