Pillow Project’s Paper Memory
Interesting things are happening with Pearlann Porter’s six-year-old multimedia-oriented dance troupe. If early shows, like The Concept Album Tour, traded in spectacle, this latest production demonstrates how far Porter’s come: Paper Memory feels visionary at times. Notwithstanding one complaint I’ll get to in a minute, this show is one to catch before it closes this…
Screw MP3 Monday; you’re downloading the new Girl Talk
So, I don’t have an MP3 lined up for today — there will be one next week — but that’s probably okay because you’re probably spending your attention and bandwidth downloading the new Girl Talk album, All Day. It’s called All Day; I’m not implying that it’ll take all day to download, though with demand…
Elder Hostages Staged Reading
Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Co. held a staged reading last night that drew a few times more people than could fit in its usual performance space. Staged readings, of course, are typically intimate affairs. The actors, scripts in hand, don’t really move around that much. The staged reading is a setup generally reserved for testing new…
Here’s what you’ll do this weekend
Hey all! Last-minute weekend advice blog post going on here. There’s a lot of stuff to cover — for as much stuff as made it into the music section and Short List this week, there’s a bunch more that didn’t. Here we go. Tonight, in addition to the shows we covered in the paper, Howlers…
The Electricity Fairy
If you know anyone who still doesn’t understand that electricity costs more than what Duquesne Light bills you, take them to see this movie. It screens Sat., Nov. 20, as part of the Three Rivers Film Festival. The fast-paced 52-minute documentary explores the impact of coal-mining in one place: Wise County, in southwest Virginia. Over…
Dressed for Access
At city clubs, dress codes spawn resentment, confusion — even allegations of racism. But the truth is more complicated.
Short List: Week of November 11 – 18
Thu., Nov. 11 — Art It’s hard, in humble newsprint, to visually represent the eight images going on display today at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. They’re print versions of gigapixel imagery — super-high-resolution, interactive images created by combining up to hundreds of individual digital photos, usually for scientific study. But courtesy of the…
Tucci’s
Inexpensive, classic Italian dining that sidesteps the clichés of the cuisine and elevates its casual setting
Unstoppable
Sure, Tony Scott’s actioner is totally formulaic. Dig the math: 100,000,000 tons of runway train times 39 cars of highly explosive chemicals, divided by two never-say-die railroad employees — one about to retire (Denzel Washington), the other (Chris Pine) in his first day on the job. (Add to each man two worried dependents, two of…
Nowhere Boy
Before he was a Beatle, John Lennon was a troubled, working-class teen from Liverpool, who liked music. Sam Taylor-Wood’s bio-pic covers these tumultuous years, as Lennon (Aaron Johnson), who lives with his Aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott-Thomas), re-connects with his vivacious but flighty mother (Anne Marie Duff); starts a skiffle group; and meets a baby-faced teen-age…
Morning Glory
A perennially hopeful television producer (Rachel McAdams) gets a shot at reviving a fourth-place-and-falling-fast morning show. Her best hope: roping in the semi-retired but super-cranky hard-news guy (Harrison Ford, set on glower), while still keeping the reigning hostess (Diane Keaton), a former beauty queen, fluffy and happy. On the upside, Roger Michell’s film is more…
A Film Unfinished
In 1942, Nazi propagandists set out to make a film showing the opulence of life in the Warsaw ghetto, with actors portraying indulgent Jewish families living high on the — well, not hog, of course. They never completed it, and in A Film Unfinished, Yael Hersonski, an Israeli filmmaker, looks at the four reels of…
Due Date
An uptight dad-to-be (Robert Downey Jr.) hitches a cross-country ride with a garrulous wannabe actor (Zach Galifianakis) in this shaggy road comedy. Todd Phillips’ (The Hangover) film is essentially a re-boot of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, in which two deeply incompatible people are forced to travel together, encountering many comic mishaps until — awww –…
The Three Rivers Film Festival
Dozens of films are on the slate as the long-running local film festival continues.
Returning Point Park alumni bring life experience to the Pittsburgh Connections dance program.
“I think audiences will find it to be a breath of fresh air.”
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
I’m not sure why director Carl Hunt and music director Steve Baldanzi decided to slow the show to a crawl.
When the Rain Stops Falling
Director Martin Giles captures the Dream Time spirit of playwright Andrew Bovell’s vision, yet stirs up the tension to the boiling point.
Pittsburgh native and comic-industry legend Jim Shooter visits.
“I’ve been hearing about the demise of print media since I started in the ’60s.”
Texas Tough author Robert Perkinson explores our wasteful and destructive prison system.
“If penalties for nonviolent offenders were what they were 30 years ago, the prison population of the U.S. would drop by half.”
There are surprisingly few assholes in Too Big To Fail: Incompetence is much more common.
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail goes inside the Wall Street bailout.
This Just In: November 11 – 18
Highlights from the local TV news: Sterile Needling
The Hot Button
A look at this week’s intriguing issue — and why you should care
Full Court Press
NAACP stance on sentencing called into question
Community Rebuilding
Manchester revitalizing in face of lending crisis, historical perceptions
Hi-REZ features Pittsburgh artists responding to Maxo Vanka’s religious murals
“Our job is to make connections and get out of the way.”
The Battlefield Band plays Pittsburgh’s annual celebration of Scottish music
The Battlefield Band helped originate and model a type of Celtic ensemble that’s since garnered an international audience.
Shearwater trades Okkervil River’s shadow for its own dramatic gloom
On the paranoid, bleary “Corridors,” singer Jonathan Meiburg’s voice is a call to arms against some dark, shadowy evil.
The Raconteurs’ Brendan Benson performs solo music at Mr. Small’s
Benson’s solo work isn’t an acquired taste — his songs are inveterately catchy and informed by classic pop.
Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders joins Pittsburgh musicians for his first area show in decades
“We’ll just get together and start playing,” Sanders says. “I might just call a key: F-sharp minor, and that’s it. Everybody just blows. It’ll always be right.”
Pittsburgh Public Market
“I had some guy for his Halloween party, he wanted two pigs’ heads and two sheep heads.”
Political Ed-ucation
Wise advice for Dems still around to follow it
Savage Love
I spoke at Pacific University, in Oregon, last Thursday night. Students submitted a lot more questions than I could possibly answer in the 90 minutes we had. So I’m going to use this week’s column to answer some of the questions I didn’t get to. What is the biggest barrier to the acceptance of…
