Image 101
“What’s interesting to me about the news is that it’s always the same!” says Pittsburgh Public Schools spokesperson Pat Crawford. “You get a little bit of weather, a little bit of traffic, the disasters, and you might get the results of a [school] board meeting if you send them a news release so they don’t…
Loud and Clear Channel
As 2003 comes to a close, we at City Paper bid farewell to one of our unlikeliest colleagues: radio “personality” Jim Quinn. You may know Quinn from his weekday morning screeds on WRRK-FM, where he raves about feminists, environmentalists, the United Nations, and so on. But here at work, we know him as the guy…
FOLLOW THAT STORY
After charging the Downtown Westin Convention Center managerial staff with dealing with the Omicron Alpha Phi Alpha Alumni Association. in an “excessively punitive” manner during their scholarship banquet weekend (News Briefs: “Glum Alums,” Dec. 11), the black fraternity organization kicked off a write-in campaign that subsequently grew to a boycott of the Westin chain and…
Cold Mountain
Anthony Minghella’s film of Cold Mountain, the best-selling Civil War novel by Charles Frazier, is half a movie for the price of one. But fortunately that half is quite satisfying. Once Minghella gets through an hour of reticent glances between his chaste lovers, he settles upon a story that moves back and forth between their…
Nut Uncrack’d
For fans of Attack Theatre, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that after several months of homelessness, the dance-based performance group has new headquarters: a rented portion of a building in the East End’s Penn Avenue arts district that’s already home to Penn Avenue Theatre. The bad news is that,…
Paycheck
Would you give up three months of day-to-day memory for a big paycheck, enough money to let you create better memories in the future? Jennings (Ben Affleck) does so with ease. He’s a hired brain who helps tech companies do jobs they’d just as soon have him forget, like rip off a competitor’s product. When…
A conversation with Ketan Bakrania
What does the name of your band mean?It’s based on the name of a [Hindu] spiritual leader, Sai Baba, this guy with a big Afro, who has a huge, huge following. He performs miracles and materializes stuff. He’s supposed to be an incarnation of God. This Indian kid was visiting me one day…
Paul Weller
I get The Jam completely — Paul Weller’s late-’70s proto-mod-punk band garnered insurmountable U.K. fame not through Britain’s bizarre hype machine, but the old-fashioned way: excitement, brilliance and more than its fair share of charm. Likewise, the cult status of The Style Council, Weller’s ’80s pre-emptive strike at acid jazz, makes perfect sense: Euro-centrism never…
Why is Squirrel Hill named as such? Were there lots of squirrels there?
Franklin Toker’s Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, notes that “Squirrel Hill is a neighborhood of surprises” — though as you’ve guessed, the neighborhood’s name isn’t one of them. While acknowledging that the area “preserves log houses from the eighteenth century and a cemetery in which Indians are buried,” Toker concludes that because it remained largely undeveloped…
Rat Pack
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., live in front of an audience, is an iconographic moment of American entertainment history so often imitated and ironically referenced that it’s almost hard to watch this 1965 performance without laughing at it. But if you can forget all that for a moment, you’ll almost certainly begin…
In America
Before it tumbles gently into melodrama, before it begins to struggle and cloy for its sensation, Jim Sheridan’s In America deals more comfortably with its effective yin and yang: on the one hand, the story of a young Irish immigrant family of four trying to survive Manhattan; and on the other, the same…
Delius
The key question anyone considering buying this Delius DVD should ask is simply this — do I want to see the two protagonists naked? Yes, folks, in these low-cost, hi-tech times, when DVD has proven itself the perfect medium for bringing opera into your living room, these are the choices. It’s too bad, because…
Kelis
Bennifer draws attention no matter the circumstance. Jay-B is a bit crunchy, but goes down all the same. But Nasis? Kelas? Doesn’t have the same ring or the same bounce. Luckily, fashion vixen and songstress Kelis doesn’t need a famous rapper/actor fiancé to help define her. She does a swell job on her own.…
Elevated Mindz
In a City Paper preview on Jean Grae earlier this year, writer Brentin Mock took to task some backpackers for whom hip hop could be a passing phase because they’re too wussy to visit East Liberty. But if Squirrel Hill is too far gone for true hip hop, I wonder what Mock would make of…
Right-Wing Boobs and the Other Kind, Too
This morning I heard Howard Stern and his crew conduct an impromptu game show with a porn star. She asked the questions, and whoever answered correctly won the prize of being allowed to grab her boobs. Howard won that round. Then somebody else, who answered the next question correctly, got to “hug her bordering on…
NO FLOW
Illustrator: Wendi Koontz Except for the year-and-a-half I was pregnant and breastfeeding, I’ve been getting my period every month for the last 23 years. I’ve bought tampons in Venezuela and crafted makeshift pads from wadded-up, scratchy tissue paper in Poland, and I once helped a friend in Mexico buy and insert her first tampon (put…
The Bush Boom
“We live in the era of the ‘hanging chad’ in which every question … is a matter of heated partisan rancor.” So says local radio talk-show host Jerry Bowyer in the introduction to his slender volume The Bush Boom: How a “misunderestimated” president fixed our broken economy. In fact, the book itself has been…
House of Sand and Fog
Early in House of Sand and Fog, there’s a quietly effective moment. Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), a troubled young woman, drives by night to the family home she lost through sheer carelessness. Someone else has bought it, and she doesn’t know what to do. So she turns the heat on and falls asleep on the…
Shocking! Council Thinking Outside of the Box
Pittsburgh’s budget crisis hasn’t left city council creatively bankrupt. On Dec. 16, council began considering measures that could help the city’s shrunken workforce clear icy streets, and apprehend rowdy criminal suspects without shooting them. Council President Gene Ricciardi said his office has faced blizzards of complaints that streets aren’t being plowed and salted since…
Four-reelin’
Dave Weewee and Jeff Justice are on more than a cross-country road trip — from their matching red jump suits on down, it’s a mission. Weewee’s independent feature film Cause ‘n’ Defect is newly available on video, and lacking big-name stars and a big advertising budget, they’re getting the word out as best they can:…
Closing the Books
As the city school board passed their 2004 budget – very quietly, compared to the last two years – two other local officials looked to the district as one possible source of financial relief for the city. With few changes, Superintendent John Thompson’s proposed budget passed Dec. 17, 5-3 with one abstention. It was…
