Rolling Stone names local mashup artist among the year’s best
“youre #22 best album according to rollin stone.” That’s quite a text message to get from your best friend while plugging away Clark Kent-style at your day job. “I wrote back, ‘Seriously? Is that out yet?’ and he didn’t even reply back,” says Pittsburgh-based mashup artist Girl Talk, whose album Night Ripper indeed landed at…
Pittsburgh N’@
From www.andybot.wordpress.com: I passed up stopping at the liquor store on Centre across from Neville because there was a guy begging for change in front of it and I can’t buy alcohol in front of a begging person because of the guilt factor. So I ended up walking all the way to the NEW WINE…
Devin Russian’s bleak, lo-fi debut
Devin Russian is well-known as the mild-mannered yet resolute co-proprietor of Garfield’s ModernFormations gallery and performance space. But he has a secret identity, sneaking out at night like Matt Murdock (a.k.a. Daredevil), to hone his craft on smaller local stages as … Singer/Songwriter Man, with the power to wield the Loudest Acoustic Guitar in the…
Stage Briefs
The Pittsburgh-Monaco Connection Pittsburgh guys who write plays about steelworkers and alley brawlers can win awards for those plays. They can even win awards named after Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. So it happened with James McManus. The Donora native, 32, earned his master’s degree in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon in May;…
Classic thrash from locals Crown the Lost
Crown the Lost’s breed of purist metal is classic, late ’80s melodic thrash in the unholy wake of Metallica and Slayer. Other than guitarist Joe Bonaddio’s occasional interjections, there are no tough-guy hardcore growls and barks. No black-metal sorcery, no dark ambient atmospheres, no gothic/industrial machinations, and most importantly, not even the faintest scintilla of…
Rocky Balboa
It’s a very familiar story, a book-end remake of 1976’s Rocky — the blue-collar underdog with no chance but plenty of heart. (Capsule review
Stories That Made a Diffidence
In 2006, citizen journalists were again the news world’s darlings, from cellphone-camera clickers to bloggers breaking big-deal stories. If the non-professional scribe is a citizen-journalist, what does that make those of us paid to do this? Non-citizen journalists? If so, we must be either resident aliens or royalty. Either way, 2006 has made us –…
Academic Questions
Michel Bérubé teaches in a classroom with concrete-block walls and a linoleum floor. There are two archaic television sets up near the ceiling at the front of the room, and rows of long, nondescript tables throughout. Every morning, Bérubé has to set up a portable wooden lectern atop the table at the front of the…
Savage Love
My wife and I have been married four-and-a-half years, and we both are bi. We’ve been propositioned by — and played with — a number of sexy friends heteroflexible enough not to want/need full swap. So our play with others has been limited to oral and light petting. We’ve now been approached by a very…
What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education Michael Bérubé
What’s liberal about the liberal arts? The faculty, for starters. Michael Bérubé acknowledges that while conservative critics overstate the numbers, “There’s really no question … that campuses are teeming with liberal faculty.” There is a question, though, about whether that interferes with anyone’s education, and about how much it matters. As Bérubé puts it, “I…
My Space
Remember when the city was desperate for revenue a few years ago, and there was all that talk about selling “naming rights” to public assets, like parks and bus shelters? Looks like Mayor Luke Ravenstahl beat us to it. In the past week, Pittsburgh households started getting big postcards about garbage collection. There, beside the…
Beam’s “experimental urban soundscapes” return with Chemistry.
“Live, there’s no rules, the music takes us wherever we want to go. But with this stuff, I had a clear-cut vision.” — David Throckmorton
Clutch amps-up the guitars … and the blues
“We kind of created our own little microcosm, and maybe the rest of the world likes to look in, instead of us trying to chase something.”
Morgantown’s Librarians: brainy, serrated dance-rock
It’s hard to refuse a band that confidently balances pleasure and paranoia, dorkdom and glamour.
Fabrizio Gerbino’s painting-as-alchemy.
Gerbino’s vision is complex but clear, propelling him ahead of the talented pack of emerging painters that populate the city.
Into the Woods Today
The Forest Service has a wilderness plan, but can we see the trees?
Surreal Life
What is the essence of Squonk when it stops squonking — or even moving? An answer lies on the fourth floor of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Post-Gazette gets last laugh on sheriff’s ads
Rival Trib sues sheriff, county and the P-G.
“Barrel Man,” Part 4
This is the fourth and final part of Dan Arp’s story about Leonard, who’s been coaxed by his alcoholic mother to leave Pittsburgh — where he has sexually ambiguous relationship with his dance teacher, Sarah — and come home to Houston for a rodeo. There, his mother gets badly drunk, and Leonard and his father…
Photoshop of Horrors
If the demon hand of Photoshop seemed visible around the gleaming raiment of Brangelina in the P-G recently — you’re right.
Paper War of Words Cuts at P-G Staffers
A former colleague editorializes against overpaid P-G staff — via a publication devised while Block paid.
Blue
Blue has a sophisticated, contemporary menu that runs the gamut from the de rigueur (chicken satay) to the refreshing (gorgonzola hummus) — and that’s just the appetizers.
Drop in Buckets Starts Downtown Recycling
New ways to Redd Up while at the office debut.
Eragon
The director, Stefan Fangmeier — seriously, that’s his name — assembles what may be the longest movie trailer in history.
Legal Smokescreen
Pity Allegheny County’s poor smokers, for they are addicted to nicotine. Pity the poor bar and restaurant owners, for they fear their income will decrease if a countywide smoking ban is instituted. Pity the poor nonsmokers, for they merely seek an atmosphere without poisonous gas circulating nearby. Pity the poor county councilors, for they struggled…
Dreamgirls sings.
At the end of Act I, when the major players come to blows in a glorious piece of Motown operetta, Hudson performs the most thrilling power ballad I can remember seeing on film.
Porter in a Storm
For a week after Steelers linebacker Joey Porter twice dropped a homophobic slur in his post-game comments with the media, you could hear a pin drop on the North Side and Madison Avenue, such was the clamor coming from the NFL and Steelers front offices. In case you’ve been in a coma: After the Steelers…
We Are Marshall
From its untoppable adversity right through to its pre-big game “heart and soul” speech, man-tears and slow-motion final goal, We Are Marshall is a familiar inspirational sports melodrama.
