GUESS WHO
Nearly 40 years after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, apparently things haven’t changed that much. A black middle-class family, headed by the irascible Bernie Mac, freaks out when his daughter brings home her white fiancé (Ashton Kutchner). This twist is meant to absolve the audience of wondering why everybody on screen is all tied up…
Mantini’s Woodfired
Location: 601 East Carson St., South Side. 412-488-1960 Hours: Lunch Mon.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thu. 5:30-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5:30-10 p.m. Prices: Appetizers and salads $5-9; entrees $15-30 Fare: The name says it all Atmosphere: Cozy, cheerful bar and upscale grill Liquor: Full Bar As restaurant trends go, the wood-fired grill brings out the skeptic…
March Madness
Ken Schoepflin walked down Forbes Avenue with a line graph pinned to the back of his jacket. Schoepflin was one of nearly 2,000 anti-war protestors marching from Squirrel Hill to Oakland on March 19 to mark the second anniversary of the Iraq War. It was his first protest. But Schoepflin says he looks every day…
Attention-Starved
At 8 on a Friday night, Grant Street is so dead that even prostitutes and the homeless shun it. But there we were on March 18: a couple TV crews, a City Paper reporter, and U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, standing before the Allegheny County Courthouse. Santorum was holding a sort of drive-by press…
Saving Chez Warhol
Changing the name of the Seventh Street Bridge to the Andy Warhol Bridge, as happened with great ceremony on March 18, means giving well-deserved additional recognition to one of Pittsburgh’s favorite sons. It also makes for helpful directions, since you now take the Andy Warhol Bridge to the eponymous museum. There’s additional resonance…
On the Frick Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Grant Street is a sign stating “Street Grade Prior to 1912.” What’s the significance of this?
The office buildings of Downtown Pittsburgh sport a handful of cryptic plaques that refer to events whose significance they never really explain. My favorite is on Wood Street, where a plaque portentously informs you that it marks the birthplace of William Thaw … without ever telling you who he is. Pittsburghers are proud of our…
Staying Put and Staying Punk
It was day three of an eight-day bicycle trip. Mary Tremonte and Jessica McPherson were peddling from Pittsburgh to New York City to join the protests of the Republican National Convention. Because the batteries in their cell phones were dead, they wheeled into the parking lot of a gas station to use the pay phone.…
A conversation with Matt Jackson
Last summer, photographer and stage/film mask-and-creature sculptor Matt Jackson traveled to the tiny town of Charleville-Mézières, in France, to study puppetry at L’Institut International de la Marionette. After a three-week workshop, he took his new hinged buddy, François, on the road for several months, performing on stages and sidewalks in London, Edinburgh and Berlin. Now…
Retro Metro
When mayoral candidate Bob O’Connor proposed building traditional streetcar lines from Downtown to Oakland three weeks ago, it was the South Side that gave his plan some traction. Laura Beres of the South Side Local Development Corporation says a South Side business owner e-mailed the group that very same week, saying,…
Activist Bummed Out Over Dismissal
Vince Eirene has been kicked out of many places, but he never expected to be booted in the midst of prayer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland. Eirene, a long-time local activist, last year toured Iraq and is well known for chaining himself to the nearby Software Engineering Institute, a Carnegie Mellon…
Jack Johnson
Native Hawaiian Jack Johnson had a first career as a professional surfer, and then as a filmmaker — he shot surf videos — before his eventual turn as a feel-good singer-songwriter. This bit of information will likely come as little surprise to anyone familiar with Johnson’s first two albums, Brushfire Fairytales and On…
Kaiser Chiefs
Melancholy synth-addled pop songs harmonizing about the woes of financial and social depression sung by spotty young limeys with haircuts and scarfs: Now that it’s become an ’80s-revival revival, this thing is deeply out of control. Imagine Blur’s most enthusiastically dated moments of summery new wave-ism and modern mod on Parklife and The Great Escape,…
Various Artists
Back in ’03, at the height of the SARS scare, Chinese artist Zhang Jian set off for Eastern Tibet with the idea of recording found sounds. He ended up in Lhasa, “renting” a group of street musicians for the day, taking them to a park and hitting “record.” The edited results, smothering this disc, are…
The Ring Two
Remember that videotape everybody was talking about a couple years ago? The jumpy, grainy black-and-white footage of a woman brushing her hair, a single tree near an ocean, a mysterious white ring. After watching it, viewers died precisely seven days later. Unless … and this was the great twist — you could get…
Schultze Gets the Blues
The bittersweet German black comedy Schultze Gets the Blues opens with an image reminiscent of the cinema of the eccentric Werner Herzog: a grassy landscape, barren of life save for two spare windmills and, eventually, a distant figure on a bicycle, passing through the frame. The figure is Schultze (Horst Krause),…
Downfall
In April 1945, as the Russians surround Berlin, Adolf Hitler is begged by his aides to leave the capital city. He declines: “I must force an outcome in Berlin, or face my downfall.” Albert Speer concurs: “You must be on the stage when the curtain falls.” With this air of fatalism, Hitler and…
BEAUTY SHOP
Yup, Bille Woodruff’s ensemble comedy is pretty much a girl version of Barbershop. Queen Latifah buys a rundown parlor in Atlanta, and with the help of the sassy crew, succeeds in ‘dos and don’ts — as in “don’t count her out.” Alicia Silverstone has the thankless role as the token white girl who wants to…
