A Conversation with Biko
Biko is an artist and collector of black memorabilia for his Museum of the African’s Experience in America. The Hill District native boasts a collection numbering more than 13,000 pieces, everything from slave shackles to mass-produced Serena Williams dolls. Items are displayed at locations including the Homewood YWCA and Homewood’s Alma Illery Medical…
Wild West End May End for Cyclists
For Lou Fineberg, author of local cycling guide Three Rivers on Two Wheels, riding from Downtown to the West End a few years ago was “one of my scariest moments on a bike.” It was a Friday afternoon, and he needed to do some fact-checking for the book. He started across the West End Bridge…
Third Time Uncharming for King Day Anti-War Protest
“It’s hard to believe this is the third year we are doing this,” says Gale Austin, co-founder of the Pittsburgh chapter of Black Voices for Peace, about the upcoming Martin Luther King Day protest against the Iraq War. “This war has gone on longer and taken more lives than even we expected.” Since May…
“Bush Monkeys” Climbs Back into Spotlight
The “Bush Monkeys” painting by Pittsburgh artist Chris Savido, which prompted officials of New York City’s Chelsea Market to shut down an art show in December, is now up for auction on eBay (search.ebay.com/art-for-freedom_W0QQsokeywordredirectZ1QQfromZR8). The acrylic portrait of President George W. Bush, which on closer inspection resolves into monkeys in a marsh (see News Briefs,…
Banding Together for Tsunami Relief
“We were just hanging out when we heard about what happened and wanted to come up with an idea of a way to help,” says Chris Condello, rhythm guitarist for the band Drop Monday. “Hanging out” has now turned into a five-band tsunami-relief concert at Hard Rock Café in Station Square on Jan. 14.…
Déjà Vu Lounge and Restaurant
Location: 2106 Penn Ave., Strip District. 412-434-1144 Hours: Mon.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-2 a.m. Prices: Appetizers, salads, sandwiches and pizza $7-12; entrees $16-22 Fare: A little of everything Atmosphere: Is the martini craze over yet? In dining as in every other social pursuit, there are leaders and there are followers. The leaders are the true originals and,…
LA DOLCE VITA
Federico Fellini’s 1960 film follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a gossip columnist in contemporary Rome, a faded classical city now a playground of shallow decadents. Fellini abandons his neo-realist style to present Marcello’s travails — a modern man adrift amidst affluence and boredom — in a lush, black-and-white kaleidoscope of flamboyant images. One of Fellini’s most…
Race Relations
You probably didn’t notice it, crammed as it was in a room above a South Side bar, but the race for mayor of Pittsburgh probably began Jan. 5. I say “probably” because it was hard to tell for sure. The room was crowded with members of the political activist group Democracy for America, and…
RACING STRIPES
If I were Babe, the porcine hero of the 1995 hit family film, I’d send my lawyer to Frederick du Chau’s new feature about a pretty farm harboring a talking animal that dares to be different. This tale about a plucky zebra that pines to be a racehorse features a few humans, including a trainer…
White Noise
As if we’re not overwhelmed with the endless clatter of communication here on earth, now it seems that the dead, too, have something to say. According to proponents of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the gone-before are sending us important messages through various household appliances, if we’d only drop everything in our lives and just listen. At…
Thinking Big at Mr. Small’s
It’s New Year’s Eve 2004, and Mike Speranzo, the founder of Mr. Small’s Funhouse and Theater in Millvale, is back from a two-week vacation in Orlando, where he had been visiting family, and where he had taken his 8-year-old son, Jordan, to Walt Disney World. But today, all is not well at Mr. Small’s, a…
In Good Company
Today, when we can’t truly decide — nor stop talking about — whether work or personal relationships are more important, it is fitting that we are offered a movie like In Good Company. It too is eager to tackle both issues, to entwine them in ways that we acknowledge may be inseparable. But…
House of Flying Daggers
What is there left to say about a movie like House of Flying Daggers, another gorgeous, elegant, mythical, high-flying martial-arts romantic drama from Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern), China’s internationally acclaimed director? Zhang also made the color-coded Hero, which we saw this past year. Then there’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee’s big hit…
Overnight
Overnight, co-directed by Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith, is like some unholy meld of Project Greenlight, Entourage and the biggest asshole you’ve ever met. In 1997, Boston nobody Troy Duffy snagged a widely publicized $15 million deal from Miramax to direct his script The Boondock Saints. Duffy moves his crew — a collection of…
Why is the Port Authority failing?
You’ll get a different answer from just about everybody you ask, but here’s mine. If by “failing,” you mean our mass transit system can’t pay for its operations, the answer is simple: The Port Authority is failing because that’s what it was designed to do. To begin with, let’s take a zone-three trip back…
Blur
Filmed and videotaped in the well-trod candid-camera style of nearly all rock ‘n’ roll films — on the bus, off the bus, backstage, live footage, repeat — Starshaped is Blur’s most recent foray into live-concert DVD territory. Damon, Graham and the rest of the boys have never looked so young, and as…
The Silver Thread
There was a time when the likes of The Silver Thread might be committed to the stockade as unrepentant loyalists — redcoat-harboring counterrevolutionaries, flaunting their barrister wigs and taxed tea like battle flags. (Though in the case of these Pittsburgh music-scene veterans, the wig might be a Stone Roses-style bangs ‘n’ bowls haircut, the tea…
Nedelle
Got a significantly strong threshold for light ‘n’ fluffy ’60s pop? You’d better if you plan to make it through the first track on From the Lion’s Mouth — a weepy love song about a girl’s little dog — without voluntarily employing the gag reflex. But even those who prefer their indie-pop fast, cheap and…
Road to Ruin
They have barely finished the benefit concert to raise funds for the last flood, and here comes the next one. Once again, Pittsburgh residents are being forced from their homes. Once again, numerous buildings are swept away. These are the hallmarks of natural disaster. Unless, of course, such things happen because of highway construction.…
