On the Road … With Bob, Bill and Mike
Neighbor HoodsDistrict 2 of a KindCity Council District 8Un-districtingQuiet SeatworkDiven and Conquer John Perris wants to lose his business of 32 years. He hopes the Turnpike Commission buys the Lytle Café from him, knocks it down and paves it over. Why? “It gets me out of here,” Perris says. “The neighborhood is a shambles now,”…
Graffiti Talk Challenge
“I’m well aware of the outlaw element of graffiti we’re dealing with,” says Khari Mosley, campaign director for mayoral and District 8 City Council candidate Bill Peduto. “Peduto has been a big supporter of finding public space to present work of an urban aesthetic, and he’ll continue to work for that. But at…
Workers’ Memorial Adds Protest
On April 28, a bell will toll for Edward Seelhorst, who worked on an assembly line at the FedEx station in Neville Township and died after an accident at work. It will toll for John Brenckle, a volunteer firefighter who assisted in the relief efforts for last September’s floods and fell ill from a water-borne…
Palindromes
There’s no getting around the fact that you either like the films of Todd Solondz, or you really, really don’t. In Happiness, which may be the most depressing film ever made, and in Storytelling, a triptych of tales about fact and fiction, Solondz asks us to follow along as he examines, exposes, dissects and reorganizes…
Martha Wainwright
Yes, this is that Martha Wainwright. Surely, it’s only fair to consider her musical pedigree: Daughter of folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. Sister of Rufus. But no, she isn’t taking a ride on anyone’s coattails. Not even close. Seriously. Not even close. Although it is true that throughout the 28-year-old singer-songwriter’s…
Crash
Los Angeles is both a genuine mulitculti melting pot and a city of pervasive, even institutionalized racism. Paul Haggis’ ensemble drama, Crash, comprises a series of interlocking vignettes attempting to span the city and to peer into its troubled soul. Haggis, who most recently adapted Million Dollar Baby, co-wrote the film with Bobby Moresco,…
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
On the afternoon of the day I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I happened across my horoscope in a newspaper. It said: “In the next few hours you will be eating a lot of cheese. It’s okay. Enjoy yourself.” Well, damned if the stars weren’t on the mark, except…
Stop is a Go
When Ben Martin, a middle-aged marketing manager from Warrendale, set out to make his first feature-length garage-style film, commercial mainstream success was not his ultimate goal. Instead, he focused on the raw and highly creative story he had wanted to tell for more than 15 years. One Last Stop in a…
Nouvelle Vague
If you thought it odd when country and punk rock first joined forces, get a load of this: Nouvelle Vague is the bright idea of two multi-instrumentalists, Marc Collins and Oliver Libaus, who’ve rewritten 14 post-punk and new-wave classics as breezy and jazzy bossa nova numbers. Sounds dumb, sure. But surprisingly, many of these cover-song…
Hal
Irish quartet Hal is a lab-born perfect-pop hybrid — DNA from Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney, and chromosomal material from Frankie Valli, introduced into Dublin’s Cali-on-the-Irish-Sea Petri dish. Weeks later emerged “What a Lovely Dance” and “Don’t Come Running,” the most smilingly melancholy, summery pop to come from the Emerald Isle since — well, since…
A Conversation with David Soberg
As an eighth-grade English teacher at an under-performing middle school in Orange County, David Soberg witnessed firsthand the inadequacies of the California public education system. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, for instance, only 48 percent of African-American and Latino students who start ninth grade graduate four years later. So Soberg,…
OLD BOY
Somebody has imprisoned Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), a middle-aged family man prone to boozy outbursts, for unknown reasons for 15 years. Just as mysteriously, Oh Dae-Su is released, given a cell phone and cash by a stranger, and prompted to determine who locked him up and why. A comely sushi chef offers to help, but…
PAPER CLIPS
When the mostly Christian and Caucasian middle-school students of tiny Whitwell, Tenn., begin studying the history of the Holocaust, they struggle to understand the concept of six million murdered Jews. In an attempt to grasp the totality of the horror, they begin collecting paper clips: one for each victim. But once NBC News and the…
XXX: STATE OF THE UNION
In this sort-of sequel to 2002’s XXX, a National Security Agency “expert,” Agent XXX (Ice Cube), is sprung from the Big House to help dismantle a domestic revolution secretly led by the Defense Secretary (Willem Dafoe). It’s pure Beltway mayhem: NSA vs. DoD, and no nearby vehicle, house or Capitol rotunda is safe from…
Welcome Indian Cuisine and Sweets
Location: 1212 Main St., Sharpsburg. 412-781-3170 Hours: Mon.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., 5-10 p.m.; Sun. noon-3 p.m., 5-9:30 p.m. Prices: Appetizers, $4-8; entrees, $10-15 Fare: Northern & Southern Indian, plus sweets Atmosphere: Colorful and casual Liquor: BYOB Some of you may have noticed a bit of an unlikely trend of late: Sharpsburg. Who’d’ve thunk this modest…
Political activism: A Conversation with Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org
Joan Blades and husband Wes Boyd, fresh from the sale of their software company Berkeley Systems (of Flying Toaster fame) in 1998, started MoveOn.org based on the reaction to their one-line Internet petition aimed at re-focusing Congress’s attention from the impeachment effort: “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation,” it…
Room for Debate
“In a city 30% Black,” the e-mail announcement charged, “arrogant whites have a debate on community development minus the Black candidate for Mayor!” Such broadsides were circulating late last week at news that a May 2 candidates’ forum on neighborhood development would exclude Louis “Hop” Kendrick along with three other Democratic contenders for mayor.…
International: FORGE Ahead
“We wanted a service project, not poverty tourism,” says Brandon Cohen, 22. On May 10, 30 members of FORGE, a group Cohen co-founded in 2003 while he was a junior at the University of Pittsburgh, will fly to Zambia to spend seven weeks in three refugee camps. One member plans to spend the…
Designs on the Mayoralty
Environmental architect and impresario William McDonough says that buildings should be more like trees. Trees turn sunlight into nourishment. They absorb carbon dioxide. They protect against extremes of temperature and absorb excess stormwater. And yet these great qualities all diminish markedly when a tree is cut into two-by-fours, the usual intermediate step before…
Correction:
Due to an editing error, our April 27 main feature, “Squaring Off,” misstated the impact of a proposed historic-district designation on South Oakland. The proposed district will not have any effect on structures outside its boundaries. We regret the error.
