RUSSIAN DOLLS
Europe seems like a groovy place to live today, especially if you’re young, smart, sexually adventurous, and starring in a hip comedy: London by day, Paris by night, and St. Petersburg tomorrow … call me on my multi-lingual mobile! Cédric Klapisch catches up with that handsome gang he introduced us to in 2002’s The Spanish…
Iovino’s Café
Location: 300A Beverly Road, Mount Lebanon. 412- 440-0414 Hours: Tue.-Thu. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., 5:30-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., 5:30-10 p.m. Prices: Appetizers, soups and salads $4-8; entrées $10-24 Fare: Continental-Asian fusion Atmosphere: White-tablecloth casual Liquor: BYOB Smoking: None permitted One of Angelique’s cousins, who has lived all her life in the leafy suburbs of…
SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY
Director Sydney Pollack casts his lens over the work of his friend, architect Frank Gehry. Their partnership on this film is anchored by a challenge each faces in his respective discipline: how to achieve personal and artistic fulfillment against stringent commercial demands. It’s a great hook that is too often subsumed in the open adoration…
Papered Over
Before its summer vacation began, the Supreme Court made the safe choice and decided to allow the PA Department of Corrections to continue denying newspapers to its most incorrigible guests. Prison officials wouldn’t want anybody getting any ideas. The court handed down its decision in the case of Beard v. Banks on June 28. Ronald…
Bigoted Remark Won’t Hurt Guillen
With the All Stars leaving town, so goes a kinder, gentler, more sensitive version of White Sox skipper Ozzie Guillen. We probably won’t see Ozzie in person again around here for awhile, but you can bet we’ll be seeing him in the headlines. He’s been busy this season, between managing the defending the world champs…
Pirates’ Unforced Error
It’s too bad owners don’t get a slot on the All-Star roster. Because hands down, the choice to represent the National League this year would have been the Pirates’ ownership: Kevin McClatchy and Ogden Nutting. No, I’m serious. The Pirates owners perform much like their third-baseman, All-Star back-up Freddy Sanchez. They don’t impress you with…
Road Scholar
When he’s not editing Western Pennsylvania History magazine for the Heinz History Center, Brian Butko is on America’s byways, documenting their diners, motels, two-story-high dinosaurs and the roads themselves. CP checked in with Butko from … where else? … on the road, in the middle of Missouri. Butko updates us on his latest books, Greetings…
Ought-to-mobiles
Nothing revs Pittsburgh up quite like the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. The 11 days of car shows, receptions and qualifying runs, culminating in the endearingly noisy races through Schenley Park, all benefit the city in various ways. The events have raised millions of dollars for the Autism Society of Pittsburgh and the Allegheny…
Wild Times Ahead
On a Sunday afternoon in Frick Park, Kevin Tucker abandons the trail. He lopes across a trickle of a creek and climbs a scantly wooded hillside, searching for a spot he knows. He crouches beside a rotting log, tipping it to look for the kind of food he hopes to survive on someday. The lion’s…
Booking the President
Some noted rabble-rousers locally and across the country hope to add George W. Bush’s name to a list of dubious distinction: They want to make our 43rd president the fourth to have impeachment proceedings undertaken against him. They claim that under the Constitution, Bush is eligible to be formally accused by…
A Sting and a Prayer
In the Light of the Age mosque, on a small North Side street, a library door that was once nailed shut is now pushed in, hanging by a bottom corner. The door to a women’s prayer room has a jagged hole through its middle, and the lock to the women’s entrance door is busted from…
ConferencesIf You Give 300 Storytellers a Venue …
Once upon a time, for all of us, telling stories meant sitting at grandma’s kitchen table and listening to yet another rendition of our parents’ youthful mishaps, or lying still in bed for the 100th rendition of the umpteenth chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth. But for dedicated raconteurs across the country, who will gather here…
A Conversation with Joycelyn Banks
Joycelyn Banks, a rehabilitation specialist at United Cerebral Palsy of Pittsburgh in Oakland, was crowned Ms. Wheelchair Pennsylvania in March. The disability advocate from McKeesport will represent the state in the national pageant in Little Rock, Ark., on July 31. Donations to help pay for her way to the nationals can be sent…
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Avast, mateys! Once again the azure seas of the 18th-century West Indies are beset with pirates, star-crossed lovers and supernatural beings. Continuing the mildly anarchic adventure begun in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Gore Verbinksi sets sail again with Dead Man’s Chest. On board this…
Strangers With Candy
Oh, woe is the television sketch comedy that makes a mad scramble for the big screen. What was howlingly funny in 20-minute bursts ingested a week apart feels padded and repetitive during a 90-minute run. The latest victim of such upsizing is Strangers With Candy, an adaptation of Comedy Central’s erstwhile cult-comedy about…
A Scanner Darkly
A war on drugs. Government surveillance. A populace careening between utter disregard, myopic self-indulgence and paranoia. Such was the stuff of Philip K. Dick’s oddly prescient 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly, now adapted by filmmaker Richard Linklater. The noir-ish sci-fi tale is set in the proverbial near future. People are wacked…
Over There and Over Here
Brad Grimm knew little about Turkey. Indeed, the opportunity to travel there inspired some trepidation among his fellow students in Robert Morris University’s Center for Documentary Production and Study. Their hesitation was “because of the whole situation we’re in globally,” Grimm says diplomatically. When he decided to go, people told him, “I hope you make…
