Only Human
“Watch that step,” says Charles Morrison, as he leads two visitors into his office in the City-County Building. Morrison is the director of Pittsburgh’s Human Relations Commission, charged with addressing complaints of discrimination based on race, sex, age, sexual orientation or disability, and it seems a little odd that his office doorway isn’t wheelchair-friendly. On…
The Eye
How can a supernatural thriller with no surprises still manage to give you the occasional thrill? Is it our innate and immutable fear of the unknown, a fear so primal that it overtakes all reason? Or do we so enjoy a scare that we will ourselves to have it, like the rush of an extreme…
Bad Boys II
I guess we should be happy that in a movie genre dominated by Caucasians, with the occasional minority sidekick, there’s at least one salable property where both comic-cop action heroes are black. Still, I have a hard time celebrating the noxious “Bad Boys” franchise, especially when the current installment is basically an elaborate excuse to…
RAY’S BLUE MARLIN GRILL
ANGELIQUE: So there I was, feeling sorry for myself because I’m not going to the beach this summer, when Jason suggested we have dinner at Ray’s Blue Marlin. Suddenly I was transported to Miami on the Allegheny. JASON: This would be Miami, circa 1953. ANGELIQUE: Or maybe a Northerner’s fantasy of Miami. JASON: The eponymous…
Station Identification
No one at WAMO radio seems to be sweating their new market competition, judging by their Downtown Penn Avenue office, where DJs, program directors and producers — bouncy black men who all look fresh out of college — are goofing off, calling each other names, scarfing down boxes of pizza and trading notes on where…
Off Center
Six months after budget cuts resulted in about 20 layoffs at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Science Center has laid off another half-dozen workers. Sources close to the museum say that between June 27 and June 30, six full-time employees in the center’s education department were let go. That’s more than the three…
Idle Fight Exhausting
For the second time this year, a clean-air measure appears likely to spur a turf battle between Allegheny County Council and the Health Department. Councilor Rich Fitzgerald, a Squirrel Hill Democrat, is sponsoring a bill that would bar any buses from idling their engines for more than two minutes, except in very cold or hot…
Local Lawyers Say Judge Nominee Not Ready
President George Bush’s pick for a Pittsburgh-based federal judgeship isn’t yet primed for the bench, according to the Allegheny County Bar Association. The Bar Association rated 37-year-old lawyer and nominee Tom Hardiman “Not Recommended at this Time,” which means he “may have the potential to excel as a judge, but & is not yet at…
A Conversation with Rob Berton and Todd Bowers
What do you look for in a new litter like you have now to determine potential show dogs? Rob: The bite — if the bite is undershot or overshot you can’t show it. And the coat color’s got to be blue. It looks black but it’s more blue, like the inside of a gun barrel. These…
Bratting Practice
Tell you what: If you don’t ask me to write an entire column devoted to a coherent theme, I won’t ask you to read one. Then we can both go out for drinks instead. Deal? • According to the Census Bureau, Pittsburgh lost an estimated 6,665 people between 2000 and 2002. That’s a drop of…
Riding It Out With Fred Mergner
Bob Grove, the Port Authority’s spokesperson and the general public’s answer man for all things PAT, needed help. The person who was working to certify the city’s new convention center as a “green” (or environmentally friendly) building had called him with what seemed at first like a silly question: Were there any transit connections within…
The Karl Hendricks Trio
In the basement of a trendy New York City rock club, in 1993, Karl Hendricks and his eponymous Trio played their geek-rock hearts out for a half-full crowd of interminably hip CMJ-conference attendees, goofball New Yorkers and a strong Pittsburgh contingent, allegedly there to make sure somebody shouted. We needn’t have worried. I’ll never forget…
Sweet Sixteen
The world has changed a lot in the 22 years since Ken Loach made Looks and Smiles, his tender, honest, unsettling story of a working-class English teenager struggling to survive the economics of his social class. Since then, technology has burgeoned — and spread to the farthest corners. The world’s wealth has multiplied, too, although…
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Certainly it’s a delicious concept: Confederate a group of superpowered (or at least hypercompetent) beings from late 19th-century literature to thwart a world-threatening villain. That’s the premise of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic-book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but its big-screen adaptation is one of those cinematic train wrecks that warrant not so…
Chi-Hwa-Seon
Chi-Hwa-Seon, about a famed Korean artist, is a portrait painted in quick but indelible strokes. Rejecting conventional narrative, filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek instead imagines key slices from the drunken, passionate, unsettled life of Jang Seung-ub and renders them in terms both beautiful and unsentimental. “What do rules have to do with my painting?” Jang asks rhetorically…
