Iguana Grill
Location: 1120 East Carson St., South Side. 412-390-0490 Hours: Mon.-Wed. 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Thu.-Fri. 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat. noon-11 p.m.; Sun. noon-9 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $4-8; entrees $6-10 Fare: Mexican-American Atmosphere: Understated contemporary Liquor: Full bar “Foreign food” is a broad term, encompassing not only myriad cuisines but also more than one approach to preparing…
Sentence Fragments
Is justice best served by keeping juries ignorant of the law? So far, Pennsylvania’s prosecutors, and most of its judges, are saying yes. Or so it seems from the strange history of Rompilla vs. Horn, a Pennsylvania death-penalty appeal currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. This isn’t a sob story about the…
Million Dollar Baby
There’s a sense of the miraculous at play in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, of improbable grace arising in the most mundane surroundings. That the film is disarming and poignant, rather than cloying and melodramatic, is a testament to Eastwood’s sharp storytelling sensibilities. Based on F.X. Toole’s short story “Rope Burns,” Million Dollar Baby…
Days of Being Wild
A revival of Wong Kar-Wai’s sophomore film, 1991’s Days of Being Wild, shows the writer-director already pursuing the themes and visual styles that would bring him critical acclaim in more recent films including Happy Together (1997) and 2000’s In the Mood for Love. Like In the Mood, Days is set in…
Moolaadé
To get an idea of Ousmane Sembene’s chops as a filmmaker, consider how the venerable Senegalese artist opens his latest work, Moolaadé. It’s with the sight of an itinerant merchant’s bicycle-drawn cart traversing a dirt road into the village where the film is set. The sequence doesn’t seem to have much to do…
Off the Map
Pittsburgh is still losing population, which is remarkable if you think about it. I mean, it’s a wonder people even know how to get out of town. New Hampshire be damned: This is the real “can’t get there from here” location. Streets begin in parallel formation and then, like expectation and…
A Conversation with Paradise
Paradise the Grand Architect was a party promoter and host at the legendary New York City club Latin Quarters 30 years ago, just as it was giving birth to some folk art you might have heard of called hip hop. He later helped form the Blackwatch Movement, the neo-Black Panther, militant, activist wing of hip…
Bright Eyes
It could certainly be deemed a dismal omen that Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, who at age 22 released what is now regarded as one of the finest singer-songwriter albums of a generation — Lifted, on Omaha’s Saddle Creek label — has followed that recording with a project that could rightly be called a modern-pop…
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
At this point, music writing is far beyond ironic and post-ironic, well into “joycore” and “spazzrock”; it’s an age in which words like “funk” and “soul” too often describe the records an artist listens to, rather than the ones she makes. So, with a language in which the closest approximations (such as Al Green-alike Ricky…
Stereo Total
Rarely in the course of history have Franco-Prussian relations produced such harmonious results as in Stereo Total, the Berlin-based, multilingual, electrotrash-chanson-pop duo of Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring. (Who else would record a song that references Klaus Kinski and Jerry Lewis in the same verse?) Do the Bambi showcases the eccentricities we have come…
McKees Rocks Can’t See Mural for Trees
Step into the main entrance of McDermott Funeral Home and the first thing you spot in the foyer are the birds: a glass cage of fully grown, 4-inch Australian finches with feathers of bright oranges, greens, violets and blues. For the McDermotts, who’ve run their funeral business for the last 120…
Unsolved Murder Has Many Keys
Nearly three years after Jamie Stickle was found burned to death in her Jeep outside her North Side apartment on Feb. 8, 2002, many things about the unsolved killing still upset Stickle’s mother, Marge Walls. Not least of which is the fact that her daughter’s death is still not officially a homicide. Jamie Stickle,…
Is there any anthropological evidence to suggest why football is such a big deal in Southwestern Pennsylvania?
“Isn’t it because we had a good team once?” hypothesizes a friend of mine who isn’t even old enough to remember the Steelers of the 1970s. Then again, she also isn’t old enough to remember the Steelers of the 1980s … or all of the other decades in which they sucked with the…
The PCA’s Extreme Makeover
Jill Larson is hanging a picture at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It’s a framed collage of a dog called “Pooch Parade,” and she’s having a little trouble getting the nail the right height: To reach the wall, Larson has to lean over a table laden with warming trays for the Rotary Club’s weekly…
