Various Artists
Deride them as suburban coffeehouse fodder and tribal-tattooed twentysomething hippie store-bought diversity, but the modern world-music compilation — particularly the Putumayo company’s collections and Wrasse’s annual sampler — is the way most Americans hear the genre that’s come to encompass, literally, everybody else’s music. On two new comps that threaten an attempt at covering the…
Friday Night Lights
Jutting out of the dusty plains of West Texas is Ratliff Stadium, a 20,000-seat monument to high school football and the fervor that surrounds it. The Periman Panthers of Odessa — “Mojo” to their fans, the winningest high school football team in Texas history — play here, and Friday Night Lights is the…
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Mamoru Oshii, who directed the critically lauded 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell, returns to that dystopian future inhabited by robots and cyborgs who harbor varying degrees of residual humanity. His new film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, isn’t a true sequel, so much as another riff on what it means to…
Greetings from Cuba
“Soy Cuba.” I am Cuba. The words resonate throughout Mikhail Kalatozov’s cinematic valentine to the resilience and beauty of Cuba and its people. And the 1964 film of the same name is the logical kick-off for a mini-festival of Cuban films focusing on Cuban identity. The series is a collaboration between…
State “Babysitting” of Autistic Kids Under Scrutiny
State aid to autistic children needs a major overhaul, according to Estelle Richman, secretary of the Commonwealth’s Department of Public Welfare. Under her microscope is the $452 million program called “wraparound,” which sends state-paid aides into the homes of kids with autism and other behavioral problems for set numbers of hours of therapy every week.…
Bush League
“Subject: From Baghdad.” “Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.” Anyone who saw the Sept. 30 presidential debate…
Hill History Finds Common Ground
As the famous Hill District photos of Charles “Teenie” Harris ran across the screen, Lincoln-Lemington elder (and oral historian) Juanita King quietly identified some of the people and places to the out-of-towners seated around her. Donna Wells, an archivist from Howard University in Washington, D.C., said it was remarkable to hear King name…
LADDER 49
While trapped in a bad fire, Baltimore fireman Jack Morrison (Joaquin Phoenix) reflects over his career — from gullible rookie to seasoned firefighter to steady family man. Jay W. Russell’s film hits just about all the firehouse clichés — booze-ups at Irish bars, the weddings and funerals, the child saved from flames, the injured partner…
What Makes Mark Run
Running down that hill in Grahamstown, South Africa, six years ago, Mark Clayton Southers wasn’t thinking about writing plays. The hill was steep, for one thing, and Southers and fellow Pittsburgher Derrick Sanders didn’t quite know how to get where they wanted to go. Plus they were late. When they finally arrived, the classroom was…
I recently moved to Pittsburgh. My initial impression is that it hasn’t acquired a reputation yet of a city on the rebound as Cleveland has, with its Flats district, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, etc. What image does the city’s PR office portray?
You must be new here, and you must be from a place even farther behind the times than Pittsburgh. Worrying about the city’s image is so 1998. Back then, we openly aspired to being like Cleveland. City officials pointed to ballparks like Jacobs Field, “first-day attractions” for tourists like the Rock and Roll…
Tree Muggers
“Bush has a terrible reputation on the environment, and deservedly so,” says Myron Arnowitt, head of the local waterways watchdog group, Clean Water Action. George W. Bush hasn’t ignored the environment — the usual practice of a president for whom conservation isn’t a priority; instead, his administration actively works to reverse environmental protections…
A Conversation with Lynne Conner
O’Hara Township native Lynne Conner is a playwright and a scholar of theater history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently researching a book for the University of Pittsburgh Press about the history of Pittsburgh’s theater scene. How did you decide to study Pittsburgh’s theater history? At first, I had a typical…
Speaking Volumes
Darwin, Franklin, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens: The names are literally carved in stone across the highest frieze on the facade of the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland. Maybe that’s both good news and bad. As the library’s founding patron, Andrew Carnegie intended that the great authors occupy a prominent…
Shopping
Albums are bullshit. That’s just an indisputable fact. Sure, the dominance of album-oriented pop music has been not just unchallenged but, in the U.S., unchallengeable for decades: We can hardly even lay claim to more than a few honest-to-god one-hit wonders over the past 10 years, nonetheless more than a handful of brilliant singles,…
Squonk Opera
With sickly-sweet tenor harmonies and accordion swells, Casio-style bom-bim-bom-bim bass, and distorted lap-steel guitar, “Cowboy Nation” marks not just a radical musical departure for multi-media performance ensemble Squonk Opera — it defines a new genre: post-ironic cowboy cabaret. It’s not a style that re-emerges too often on Rodeo Smackdown, the soundtrack, of sorts, to Squonk’s…
