When and how did the Highland Park Zoo get its start?
Pittsburgh has never lacked for wildlife displays. Lemming-like behavior can be observed in City Council on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings; and in the South Side, residents use parking chairs in complicated rituals to assert territorial dominance. In fact, Rachel Colker’s book The Pittsburgh Zoo: a 100-year history notes that Pittsburgh had a handful of zoos…
Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
The set-up is mildly clever as a fresh shout-out to often-parodied canon of 1980s teen horror films. But the sort-of clever deconstruction morphs into run-of-the-mill dismemberment. (Capsule review.)
Savage Love
I am a recently married 30-year-old straight guy. My wife is great and, in fact, I have a baby on the way. My relationship with my wife is a good one. We married for all the right reasons after a long “courtship.” My problem lies with my addiction, if you will, to receiving head from…
Puccini For Beginners
To commit or not? This is the popular quandary that keeps afloat Maria Maggenti’s slim romantic comedy set in boho Manhattan. (Capsule review.)
This Just In: March 28 – April 4
Bar Burner Summary: A Lawrence County bar burns down. Station: WPXI Channel 11 Reporter: Jodine Costanzo When it Aired: March 22 Running Time: 37 seconds Visuals: Smoke, flames and fire trucks, after dark. Highlights: * When the station’s male “power voice” presents this pithy preview: “Closing time comes early: The local bar burns.” * When…
Reign Over Me
Mike Binder’s relatively quiet drama is about incalculable grief and what the human spirit can ever do to quell it. (Capsule review.)
The Pittsburgh Community Gallery Project offers art by, and for, the neighborhood.
Carnegie Mellon graduate students, who were using the space to work on their own project, came together with seventh-graders from Pittsburgh’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.
Royal Caribbean
Our waitress cautioned us that the jerk checken was hot, but we found it well on the tolerable side of palate pyrotechnics.
Pittsburgh n’@
From: http://the-parrot.blogspot.com/2007/03/steak-or-dog-food.html If you only had two dietary choices available — a fine cut of steak or a can of the cheapest dog food that money could buy, and the decision on which meal you would receive was made by a group of individuals with questionable motives and/or intellect. … [Y]ou’d have that occasional delicious…
Internet buzz band Deerhunter IRL, OMG
It’s free and at Carnegie Mellon on a Tuesday when nothing else is going on.
Courtroom election challenges more like early primary
The “concerned citizens” who challenge a candidate often have more political connections than members of the Kennedy family.
The Tracker
Australia’s troubled relationship with its indigenous people forms the core of Rolf de Heer’s recent The Tracker, a mythic frontier drama now available on DVD. The story is set in 1922, in the continent’s interior, where the natives must be “cleaned out” if they won’t submit to the white man’s rule of law. Under the…
1,000 march against war in Iraq
“The anti-war movement unconditionally supports the troops,” said Paul Abernathy of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Turning the Tables
Around 11 p.m. on a snowy Tuesday night, Bill Shannon enters Ava nightclub, in East Liberty, to find images of himself flickering across a movie screen over the bar. Shannon is dressed casually and primed to hang out: His video double, meanwhile, is costumed and busy dancing. In a hooded white jumpsuit, supported on a…
The Bear, The Proposal & The Wedding
There’s a rumor abroad in TheaterLand that Anton Chekhov wrote comedies. Those of you who’ve had the misfortune to sit through his excruciating Three Sisters could be excused your chortling. But Pitt Rep offers up, as proof of Chekhov’s yuk-master credentials, three one-act comedies, “The Bear,” “The Proposal” and “The Wedding.” Written in Anton’s flaming…
More curatorial thoughts on issues artistic would benefit a mesmerizing exhibit of work by woodblock printer Tsukioka Kôgyo.
Why present such a well-curated and extensive selection of images if the viewing public will be so heavily encouraged to treat it as a cumulative historical placeholder?
Relativity
The question is shocking and infuriating — even mirroring a certain strain of white-racist thinking — and it may provide for some of the best drama Kuntu Theatre has ever staged.
No Contest
Is the phrase “discriminating Pittsburghers” an oxymoron?
Pittsburgh Opera hits all the right notes on Mozart’s Magic Flute.
It’s the musical equivalent of a big slice of chocolate cake.
Bittersweet Outcome
When the NCAA selection committee announced the men’s basketball brackets, I promised myself that I would not be upset should Pitt meet and lose to UCLA in the Sweet 16. (By contrast, I could not even bring myself to conceive of Pitt losing to the whitest, most annoying team on earth in the second round…
The One AM Radio’s wintry tone-poem, This Too Will Pass
In Hirway’s world, people go to airports to watch other lovers reunite, take trains as far west as they can afford, and sleep in cars.
Art collective Unicorn Mountain brings home the bacon
It seems unicorns aren’t the only mythical beast on the Mountain these days; there’s also been a sighting of that much-quested creature: cold hard cash.
Battles hits Pittsburgh, featuring Don Caballero alum Ian Williams
Braxton’s voice warps between octaves, from munchkin highs to satanic lows, obliterating the meaning of whatever words there may have been in the first place.
Comic Todd Glass will see you at the gym.
“‘Are you aware that blowing your nose into your hand might be a little vile to the people around you?'”
The Namesake
More lovely than it is original or profound, it’s another reflection on cross-culturalism, family ties and the nonviolent liberation of women from traditions that probably don’t give way as easily in real life as they do in Nair’s films.
From Peduto to Potato
The pierogie represents old-school Pittsburgh, can be a little slippery and is made out of mush inside. Much like the incumbent.
The Lookout
The Lookout reminded me for a while of Half Nelson, a better movie about a troubled loner that knew how to keep it real.
A Conversation with Bill Peduto
“Who takes over? Who takes over the reform movement when I destroy it?”
European film’s avant-garde lives, contends a conference on experimental film.
Halle argues that new developments keep boundary-pushing moviemaking viable.
