Tonight: Pictureplane et al at Belvedere’s
You may be thinking, right now: What’s new with that VIA crew? Don’t they have an ongoing series of shows happening leading up to their next big festival? Yes! Yes, they do! And the last iteration of that before they take some time off to prepare for the fest: tonight’s Pictureplane show at Belvedere’s Pictureplane…
MP3 Monday: Slim Forsythe and the Nied’s Hotel Band
A few months back, I wrote a feature on Slim Forsythe, the singin’, school bus drivin’ cowboy of Lawrenceville. Slim’s known to collaborate with plenty of bands — he’s got a few different combos of his own (like The Payday Loners), and plays with other folks — like, sometimes, The Nied’s Hotel Band. That band,…
Locally Produced Science-Fiction Web Serial Debuts
The year is 1975, and everything is about start going very poorly for Edward Borman. His government office in the U.S. Steel Tower is closing for the evening, but instead of heading home to a beer and a ball game, Borman finds himself wrapped up in a dangerous plot involving invaders from Mercury, a mysterious…
Shields alleges “significant political pressure” to kill drilling-ban referendum
City councilor Doug Shields, who is seeking a public referendum on banning natural-gas drilling in city limits, is alleging that civic leaders are pressuring council to kill the measure. Among those leaders: Democratic county executive candidate Rich Fitzgerald, and two members of the city’s financial oversight board. Council is set to debate the referendum measure…
Gassing the Forest
This weekend the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources co-hosts “Prowl the Sproul,” an annual hiking weekend in Sproul and Susquehannock state forests, north of State College. A press release quotes DCNR Secretary Richard Allan touting “some of the most scenic hiking areas in the state.” But the Sproul and neighboring lands are less…
Kazanda’s Café
While there are coffee shops near East Liberty — Voluto, in Garfield; Starbucks in “Eastside”; Coffee Tree Roasters in Larimer’s Bakery Square development — and a newly opened bean roasters on Penn, a full-service café has been lacking in the neighborhood proper for some time. Kazanda Tamo changed that by opening Kazanda’s Café, a coffee…
United States Bartenders Guild Opens Pittsburgh Chapter
It’s official: Pittsburgh’s cocktail culture is worthy of national recognition. On June 26, after year-long campaigning by a small group of local craft bartenders, the United States Bartenders Guild formally recognized a new chapter in Pittsburgh. That makes Pittsburgh only the 25th city in 60 years to gain a chapter in the prestigious network dedicated…
Los Cabos
It’s an exciting time to be a lover of Mexican food in Pittsburgh. 2011 is shaping up to be the year that welcomes several new restaurants serving a variety of cuisines from Mexico and from other Central and South American countries. One of the first to open is Los Cabos SoCal Mex. Located in Bloomfield,…
Santorum frothing at the mouth — again
Generally, this space has had very little to say about the presidential aspirations of former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Frothy Mix). While our pals at Early Returns follow Santorum almost religiously — is there any other way? — we’ve generally just tried to avert our eyes. Unlike Santorum, after all, we respect the privacy rights of…
Bottle Club
It’s 92 steamy degrees in the former fork-lift maintenance shed of the former Glenshaw Glass facility. Richie, Sandy and Big Al are wilting in the heat. Working the production line, they’re bottling, corking, taping, sealing, labeling and boxing up Boyd & Blair … which at least one connoisseur has rated the world’s finest vodka. The…
Savage Love
You probably get this question every day. I’m a man who loves it when my girlfriend fucks me with a strap-on. Another great thing: My girlfriend ejaculates plentifully when we have sex, and she has done so when she’s pegging me. Which leads to my question: What are the possible issues from getting female ejaculate…
Short List: July 20 – 28
Among the panelists who’ll speak after the July 25 screening of The Last Mountain, perhaps the most newsworthy just now is Michael Hendryx. The West Virginia University professor co-authored a recent study documenting greatly elevated birth-defect rates in central Appalachian counties where there’s mountaintop-removal coal-mining — some 63 percent higher in 1996-2003 than in nearby…
Emission Control: Lawrenceville foundry agrees to reduce discharges
Since the 1860s, the McConway & Torley foundry in Lawrenceville has been melting down scrap metal and molding it into railroad couplers. And thanks to a recent agreement between McConway & Torley LLC and the Group Against Smog and Pollution, that process should be safer for the air near the riverside complex located on 48th…
Service Disruption: State budget cuts affecting county homeless programs
At one end of the basement of Friendship’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, a man sleeps in an armchair next to the television, a white baseball cap pulled over his face. Paul DeWalt, program director for the East End Cooperative Ministry, says the sleeping man likely stayed in one of the county’s more than 400 emergency homeless…
Nostalgia for the Light
Initially, there seems to be little to connect the work of astronomers with the plight of Chile’s infamous “disappeared,” but Patricio Guzman’s provocative essay, about the Atacama Desert, proves otherwise. The desolate mountainous region is home to observatories (the sky is especially clear here), as well as the detritus of 19th-century salt-mine labor camps and…
Blank City
Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, rundown parts of lower Manhattan were home to angry, creative types: artabouts who variously painted, played in bands, shot movies, acted in movies, created public spectacles, published manifestos and railed against the fusty conformity of America seguing into the corporate go-go of the Reagan years. Among them:…
The Last Mountain
“Coal is mean, coal is cruel and coal kills,” says West Virginia native and anti-mining activist Maria Gunnoe. It’s hard to disagree after watching Bill Haney’s new documentary, The Last Mountain, about the unpaid costs behind mountaintop-removal mining, a form of strip-mining that blasts several hundred feet off a mountain and buries stream valleys in…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
“The boy who lived, come to die.” That’s it, folks: 14 years, more than 4,000 pages and nearly 20 hours of movie all boil down to this critical meeting when the boy wizard goes wand to wand with his sneering nemesis, Lord Voldemort. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 begins where Part 1…
Rhinoceros
As my grandfather used to say, “If it was easy, everbody’d be doing it.” Which is maybe why you don’t see many local theaters producing works from the Theatre of the Absurd. But, God bless ’em, The Summer Company spits in the eye of conventional wisdom with its version of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic Rhinoceros.…
A new book of American regionalisms keeps Pittsburgh in the mix.
Mim Harrison discovered her fascination with regional language in college: “I did my junior year abroad in England, and that was really where I started to kind of hear language — because I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying to me!” But really, she’d already been primed. In the 1970s, Harrison moved from Olean, N.Y.,…
At The Warhol, Mixed Signals explores sport and sexuality with mixed results.
“Bull in the Ring” is a small room with four video projections, one for each wall. Each video shows different footage of the same event, a high school football practice. The coach shouts commands, and the players respond. Artist Shaun El C. Leonardo used handheld cameras, so the pictures are slightly jumpy, plus there’s the…
Venerable painter Richard Rappaport discusses five of his works.
Two large paintings by Richard Rappaport, from distinct stylistic periods separated by 22 years, hang at the International Children’s Art Gallery, in Friendship. The exhibition, Rappaport Unblurred, is a play of opposites that also includes two other perennial favorites by this 66-year-old artist, alongside his portrait of guru of the postmodern Robert Lepper. At City…
Critics’ Picks: July 21 – 24
Highlights from the coming week in music, featuring the Porterfest, the Pittsburgh Blues Festival … and Rob Zombie with Slayer.
Sight Unseen updates classic drum and bass
Colangelo’s in the Strip District is an appropriate place to sit down with Preslav Lefterov and Adam Ratana of Sight Unseen. Much like the Strip sees vibrant everyday life amid architectural reminders of the city’s past, Sight Unseen’s beautiful breakbeats represent an evolution of Pittsburgh drum and bass from the vinyl-only rave days of yore…
Pittsburgh Artists Wanted for MacDowell Colony
The Heinz Endowments is encouraging Pittsburgh artists to take advantange of its newish fellowship program to help locals get residencies at this famed international artists’ community in New Hampshire. The fellowship program funds two slots set aside for artists from Allegheny County or any of nine surrounding counties. Fellowships cover all residency costs for two…
Three acts to catch on Warped Tour
Warped Tour has been a summer staple for more than 15 years now, morphing aesthetically with the times, but maintaining a basic theme: bands that are sort of on the fringe, kind of, if you’re a 15-year-old from the suburbs. Rather than look at the tour as an annual ritual full of jock-ish metalcore, Christian…
Black Francis is still not dead, and is coming back to Pittsburgh
For set lists these days, Black Francis says he picks out at least one song from each of his albums. This presumably means both something from The Pixies’ classic Surfer Rosa and something from the concept record he did in 2008 about Cuchullain, the heroic figure from Irish mythology. “Is my last record less valid…
T Model Ford, at 91, brings Delta blues back to Pittsburgh
T Model Ford scarcely needs to self-mythologize. When a man who can’t read at all, let alone read music, picks up his first guitar at 58 and is still touring at age 91, the legend has essentially written itself. But that doesn’t stop him from boasting a little. “Well, I stay in attention with the…
Longer version: Interview with Black Francis
Below is a longer version of the interview we ran this week with Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black, of The Pixies fame. He plays a sold-out acoustic show at Club Cafe Saturday, July 22 at 8 p.m. First, I want to ask about the upcoming album with Reid Paley, who played around Pittsburgh for…
New activist group One Pittsburgh takes the stage
It’s been a long time since anyone’s accused Pittsburgh of being a hotbed of activism. While other cities may host public demonstrations, engaged electorates, and multiple political parties, Pittsburgh has … the Steelers, the Pirates, and the Penguins. But a fledgling group, One Pittsburgh, is trying to give Pittsburghers a greater voice in the debate…
