Girl Power
The first thing you notice when you walk into Tara’s living room is not the group of stylish young women and men sipping cocktails on chairs arranged in a semi-circle. It’s not the music playing. It’s not the candles burning, or the art on the walls, or the little bowls of Asian snack mix. No,…
A Conversation with Kareem Sami
The face of management changed rather quickly here. What happened? It kinda worked out where [the previous manager] wanted to get out of it, and she said, “Well, why don’t you do it?” I have experience running restaurants and food services, but I’ve never run a café specifically. So all this was new to…
War Without End, or Amen
“After all the hoopla of this election, on Nov. 3 when I wake up my son is still dead,” says Lila Lipscomb. “Some [other American] mother is going to have their child still in Iraq and there’s going to be an Iraqi mother holding her blown-up baby. It needs to stop and we’re…
Extra Curricular Activism
Who will educate the presidential candidates, incendiary filmmakers, “527”-group founders and FactCheck.org directors of tomorrow? It might be Kentucky Avenue School in Shadyside, a 72-student private school whose head, Brian Horvath, instituted a course called “Social Activism” this fall for its 17 seventh- and eighth-graders. “We can teach them as much as we…
Arguing in Circles
Sometime shortly before 1907, Carnegie Tech Board member Lucian Scaife sat at the all-male Duquesne Club and wrote thoughtfully: “To make and inspire the home; to lessen suffering and increase happiness; to aid mankind in its upward struggles; to ennoble and adorn life’s work, however humble; these are woman’s high prerogatives.” Surely these sentiments…
The Three Rivers Film Festival
The 23rd annual Three Rivers Film Festival, presented by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, runs from Fri., Nov. 5, through Thu., Nov. 18. The program of more than 40 films includes foreign-language works, American independents, documentaries, experimental cinema and a restored silent classic, as well as new works from local filmmakers. Tickets for most films are $7…
Cowards Bend the Knee
For his latest piece of experimental camp cinema, the Canadian director Guy Maddin — who made Tales from the Gimli Hospital and The Saddest Music in the World — relates an “autobiographical” tale of an eponymous alter ego who plays rough-and-tumble hockey (is there any other kind?) for the Winnipeg Maroons. We meet…
Week One Daily Schedule
Fri., Nov. 5 SouthSide Works 7:30 p.m. Moolaadé (with reception) 7:45 p.m. Speak (with reception) 8 p.m. Cowards Bend the Knee (with reception) 10 p.m. Moolaadé 10 p.m. Speak 10 p.m. Cowards Bend the Knee Sat., Nov. 6 Regent Square 3 p.m. A Letter to True 5:30 p.m. The Clay…
Ray
As if to prove there is no originality left in the world, the director Taylor Hackford and the actor Jamie Foxx have come together to make Ray, a modern warts-and-all hagiography about the groundbreaking musician Ray Charles, who mixed blues and jazz with gospel in ways that infuriated people in the 1950s, and…
South Asian Films Abroad
It’s no exaggeration to say that the documentaries comprising the Traveling Film South Asia tour have come halfway around the world. These 15 recent films — from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan — were selected at the Film South Asia festival held last year in Kathmandu, Nepal. The tour’s goal is to illuminate the region’s…
Monster Hunt
George Csicsery started tracking it in the mid-1980s — what he calls “a hysteria epidemic that was mounting around the issue of child abuse.” The writer and filmmaker was reporting on the case of a Nigerian-born Oakland, Calif., cabbie falsely accused of child sexual abuse; a wave of similar allegations from day-care centers…
ALFIE
This updating of the 1966 Michael Caine classic finds our roguish Alfie (Jude Law) working as chauffeur in Manhattan, luring the lovelies with his British accent and well-cut suits, while never ever falling for nonsense like commitment. Law is charming — if you go for that love-me-I’m-adorably-naughty type — and he does what he can…
Talib Kweli
I think it is finally fair to say that Talib Kweli was the disappointment of the stellar Soulquarian draft class who ushered all the “neos” of modern black music into the new millennium. The Soulquarians, as spread in a classic Vibe photo, were ?uestlove and Black Thought of the Roots, Common, Jay Dee, James Poyser,…
Barb’s Country Kitchen
Location: 4711 Butler St., Lawrenceville. 412-621-2644 Hours: Mon.-Fri. 4:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sat. 4:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; Sun. 6:30 a.m.- 2 p.m. Prices: $1.60-6.99 Fare: Classic diner Atmosphere: Who are the people in your neighborhood? Liquor: None So you’re trying to explain Lawrenceville to your friend from out of town: “An old blue-collar neighborhood …” “Like Detroit?”…
The Futureheads
Call it a musical midlife crisis, maturation in reverse, or simply the twists of 20 years consumed by long-players and “seminal works of rock genius” (or some such bullshit), but I find myself more and more begging for the fast and cheap ephemeral pop song in its finest gone-tomorrow form. I want bands that have…
War Stories
When President George W. Bush went to Iraq, he expected a triumphal celebration; he got a vicious insurgency instead. When peace activist Brian Buckley went to Iraq, he expected an insurgency. But on one night, at least, he got a celebration. As Buckley explained to a dozen Pittsburghers at Café Bliss Oct. 31, he…
I noticed a building at the corner of South 17th Street and East Carson with the word “Lorch’s” painted on the back wall. Who was this Lorch?
Pittsburgh is dotted with the names of famous retailers, department stores whose names — even if they exist only on fading signs — still carry a bit of nostalgia for the city that once was. Downtown Pittsburgh still has Kaufmann’s, of course, but one can find traces of other department stores as well, like Horne’s,…
