Events Announced for Peduto Inauguration Day
Photo by Heather Mull Bill Peduto Monday is Bill Peduto Day in the city of Pittsburgh and his transition committee has announced a whole slew of Inauguration Day activities, including a photo-op for “portraits” with the mayor and his cabinet at the Wintergarden at PPG Place. It’s never too early to get that 2014 Christmas…
Short Film Contest Seeks Entrants
Pittsburgh’s JFilm seeks entries for short-film competition
Critics’ Picks: December 26 – January 2
[SOUL] + TUE., DEC. 31 He did time as a James Brown impersonator, had stints of homelessness and was the subject of a biographical documentary; now Charles Bradley, on the heels of his 2013 release Victim of Love, plays Pittsburgh’s First Night celebration. The now-65-year-old Bradley broke out in 2011 with his debut, No Time…
Grudge Match
In this comedy from Peter Segal, a pair of retired boxers (Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone) is coaxed out of retirement for one last fight to settle their long-running rivalry. It’s a full complement of grumbling, sniping, crusty managers, sweaty man boobs, some family obligations and an uninteresting revelation or two before the “big fight.” (Who…
Lukas Read returns home to Pittsburgh with a new solo album
LUKAS READ with MICHELLE GREGIO. 7 p.m. Sat., Dec. 28. Pittsburgh International Children’s Art Gallery, 5020 Penn Ave., Garfield. All ages. $5 (suggested donation; benefits Thomas Merton Center). www.facebook.com/lukasreadmusic When Lukas Read was living in Pittsburgh, you may have known him for his work with Whiskey Holler, an indie-rock band with occasional alt-country threads. But…
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
About halfway through Ben Stiller’s adaptation of James Thurber’s eponymous short story, I realized with a start: Stiller must not have actually read the tale about the mild-mannered Mr. Mitty, who escapes his dull life through fanciful daydreams. Or perhaps he started it and never finished it. (It’s only 2,100 words long.) Or, and this…
New Releases
Mario Dones Black Watermelon (Self-released) First full-length from one of the city’s more underrated MCs. Dones takes topics that are common in hip hop — money, race and references to hip hop itself — but delivers his thoughts in ways that avoid cliché. He shows range, too, spitting fast on some tracks and taking it…
Wadjda
There’s perhaps nothing so remarkable about a sweet, low-key coming-of-age story about a young girl who’s determined to live life on her own terms. But there is when that film is set and filmed in Saudi Arabia, a nation where the public and even private roles of women are strictly curtailed. Add in that this…
Y U No Write Real Story?
For the past several years in this issue, City Paper has dedicated space to remembering the top stories of the past year. We always tried to make the list as complete and as exhaustive as possible. But after our insurance-provider refused to pay out any more claims for carpal-tunnel surgery, we decided maybe the big…
CP music writers look back on 2013
My Top Five Shows of 2013 Swans at the Rex Theater, June 14. I felt a lot of things at this show: unending sonic vibrations through my chest, lower back pain, impatience, near-bliss. As much an endurance test as anything, Swans played for over two hours and I, for one, oscillated between extreme fatigue and…
Saving Face(book)
“Leaders of the nation’s biggest technology firms warned President Obama … at the White House on Tuesday that National Security Agency spying programs are damaging their reputations,” the Washington Post reported Dec. 17. The executives — who included representatives from AT&T, Google and Facebook — “also pressed the need for transparency and for limits on…
Gas Explosion
You can’t blame Gov. Tom Corbett, and the executives of the Marcellus Shale industry, if they seemed a little stunned last week. They’re only used to the ground shifting beneath other people’s feet. And they weren’t the only ones surprised by the state Supreme Court’s ruling on Dec. 19. It’s not often a judge takes…
Savage Love
DEAR READERS: Sophia Wallace, the New York City-based conceptual artist behind the amazing Cliteracy project, was a guest on my podcast recently. (To hear our conversation, go to www.savagelovecast.com and look up episode 371.) During our chat, Wallace told me that a column I wrote years ago about the importance of the clit had a…
Short List: December 26 – January 2
FREE EVENT: Sat., Dec. 28 – Birds Odds are your tribe doesn’t have a holiday tradition as venerable — or as feathered — as the Christmas Bird Count. This Audobon Society initiative — the world’s longest-running citizen-science survey — is 114 years old, and the Audobon Society of Western Pennsylvania’s participation dates to the 1950s.…
A modern take on the traditional Jewish deli opens in Squirrel Hill
Nu Modern Jewish Bistro 1711 Murray Ave., Squirrel Hill. 412-422-0220 Hours: Daily 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $4-6; soups, salads, sandwiches $5-13 Liquor: BYOB Often, it seems like the rich culinary tradition of European Jews has been worn down to a couple of clichés, like chicken soup and pastrami on rye. Even when the representation…
Bar Marco’s Jamilka Borges shares a Puerto Rican holiday treat
Bar Marco’s chef de cuisine, Jamilka Borges, describes innovating menus for the restaurant’s tasting room as “the ultimate chef dream.” But when it comes to holiday meals, she still prefers traditional foods. Borges learned to “love the idea of feeding people” from her mother, who would start a new dish with a main ingredient and…
Gus’s Café distinguished by beer list, gluten-free menu
George Haritos has a simple vision for the just-opened Gus’s Café: “The plan is to make this a comfortable place.” Haritos named the friendly Lawrenceville bar and restaurant in honor of his late father, Konstantinos “Gus” Haritos: The elder Haritos owned Harris Grill on Ellsworth Avenue from the 1950s until 2001. The new venue is…
Local writer goes gluten-free in new lifestyle book
Caroline Shannon-Karasik long knew there was something a little off with her health. As a teenager, she’d get sick more often than most, and at one point was losing her hair. It wasn’t until 2010, though, that the Penn-Trafford and Point Park University grad got the diagnosis she’d waited so long for: celiac disease. Since…
Two unusual memoirs confront disease with humor and introspection.
The late Marilyn Bates’ memoir Bloodwork: Married to Diabetes for Six Decades is as wry as its title suggests, but somehow not nearly as depressing. Bates, a Steubenville native, grew up overly acquainted with Pittsburgh hospitals because of childhood diabetes; she spent her latter years in Pittsburgh as a high school and college writing teacher,…
Artist Scott Hocking finds meaning and resonance in cast-offs from Detroit and industrial tailings from Pittsburgh
CORONAL MASS INJECTION continues through May 25. The Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side. 412-231-3169 or mattressfactory.org. The Mattress Factory seeks out art from the world’s potential conflict zones and ideological fault lines. Scouts from the North Side institution visited Cuba during the George W. Bush-era deterioration of relations with the island nation. Before…
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom Directed by: Justin Chadwick Starring: Idris Elba, Naomi Harris Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is less a bad movie than an impossible one. Director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter William Nicholson try to cram 50 years from one of the most iconic lives of the past century into a single feature…
Works of embedded Civil War artists at the Frick
CIVIL WAR ERA DRAWINGS FROM THE BECKER COLLECTION continues through Jan. 12. Frick Art & Historical Center. 7227 Reynolds St., Point Breeze. 412-371-0600 or thefrickpittsburgh.org These days, anyone can (and often does) take numerous pictures of anything. But during the Civil War, getting images from battlefields required skilled illustrators (notwithstanding the pioneering work of photographer…
The Wolf of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s comedy The Wolf of Wall Street ostensibly details the rise and fall of real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), but it’s a cautionary tale that like its coked-up protagonist insists on having a wild time right up until the last scene. Belfort got rich pitching dubious penny stocks in the late ’80s, before…
We review the first 50 pages each of Mason Radkoff’s wonderful debut novel and Adam Matcho’s darkly funny essay collection
Walt and Samantha married 12 years ago, and they still flirt. The thing is, they’re divorced. But they see each other a lot: Walt, a failed-academic-turned-handyman, lives above Sam’s garage — even though she’s now married to Arthur, a straitlaced professor of dentistry. Mason Radkoff’s wonderful debut novel, The Heart of June (Braddock Avenue Books,…
The Great Beauty
When occasional journalist and Rome society fixture Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) turns 65, he grows more contemplative of his life: Has it all been a whirl of parties, bullshit and frivolous pursuits? Is there any meaning, or any future? Director Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) examines this query in his loosely plotted but visually dazzling film.…
