Bush League
“President’s Budget Contains Larger Cuts in Domestic Discretionary Programs Than Has Been Reported.” Gosh, it must have been an oversight: In issuing Bush’s 2005 budget Feb. 2, the Office of Management and Budget left out his plans for the following four years. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (Feb. 5), those plans…
A Conversation With Sandrine Sheon
How did you get involved in paper engineering? I guess it comes from my art background; I studied history and languages as an undergraduate, and then went into art, and at that point I was making all these contraption boxes — [Joseph] Cornellian pieces where you put something into a space, and move a handle…
Why do streets and avenues Downtown not intersect as in other cities? Why do avenues start at 1st Avenue and the streets start at 6th Street? What happened to the lower-numbered streets?
Emo Phillips, one of the unjustly forgotten comic geniuses of the modern age, once told a joke about driving in New York City. He was on 47th Street and needed to get to 48th but couldn’t figure out where to turn. Then he remembered Einstein’s postulate that, due to the curvature of the space-time continuum,…
Oneida
About a year-and-a-half ago, this Brooklyn squall-n-throb trio dropped an album that, like the near-blinding fireball on its cover, obliterated everything they’d done before, leaving their previous efforts in a smoldering heap. Each One Teach One dared to take the psych spotlight off Japan for a moment. That album’s 58 or so minutes of largely…
Zehetmair Quartet
Few music lovers are probably foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a new recording of Robert Schumann’s string quartets. After all, they may be the most neglected of the composer’s mature works — and it’s not hard to see why. Poor Schumann — composer, madman, hen-pecked husband. Still, if it weren’t for…
My Favorite
While everything associated with the ’80s is in again, for some musicians, the decade never went out of style. Case in point: New York-based retro-futurists My Favorite. During the early ’90s, bucking the grunge trend, the band decided instead to focus on creating synth-pop tunes awash in all the cinematic and aesthetic nostalgia of the…
Barbershop 2: Back in Business
On the surface, the deal in Barbershop 2: Back in Business seems sweet: Allow urban renewal to work through proven cash cows like the Nappy Cutz chain hair salon with its basketball courts and exotic fish aquariums that Quentin Leroux (Harry Pennix) is building across the street from the local, family-owned Calvin’s Barbershop. Calvin…
The Company
Thirty-some years after he gave us the last great innovation in the raw material of cinema, Robert Altman still has the ability to make great movies. You only need watch his natty, class-conscious thriller Gosford Park, or the brutal Short Cuts, to know that the old white-haired lion hasn’t yet lost his mane. When…
PRESIDENTS, WE SALUTE YOU!
PRESIDENTAlbert HeilesThree Rivers Volkswagen Club Writer: ANDY NEWMAN Years in Position: 1 Duties: Presides over six annual board meetings to help steer an organization of more than 250 Volkswagen enthusiasts. Platform Planks: “I want to increase the number of people who participate and we want to have more fun. Our objective is to grow our…
Not Knowing Jack About Terrorism
I’ll confess: I’m jealous of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette national security writer Jack Kelly. Mostly it’s because of his title. Chicks dig that war-on-terror stuff, and being a security expert seems like a pretty cushy job. You certainly don’t have to be right very often. Like many pundits, for example, Kelly was sure Iraq had Weapons…
The Barbarian Invasions
For Rémy — the arrogant, didactic, philandering history professor and bon vivant we first met 17 years ago in The Decline and Fall of the American Empire — the world is coming to an end. Not the whole world. Just his world. But to Rémy, it’s the only one that counts. He has a…
City Budget, From Soup to Nuts
Six weeks into the year, the City of Pittsburgh’s 2004 budgetary stew seems increasingly a case of too many cooks competing for the ladle. Cook 1: On Feb. 4, Councilor Sala Udin proposed rolling back the parking tax, which had jumped just three days earlier from 31 percent to 50 percent. Though Downtown business…
Howard’s End?
“Well, a lot has happened since our last meeting, and not much of it is good,” said Rob Beckwith, host of the Feb. 4 Howard Dean “meet-up.” It was the one-year anniversary of the first Internet-organized gathering of support for the Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate. About 25 of Dean’s loyal Pittsburgh devotees met…
Kerry the Day
Janis Williams knew before the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was the Democratic candidate to beat. “[Vermont Gov. Howard] Dean got so much press about his grassroots organizing and his team,” says Williams, a North Sider and volunteer organizer for the Kerry campaign. “We’ve had a network of…
Bush/Giuliani? Not Ruled Out …
For weeks, political insiders have speculated that President George W. Bush, sagging in the polls, might eventually send Vice President Dick Cheney back to his Wyoming pastures in favor of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Pundits have pointed to Cheney’s dour image, his four heart attacks and the general agreement that he’s not a…
Black History Recovered
Dr. E.J. Josey, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Science, wrote the book on black librarians … literally. His 1970 volume, The Black Librarian in America, was the first to detail their careers and studies across the country. In 1964, Josey had fought to get the American Library Association to pass…
