The Parallax View
Alan Pakula’s bleak 1974 film doesn’t just riff on the Kennedy assassinations (JFK’s killing was just the beginning; both political assassinations in this film clearly reference Robert Kennedy’s murder) but draws its real inspiration from the growing cultural currency of “conspiracy” that found credence in the troubled mid-1970s. And the paranoia runs deep: Here, it’s…
A Conversation with Shakey
Tell me about the Sacred Pistons.We put on two car shows a year, and we have a big party in the spring on Memorial Day weekend. Everybody brings their cars, and a couple car clubs come over from Ohio, New York and Jersey. We pretty much just have a big barbecue — there’s a…
Accounts Deceivable
When Pitt radio station staffers bounced $4,770 in checks last October, they finally realized that at least $5,000 was missing from their station account — money they had accumulated just eight months before, according to confidential station sources. Pitt student Allison Rowland, WPTS’s station manager, had written two checks totaling $4,770 for registration and…
Whatever Floats Your Concrete
If you give a nerd a canoe, he can float for a day. If you teach a nerd how to build a concrete canoe, he can float for a lifetime. Says Jennifer Pazdon (above, foreground), captain of the concrete canoe team at CMU: This is not your mother’s concrete. Pazdon and other civil engineering students…
City Faces Revesnooze
As if the news weren’t bad enough for the city of Pittsburgh, revenues appear to have taken an unexpected plunge in 2003, according to initial tallies from the city controller’s office. A spreadsheet of city collections shows that it took in about $347 million in taxes, fees, fines and aid last year, down from $353…
White Like Me
You’d think a white guy like me would be overjoyed by the creation of a new state-appointed board to oversee Pittsburgh’s troubled finances. After all, the panel — which is charged with monitoring city spending and assessing the need for new tax-revenue streams — is made up of five white guys. No women, no African…
Schoolhouse of Cards
Pittsburgh’s school board took the first public step last week in a months-long process that historically has caused the district strife — school “realignment,” or the closing and consolidation of some of the city’s schools. Introduced to the board last week, for possible approval on Feb. 24, were proposals for two contracts: one for…
The movie My Architect shows the American Wind Symphony barge designed by Louis Kahn. Was it the only one built, and where is it now?
During his career, Louis Kahn designed buildings ranging from an Ivy League art gallery to the capitol building of Bangladesh, structures of intense geometric rigor. But perhaps his most accomplished work was fashioning the façade of a normal existence from an unwieldy personal life … a life that, as My Architect documents, included having three…
Black to the Future
Having trouble telling the state House April 27th primary races apart in the local districts with the largest black population? Here’s some help: In one, a newcomer is taking on an elected official with over 20 years experience at the state level; the other finds a newcomer being challenged by an elected official with over…
Boombox
The secret history of Boombox, as documented on Dead Batteries, is one that stretches back centuries: from Hassan-i-Sabbah’s order of hashish-induced assassins, to the 17th-century heretical Ranters; from absinthe-swilling romantic poets to tech-prone English post-punks, twiddling knobs and popping eardrums. Because Boombox is one half wild-eyed insurgent spiritual extremist, one half calculated sci-fi robot-rocker –…
African-American Museum Still Not in Black
Now that the proposed African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh finally has the Downtown property supporters sought for months, the hard part can begin: raising the rest of the $26 million needed to complete the project. Neil Barclay, president of the AACC, doesn’t think it will be particularly difficult. “We’re getting significant national…
Life in Balance
For several years, the duo of Steve and Ami Sciulli — as Life in Balance, a meditative blend of mellifluous shakuhachi flute and the ringing tones of quartz crystal bowls — have been purveying their unique brand of “sound healing” in sessions and concerts among Pittsburgh’s loosely defined new-age community. The feeling they’ve projected has…
Bush League
“Unhip, Unhip Al Hurra.” Say you’re occupying a medium-sized country in a turbulent part of the world but you don’t like what that region’s mass media is saying about you. What to do? Fund your own satellite-TV station! Writing for Slate (Feb. 20), Ed Finn surveys Middle Eastern reaction to the first week of Al…
Nanang Tatang
When the Brooklyn-based folk band Ida decided to take a temporary break from their heavy touring schedule back in the fall of 2000, something surprising happened: The vocalist and the lead guitar player got married. Their coupling soon led to a pregnancy, and then a move to Rhode Island, where Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell…
Black History Re-Pressed
In the early 1980s, Ben Wilson was walking through the Hill District when he came upon the Black Chronicle, a newspaper-like compendium of articles from newspapers dating back to the 18th century. All the articles concerned black people and their struggle, from slavery to the Civil Rights era. For six years Wilson says he tried…
The Passion of the Christ
The word “authentic” shows up a lot when people talk — as they have, a lot — about a movie few as yet have seen, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The film’s Web site touts its “realism,” and to hear the hype you’d think Gibson had hauled a camera crew back to first-century…
Follow That Story
Turns out there will likely be two, not three, competing Pittsburgh City Council resolutions regarding the controversial USA PATRIOT Act. (Questioning PATRIOTism, Feb. 19.) One, sponsored by Councilor Bill Peduto, asks Pittsburgh law enforcement not to participate in investigations using the act’s enhanced surveillance and search powers. The other, sponsored by Council President Gene Ricciardi,…
Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
In the future, when scholars assess the Cuban Revolution, they’ll hopefully study Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a valuable document of one young American woman’s blossoming under the tutelage of a swivel-hipped Havana busboy. Good girl Katie (Romola Garai) arrives in Havana with her family (dad’s an executive with Ford Motor Co.) on the eve…
Pretty Lights, Tender Bodies
At least in terms of producing their latest work, Pittsburgh filmmakers Jim Duesing and Jesse McLean occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. But both will be featured on a roster of international artists when the venerable Black Maria Film and Video Festival hits town Feb. 28. A veteran animator with a host of international…
The Sleaze
At 11 on a Monday night, the Sleaze (Mark Pipas by day), quirkily handsome in rolled shirtsleeves and baggy jeans, walks into Club Café with his equipment strapped to his back. It takes just a few minutes to set up and plug in his keyboard and guitar on the stage before he orders a Budweiser,…
In My Skin
It might resemble a morbid psychodrama, but the best way to regard this film about a case of self-mutilation in the new corporate Europe is probably as a comedy so dark you’ll forget to laugh. Esther, young, healthy and in love, is a rising star at her marketing firm; one night she trips on some…
Welcome to Mooseport
In the opening scene, the various residents of Mooseport extend cheerful Main Street greetings to a middle-aged nude jogger — meaning that moratorium I suggested on comedies that take place in pretty little towns inhabited by delightfully quirky natives (and dear god, an actual roaming pet moose!) has been ignored again. Former U.S. President “Eagle”…
