The Mole: Dig It.
Summer’s here, as evidence by the sudden blossoming of B- and C-grade reality shows. (Who among us can’t wait for Celebrity Circus or I Survived a Japanese Game Show?) Among the returning “favorites” is The Mole, a show that should be more fun than it is. But because the better shows have packed up for…
Open Registration
Legislation introduced in Pittsburgh City Council today would establish a “Mutual Commitment Registry.” The bill may be the closest thing same-sex couples are likely to get to a marriage license — at least for now.
Lost Horizon: Can’t Get Back
The two-hour season finale of Lost was an entertaining ride, with lots of answers and questions, and an astonishing selection of characters who died, almost died or were resurrected (or, in the case of Clare, who knows?). Quite a few things were wrapped up or clarified, snatching up threads laid all season: Why Ben turned…
Feat of Clay
It smells like someone is cooking a putrid stew out of Billy Conn’s old sweat socks. The smell assails you on the threshold of the World Class Boxing gym, which you reach by climbing flights of stairs leading up from a side street in Ambridge. Before you’ve caught your breath, your sinuses are assaulted by…
The Strangers
Those of you who enjoy feeling freaked out, holding your breath and biting your nails for 90 vicariously fraught minutes should find this horror thriller a satisfactorily outing. This debut feature from writer-director Bryan Bertino has a simple set-up: After seeing the aftermath of a bloody event, we flashback to and spend the night in…
Contempt
It’s easy to see, almost half a century later, why the international cinema world went fou over Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 drama-cum-treatise. We embraced Godard’s cinema to hear people talk, and to see them work through their creator’s anxieties about love, art and, eventually, culture and politics. Godard explores the former pair of topics thoroughly here,…
Mr. Willie’s BBQ
Soul food comes to Squirrel Hill
Golf: The Musical
There are no characters, per se, nor story: Each song is its own sketch, a kind of harmless editorial about the world’s dullest sport.
Ain’t Misbehavin’
The production does offer a few bright spots, most notably the extraordinary voices of Stevie Akers and Tasha Michelle.
Wilde Tales
Since the stories reflect the inside of Wilde’s Art Noveau mind as well as the Victorian-era perception of humanity — that it was fairly rotten — they are curious tales to tell children.
Crime-thriller author Jonathan Santlofer illustrates his own novels.
“The arts are not real. They assume a kind of super-reality.”
Evolving Faith
The much vaunted “fittest” in “survival of the fittest” can’t include rigid fundamentalists who believe the Earth is a mere several thousand years old — they’re missing the long view, after all. So says the Rev. Michael Dowd, a Pentecostal preacher, author and firm believer that evolution and Christianity can and must coexist. Dowd has…
Class Trip
Pittsburgh Schools’ Superintendent Mark Roosevelt called it a “totally true and inescapable reality.” Schenley High School must close its doors, he announced May 19 … and the district must move on with its high school-reform efforts. “This is the right agenda,” he said. Unfortunately, the ensuing discussion between administrators and board members proved another “inescapable…
How do you renovate a 16,000-year-old shelter?
“I love the poetics of how the old roof is supporting the new roof.”
Pittsburgh 250: A New Menu
Local classics are updated for the city’s anniversary.
Local soul singer Hakim Rasheed preps single for Koch Records
He’s currently collaborating with producers Nesia Beatz and Soy Sos, Mozart Productions and Mindbender.
Afro-American Music Institute offers JamTastic concert at Gullifty’s
A highlight of the event will no doubt be the AAMI Music Ensemble, performing under Dr. James T. Johnson, Jr., the institute’s executive director.
Irish pop-rockers Bell X1 break the sound barrier at Club Café
“If there was a God, then why is my arse the perfect height for kicking?”
Contemporary composer Anthony Braxton visits for a weekend of performances
“The struggle that I’m involved with is the struggle that is a luxury in the sense that I was able to discover something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Michael Chabon’s new collection of reviews and essays finds him playing literary cartographer.
It’s the aesthetic rush of a reader connecting with multiple fictional worlds, the charge that can come from what Chabon calls the realization “that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.”
Pittsburgh n’@
Dispatches from the blogosphere: When Deaths Outnumber Births — The Parable of Pittsburgh.
Sprawled Out
The region’s blueprint for funding things like economic development leans toward revitalizing existing communities and preserving open space, in contrast to the bedroom-suburb-and-strip-mall model that has characterized growth for decades.
Is it true CBS television almost moved its corporate headquarters to Pittsburgh in the 1990s? I thought there was talk of a merger between CBS and Westinghouse.
There was more than talk of a merger: It actually happened. But as with the revolution on Orwell’s Animal Farm, it’s sort of hard to tell the difference now. Somehow, the acquirer ended up being acquired: A venerable Pittsburgh company tried to expand into a new business, and ended up shrinking its old businesses instead.…
Savage Love
I’m a straight male and I love my fiancée. She’s perfect. But while I am physically attracted to her, I find myself masturbating rather than having sex with her. She knows, but we don’t talk about it — we can’t — and recently she walked in on me, and it was very awkward. I put…
