The Rundown
An enforcer named Beck (The Rock) is dispatched to the Amazon jungle to retrieve a crime boss’ errant son, Travis (Seann William Scott). That what Beck really wants to do is open a small, upscale restaurant, and that Travis’ absconding is a graduate-school dissertation gone off the rails, are just two of the amusing quirks…
Long Story Short
Jennifer Bannan says the first great writer she knew was a neighbor in her hometown of West Miami; when they were 8, she and Alicia even wrote a play together. Her childhood friend’s influence was still reverberating when Bannan came north to study creative and professional writing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. Indeed, Alicia…
The Battle of Shaker Heights
If you have a teen-age son with a sophisticated vocabulary and a wry sense of humor, or one with no sense of humor at all, you may want to arrange a family night and take him to see The Battle of Shaker Heights, which plays like a 90-minute pilot episode for a WB series, except…
Out of Commission
Give the Mayor’s Commission on Public Education this much: Its Sept. 22 report on reforming the Pittsburgh School District has already served the cause of education. The next time teachers want an object lesson in political expedience and disingenuousness, they can just give their students a copy. Though it’s titled “Keeping the Promise,” the report…
Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour
As one among just a handful of traveling sideshows of new short films that reach Pittsburgh each year, the venerable Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour is always worth your while. And if a preview videotape sampling roughly half this year’s offerings is any indication, the 41st annual edition is one of the strongest in recent…
Civil Matta
You want political scuttlebutt, go to the back steps of the City-County Building. Around midday the portico facing Ross Street is a nest of city and Allegheny County officials and functionaries — some catching a smoke, others getting some air, and all, always, gossiping. It’s not often that an alleged piece of back-steps chatter costs…
Outkast
It’s the coolest thing when two good friends grow in opposite directions but remain tight. I got cats I grew up with who’ve decided they can’t click with me anymore because I left the ‘hood to go to (gasp!) college. But then I got close compadres still in the ‘hood who totally support my departure…
Cerberus Shoal
During my academic career, I had difficulty with only one subject: Spanish. For 50 minutes a day I sat in a class where I learned how to conjugate past-perfect verbs and say ridiculous phrases such as “my soup is cold.” My pronunciations were brutal and my enthusiasm lackluster. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t fully…
Cedric Im Brooks & The Light of Saba
Down an unmarked, cobblestone side street and duck through a short wood-framed doorway. Descend flight of stairs; knock three times while whispering the Aramaic word on back of a card. Make no false move, think before you leap. Inside, inhale deep of the incense and fresh collie, place needle in groove. Uninitiated beware the full…
A Conversation with Earl C. Schriver
Your golden eagle, Wambli, is 41. Have you had him the longest?Well, now, yes. My yellow great-horned owl died a little over a week ago. West Nile. Really?Oh, yeah, that stuff’s hammering everything. There’s no birds. The woods are silent. People don’t realize it. Songbirds are about gone, most of them. [If] we lose 25…
Hostel Climate
Two months into his six-month car trip through the U.S., Mike Astle discovered Hostelling International Pittsburgh in a guidebook. “It’s by far the best one I’ve ever been to,” said Astle, a twentysomething supermarket produce manager from Manchester, England. He slipped a frozen dinner into the oven in the Allentown hostel’s bright, spacious kitchen. “I…
Building Distrust
During a morning rush-hour march and rally Sept. 26, roughly 250 participants in the Justice for Janitors campaign paused to shout slogans and beat makeshift drums at three buildings where they are treated differently than they are at most of the others they clean Downtown. That’s because cleaning contractors pay union janitors at the new…
No Tom Like the Present
When a group of mayoral appointees issued their report on the city school system last week, only Mayor Tom Murphy’s desperate attempt to escape to the elevators hinted at his summer of political troubles. Ignoring for the moment the congenial pack of commission members themselves — who’d been for the last year as tight-lipped…
Bringing Home the Pagan
Pittsburgh Pagans — whose spirituality centers around a variety of pre-Christian faiths, often with New Age touches — are preparing for a second annual Pagan Pride Day Oct. 5, which they hope will make their name and beliefs better understood by the public. Co-organizer Amy Mokricky, owner of Moonstones in Dormont, says the day…
Correction
In “Dr. Tyson Examines His Books” (Sept. 24), the figures given for malpractice insurance were per physician, not for the entire practice. Also, Tyson recommended an ENT (ear, nose and throat specialist), not, of course, an EMT (emergency medical technician), for the child whose earring backs had grown into her ears.
Is it true that some one-legged painter has world-famous paintings hanging in the Carnegie Museum and other respected museums in the country? Is it true that he once boxed the heavyweight champ of the world, John L. Sullivan?
Sure it’s true. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but Andy Warhol could really kick ass. The guy could bench-press three heroin addicts in drag with just one hand. Okay, I’m kidding. Andy Warhol couldn’t really do that, which is probably why he left Pittsburgh in the first place. If you want to…
Three Rivers, Three Novels
Until now, Kevin Forsythe’s published works have consisted mostly of gripping narratives about Pittsburgh snow-removal procedures and stadium lease deals. A trusted lieutenant in City Controller Tom Flaherty’s office for more than a decade, the aspiring novelist has had little public outlet other than the audits he has helped compile. Yet even the limited audience…
The Cuckoo
Alexander Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo is like an affair with a lover you don’t see coming: unattractive at first, then slowly more charming and seductive, and finally, so dazzling and intense that you can’t believe you didn’t recognize it from the start. It’s the Tower of Babel meets Grand Illusion, and so lovely and exhilarating by…
