Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
Under artistic director Kevin Noe, PNME has for years been a musical initiative that warrants performing in a place like its longtime home, City Theatre’s main state. The July 23-24 program went particularly far in utilizing the stage as would a theater company — one that also performs adventuresome and devilishly complex music. At the…
MP3 MONDAY: Boulevard of the Allies
In Pittsburgh, the Boulevard of the Allies isn’t just a road running through Downtown that backs up every day at five o’clock. It’s also the name of a local alternative band that sounds straight out of the ’90s. Hopefully this week’s MP3 Monday track, called “Man in the Photograph,” will keep your rolling, even through…
Who (Re)Built the Electric Car?
ChargeCar reimagines plug-in vehicles
More with Josh from Meeting of Important People
Sometimes you do an interview and it’s kind of long, but good. And you only have 750 words of room in the paper, so you have to cut the interview down — plus there’s the matter of making the interview fit some kind of arc that will actually make sense in that space. But you…
Short List: Week of July 22 – 29
When Andrew Paul was planning Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre’s upcoming festival of Harold Pinter plays, avoiding titles overfamiliar to Pittsburgh wasn’t too hard: In recent years, only one local company (Quantum Theatre) has staged a work (Betrayal) by the late British master and Nobel laureate whom some consider the leading playwright of the past…
Sweetgrass
In the summer of 2003, two cowboys on horseback lead 3,000 sheep high into Montana’s Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture, while the cameras of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash tag along. In this elegiac documentary, there is no narration and the only soundtrack is the incessant bleating of sheep.
Sweetgrass is one of those quiet,…
Ondine
Off the coast of County Cork, a gloomy fisherman named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), adrift in his own life, gets a surprise in his net: a beautiful, frightened woman (Alicja Bachleda). He dubs her “Ondine,” after the water nymph, and hides her away a cottage, while spinning out a yarn to his ailing daughter Annie (Alison…
Cyrus
Don’t be fooled by the ads: This isn’t one of those silly comedies starring Jonah Hill (Superbad) and John C. Reilly (Step Brothers). Cyrus is the “upscale” new film from Jay and Mark Duplass (Baghead), the critical darlings of the sub-indie mumblecore set. Their feature is equal parts awkward to engaging, and nervous silence to…
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
It’s not really a sequel, but Jan Kounen’s film does take up where Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel left off. It’s Paris in the 1920s, and Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) is now a respected couturier and a wealthy patron of the arts. In her sights: Igor Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen), the Russian composer whom the recent…
Birdemic: Shock and Terror
Bored with The Room? Looking for the next so-bad-it’s-hilarious, low-low-budget film? Perhaps something with a dash of ecological commentary, such as warning about killer birds brought on by global warming? James Nguyen’s lame-o rip-off of Hitchcock’s classic The Birds has all the hallmarks of an unintentional disaster movie: stilted acting; halting dialogue (much of it…
The Kids Are All Right
In director/writer Lisa Cholodenko’s dramedy — the story of a long-time lesbian couple whose teen-age children contact the sperm donor who made them possible — nothing very unusual happens. That’s a good thing, because it doesn’t problematize the “non-traditional” family, nor even refer to it as such. But this sort of endeavor also leads the…
Inception
Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) is paid to break into dreams and steal secrets; now, his next job involves the decidedly trickier task of getting several layers deep into a dream and planting an idea. It all makes a certain crazy sense when explained in Christopher Nolan’s captivating hybrid thriller Inception. Not that you should completely relax:…
Tin Front Café
Inventive vegetarian meals push past the expected at this Homestead café
Working
The production at Apple Hill Playhouse is big and sometimes lumpy, but usually hits the right notes of comedy, pathos, empathy and overall enjoyment.
A Thurber Carnival
Updating the play is pointless, because the “feel” of the show is so not-contemporary.
Pitch for Mounds
Group wants control of burial mounds in the Rocks
Cut Off
Proposed PAT cuts not kind to Troy Hill
Not Labor’s Day
IUP shutters labor center; attorney seeking return of donations
Arsenal Cider House & Wine Cellar
Home-crafted cider and fruit wines, now available in Lawrenceville home
This Just In: July 22 – 29
Highlights from the local TV news: nailed
Guitar whiz Kenny Wayne Shepherd co-headlines the Pittsburgh Blues Festival
Shepherd was a forerunner in the late-’90s trend of teenage bluesmen; he’s been noted for his lovely licks and soulful strumming since he was just 16 years old.
Searing bass and drums duo Lightning Bolt plays Belvedere’s
Lightning Bolt doesn’t play on stages, but in the middle of their crowds, creating a people hurricane with two guys beating up their instruments in the eye of the storm.
Prometheus Burning’s harsh brand of industrial assaults the senses.
“It’s rhythmic, but more intelligent and intimate, hopefully trying to make people feel, think and question.”
A Conversation with Josh Verbanets of Meeting of Important People
“It’s when we play a garage-rock bill where people want to talk about old Alice Cooper bootlegs that it really seems to work.”
There’s more than Alice in Wonderland to Maggie Taylor’s brilliant Photoshop surrealism.
If Edward Gorey and René Magritte ever invented a universe together, it might look like Taylor’s.
Local punks The Fitt release When The Fitt Hit The Shan with guest Paul Quattrone
“Anyone that’s contacted me, I’ve given a chance,” Waters says. “We’d definitely want to continue.”
Savage Love
I was recently told that I am being puritanical and self-righteous because I can’t get over the fact that my partner spends a good deal of time seeking out pictures of very young girls to masturbate to. Nothing illegal, he says, but still … He admits to having a 20-year-plus addiction to porn, and with…
