The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
I’ve always been a sucker for oddball bands with gimmicky names (remember I Am the World Trade Center?), and much to my delight, the San Diego-based Plot revels in gimmickry not just in name, but also in cover art, stage costume and spirit. And as for the sound? Truth be told, anyone familiar with…
Harangue
There’s been a spate of keyboard-rock lately, but local organ-guitar-drums trio Harangue doesn’t fit the mold with its uncommonly weird debut. Produced by Jason Kirker of The Modey Lemon, the guitar and keyboard are both distorted, and vocalist Matt McDermott sports a rambling vocal style that’s half American lo-fi and half British affectation, which is…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Feel like a horror film? Something that’ll make you gasp out loud, feel queasy and send you home from the theater shaken and wary? Forget whatever slasher flick is terrifying the kids out at the mall and make tracks for Alex Gibney’s documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. His journey into the heart…
HOUSE OF WAX
Attractive college students get trapped in a town with a pair of twisted brothers and a bunch of dead people covered in wax. Even as a throwaway horror flick, Jaume Collet-Serra’s not-quite-a-remake suffers from multiple sins including tedious pacing, a Swiss-cheese plot that tries to be serious, a crew of mostly no-name actors and a…
MINDHUNTERS
Renny Harlin’s thriller is a contemporary riff on Agatha Christie’s famous mystery, And Then There Were None, in which a group of people trapped on an island come to realize that one of them is killing the others off systemically. The fresh twist is that this crew are all FBI profilers, professionals trained to second-guess…
Ciao Baby
Location: 435 Market St., Downtown. 412-281-7400 Hours: Mon.-Thu. 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 5-10 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m-3 p.m., 5-11 p.m.; Sat. 5-11 p.m. Prices: Appetizers, $6-12; entrees, $17-30 Fare: Italian indulgence Atmosphere: Decorator-catalog Italian Liquor: Full bar Before we went to Ciao Baby, we would have said that Pittsburgh needs another Italian restaurant like it needs…
MONSTER-IN-LAW
On its surface, Robert Luketic’s comedy is mildly entertaining. Jane Fonda, who returns to the screen after a long absence, clearly has fun playing the overbearing momma of Jennifer Lopez’s fiancé, and the film moves fast enough to make you forget you’ve seen this meet-the-parents scenario many times before. Yet there’s something unseemly about two…
Role Call
On the surface, it seems that no matter who wins the various primary races being decided May 17, the old boys’ network will come out ahead. In the city of Pittsburgh, none of the seven Democrats running for mayor are women. Only three of 15 city council candidates are women, and two of…
THE NOMI SONG
If you don’t already know who new-wave oddity Klaus Nomi was, or have some familiarity with New York’s late-1970s downtown scene, you might find Andrew Horn’s documentary about the enigmatic singer somewhat elusive. Horn unfortunately doesn’t provide much context; for instance, he supplies no dates, as if being a video performer in 1978 were no…
Hart of the Matter
Congresswoman Melissa Hart walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Congresswoman, why the long face?” OK, that’s a recycled John Kerry horse-face joke. But if Melissa does have a long face, it could be because some say she isn’t fit to lead a possible ethics inquiry into the alleged shenanigans…
State senate race: Third-Party Third Candidate Gives Office Second Try
Mark Rauterkus is hoping for an astounding voter turnout in the 42nd District state Senate race on May 17, one of the only spring contests that’s not a primary. Rauterkus, the Libertarian candidate, figures all he needs are several hundred Republican votes, maybe a fifth of the Democrats — and all 8,000 people in the…
Refusing Heaven
For the past four decades Pittsburgh-born poet Jack Gilbert has been fashioning bitterly honest poems about “adult concerns,” as he calls them — poems about love and betrayal, grief and longing. Gilbert’s 1981 collection Monolithos read like a record of his tumultuous and intense years with the poet Linda Gregg. The Great Fires,…
College life: Waste a Lot? Want That!
The dozen or so bags looked lonely and adrift in the vast space, and dirt and ash coated most of them. But this was prime Dumpster-diving territory: a huge bin by an upper-class dorm at Carnegie Mellon University, just days before the term’s end and graduation. “People throw out really good stuff,” says Lisa…
The Mural That Wasn’t
Edgar J. Kaufmann was, to say the least, a practicing capitalist; the department-store founder’s very name meant “merchant.” So what was he doing, inviting an unabashed Marxist, the Mexican painter and architect Juan O’Gorman, to paint a mural in Pittsburgh? That’s the question acclaimed writer Hillary Masters seeks to answer in…
State politics: Searching for the Inner Santorum: When Is His House Not a Home?
Usually when Republicans are accused of exploiting tax loopholes, the amounts are much larger. But a group of local activists are accusing U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of improperly obtaining a county tax exemption that reaps him $72 a year. At a May 5 press conference, the group Democracy for Pittsburgh turned over some 750…
I heard that Duquesne University’s library has a Michael Musmanno room. Who was he?
A state Supreme Court justice, novelist and strident anti-Communist, Michael A. Musmanno may be one of the most complicated figures in Pittsburgh history. He was a defender of executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who became Pittsburgh’s answer to Red-baiter Joe McCarthy. He spared people the horrors of living under communism in Europe, but…
Muse You Can Use
“All art,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is quite useless.” Had you been in a spacious rehearsal studio tucked inside the Benedum Center on April 5, you might have reached a similar conclusion. Approximately a hundred artists, arts educators and arts administrators had convened to discuss the implications of a report titled Gifts of the Muse, which…
Spoon
If Spoon’s 2001 disc, Girls Can Tell, marked a turning point for the band, the next year’s follow-up, Kill the Moonlight, completed group members’ segue from scruffy post-punks to crafters of taut, intelligent pop. On Gimme Fiction, Spoon continues down the path laid by those two previous discs, slicing through sharp, angular guitar hooks with…
Mass Movement: Waiting With Freighted Breath
Many East Enders dream of rail-based mass transit the way Left Behind readers dream of the Second Coming. Unfortunately, light rail would cost anywhere from $2-3 billion, depending on the plan, according to general estimates in the Port Authority’s East End Corridor Study. That’s not as expensive as the proposed Mon-Fayette Expressway. But…
Mayoral campaign: Three Out of Four Five-Figure Donors Prefer O’Connor
Say you pick up the phone and the voice on the other end says, “Hi, I’m Bob O’Connor. I want to be your mayor. And I want you to give me at least $10,000 to help make that happen.” Say “Sure!” and you could join an elite group of five-figure political givers who have given…
Kingdom of Heaven
Who else but a pope could come up with an idea as bloody delicious as the Crusades? In this case, it was Pope Urban II, who began his reign by outlawing fighting from Sundays to Wednesdays (the “Truce of God”), and who launched the First Crusade in 1096 as a way to reclaim…
