When was Pittsburgh first incorporated as a city?
For the answer to your question, I turn to History of Pittsburgh by Sarah Killikelly, who did historians a great favor by studying the evolution — if that’s the word — of city government, so the rest of us don’t have to. According to Killikelly, the first attempt to establish a…
Buck 65
A while back, during my morning e-mail ritual, I opened an especially excited message from a publicist, imploring me to lend some attention to one of her new musicians. “Buck 65 is blowing up!” She assured me. Richard Terfry, as Buck is also known, was apparently a hip-hop artist who rapped over country and western…
Hide and Seek
Hide and Seek desires to be a spooky cinematic riff on the popular children’s pastime, but John Polson’s film has the feel of another game, and it’s one where we, the audience, get played. A flashy ad campaign and an A-list star may lure movie-goers, but that’s just a fresh shill for a…
M83
It’s no wonder Frenchman Anthony Gonzalez named his cinematically minded electronica project, M83, after a spiral galaxy. “I’m fascinated by all the things which have a connection with space,” he explained in a recent interview with Anthem magazine. And if recent press reports (and SoundScan numbers) can be believed, most everyone with a…
Coachwhips
If office-casual garage rock is your scene, this could be just the right punch in the mouth for you. Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge is pure, visceral immediacy and it doesn’t just shake hips. It shakes hipsters from their denim-clad pretensions of cave-mannish brutality. Saturated with raunch and rancor, vocalist/guitarist…
Alone in the Dark
Any film that opens with paragraphs of explanatory text is already off to a bad start. Alone in the Dark scrolls plenty of hoo-hah about an ancient advanced people, the Abkani; a gate to an evil other world populated by bad creatures; a super-secret government agency, Bureau 713; a scientist medically experimenting on orphans; and…
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Sam Bicke sells office furniture, and he sells it very badly. Timid and halting, he can’t get a guy to buy a sporty brown Naugahyde swivel chair. His boss seals the deal in under a minute. So later, at a bar, the boss tells Sam (Sean Penn) that he has to…
Tactical Video
The Saddam Hussein masks were all well and good for bus rides in Pittsburgh. But Fereshteh Toosi figured that if Saddam were on holiday stateside, the place he’d really want to see is Washington — and he’d probably take along one of his body doubles. So six weeks after the 2003…
A Conversation with Sue Eggen
Sue Eggen, 28, moved to Pittsburgh from Portland, Ore., last summer after her boyfriend enrolled in grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. Among other delights, she found a burgeoning community of hip young crafters who spurred her plans to open a Pittsburgh branch of the Church of Craft. What did you think Pittsburgh…
Stillers Water Runs Deep
Thank goodness the Stillers got their butts kicked by the Patriots. I was worried there for a while. We Pittsburghers can’t get a break. Our destiny is eternal mediocrity. If you accept this premise, then you understand the danger of the Stillers actually heading to the Super Bowl. If the Stillers…
End of the Trolley Line?
In her living room, Allentown lifer Judy Hackel has a painting of an old-fashioned streetcar from her childhood — the one whose route is today loosely covered by the modern 52 Allentown T. As head of the Allentown Civic Association, she enlists the trolley as a picturesque ambassador for her neighborhood…
Merger Benefits Not Necessarily White and Black
One day our city and county governments will merge and, “we should give in to the fact that this is inevitable,” says Richard Adams, dean of Community College of Allegheny County’s Homewood branch. But the merger won’t be without a fight to ensure that minorities have a stake in the combination. The Western Pennsylvania…
Who’s Your Robot Daddy?
The silvery little bugger just wants to be friends. Sony’s latest robot project, a bipedal humanoid called QRIO, caught Pittsburgh’s eye on Jan. 28 with its multiple-CPU-controlled dancing and ingratiating city name-dropping. But the robot’s mission is greater than just showing off clever feats of engineering: He’s an ambassador between human- and robot-kind. Robots creep…
My Ngoc
Location: 2120 Penn Ave., Strip District. 412-765-1150 Hours: Open 7 days, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Prices: Appetizers and soups, $1.50-6.95; entrees $5.95-15.95 Fare: Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese Atmosphere: 80s minimalist Liquor: Full bar with limited wine My Ngoc is probably best known for what happens outside its doors. At all hours, you can find one of…
Loaded Barrels and Empty Gestures
It has come to this for gun-control advocates in Pennsylvania: introducing nearly hopeless assault weapons ban bills just to get legislators to talk about the issue, and giving the state a symbolic bad grade. Democratic state Rep. Dan Frankel of Squirrel Hill says in the next few weeks he is planning to…
Justice Perverted
The case U.S. vs. Extreme Associates was supposed to be about an especially perverse form of pornography. It’s turned out to be more than a little perverse itself. According to the U.S. attorney who filed the case, Pittsburgh’s own Mary Beth Buchanan, pornography is legal when it is being made. It’s legal when it…
Mayor May Not
Jan. 2, 2006: You are the new mayor of Pittsburgh. Here in the lobby of the City-County Building, the city’s political fixers, business honchos and labor leaders are gathered to celebrate your inauguration. They’re slapping your back. They’re wringing your hand. Ladies are offering their cheeks for your trademark peck. Just one thing darkens your…
Baghdad Sojourn
Last March, on the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Pittsburgh-based peace activist Vincent Scotti Eirene took a tape recorder and a camera on a two-week tour of Iraq as part of a fact-finding delegation organized by the group Occupation Watch. Now Eirene has self-published Night Flight to Baghdad, a 28-page…
Progress Pittsburgh: Against the Machine
If somebody distilled the disgust and hope that drove hordes of young Democrats to Pittsburgh’s voting booths on Nov. 2, and pumped it into the May 17 mayoral primary, what would happen? That’s the question posed by Progress Pittsburgh, a new political action committee that hopes to rally young progressives and upend the old order.…
