Oh God It’s the PUMA People
So for the last 45 minutes, I’ve been receiving — at the rate of one every 30 seconds — e-mailed form letters from PUMA, a group whose acronym stands for “People United Means Action.” The e-mails are all the same — and are no doubt all being sent to newspapers across the country. They read…
Has Pat Dowd Just Been Out-Dowded?
City Councilor Pat Dowd has been a controversial figure, but one thing both his critics and his supporters can agree on: He is a big believer in transparency and due process. A few months back, for example, the Pist-Gazette opined that the big problem with Dowd was that he was TOO obsessed with obeying the…
October’s Mish Mash
I love my DVR but it leads to bad habits like lots of TV shows piling up in its recesses. (In the old days, you’d start to notice the tumbling stacks of videotapes.) Vacation, houseguests and breaking political news have all conspired to put me waaaay behind on new TV. I’m catching up slowly but…
CP Remixed Revisited: Video!
As regular readers of this chunk of hypertext are all too aware, last Thursday was the inaugural edition of CP Remixed, our new series of concerts featuring local artists. I was given the enviable task of recording portions for posterity, and the result is further evidence that you shouldn’t send a print journalist to do…
Broder Hits the Road
The Washington Post’s David Broder deigns grace us with his presence. Well, not “us,” per se. Broder visited the Philly-area suburbs, where conventional wisdom says Pennsylvania’s presidential election contest will be decided. But instead of dwelling amongst the peasantry in Pennsylvania’s rural and post-industrial villages, as so many national reporters have done, Broder visits Montgomery…
God Help Us All
I don’t know what else to say about this. Except that no matter who we end up with as president, we’re still stuck with shitheads like this as citizens.
Amazing Race: More Stressful Globe-Hopping
It’s yet another “race around the world” as the popular travel reality show Amazing Race lifted off from Los Angeles last week. As always, this show takes a few weeks to get in its grove. At the outset, there are too many contestants to keep track of — I find the attractive young couples to…
All Uphill From Here
A momentary silence descends inside Exclusive Cutz as barber Master PeeWee kills the razor’s power. But the quiet doesn’t last long: Loretta Harris, who has just been getting her eyebrows trimmed in the second-floor Centre Avenue barbershop, has some sharp words for the new Pittsburgh Penguins arena being built a few blocks away. “They ain’t…
The Express
In 1961, Syracuse University halfback Ernie Davis became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy; two years later, at 23, he died of leukemia. Set amidst the era’s civil-rights struggles, this golden-hued biopic packages “The Elmira Express” (who spent his early childhood in Uniontown, Pa.) as the mannerly, deferential yin to the fiery…
Blindness
A mysterious virus causes everyone to go blind in this thriller from Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God), adapted from Nobel laureate José Saramago’s allegorical 1995 novel. It’s an ambitious project that doesn’t make the grade. The first citizens stricken, including an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his inexplicably still-sighted wife (Julianne Moore), are…
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
A pampered, pocket-sized pooch named Chloe gets lost in Mexico and must rely on other dogs to get her home safely. Her allies on this perilous road trip are a German shepherd named Delgado, a disgraced Mexico City police dog, and Papi, a besotted working-class Chihuahua-mix, also from 90210. Raja Gosnell’s live-action family film is…
Appaloosa
In recent decades, the formula of the classic Western — good guys in white, bad guys in black — has blurred into variously shaded gray characters. But in Ed Harris’ film, there is no doubt that his marshal-for-hire Virgil Cole (Harris) and partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) are the good guys battling to free the…
Monster Mash-Up
“I was like, ‘I love tardigrades!”
The Duchess
Set amid England’s late 18th-century gentry, Saul Dibb’s drama is a movie about an ur-feminist — the titular duchess, Georgiana (Kiera Knightley) — forced to subjugate her mind and desires to the oligarchy of men who dominated her culture. We’ve seen that theme done before, but rarely so entertainingly, and by a cast of disciplined…
I Served the King of England
Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains)is a long-standing filmmaker and Jan Díte, his protagonist in I Served, is a hot-dog vendor who becomes a brilliant waiter at fine hotel restaurants. How could two people be more not alike? But this is Czech cinema, where everything is irony and melancholy, the same yet different. Along the way,…
This Just In: October 9 – 16
Highlights from the local TV news: Billy Ray meets Billy Ray.
Partly cloudy, chance of Girl Talk
When do you know a Pittsburgh boy’s really made it big? Obviously, when teen girls are creating weather forecasts for his upcoming shows and posting them on the internet. Julie Bologna, eat yr heart out. Thanks to Chicagoan colleague Jess Hopper for the heads-up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6QjAmFvbV8
All Souls’ Day
Wind wild, warm, moist Trees gothic evergreen stained glass deciduous red, rust, ochre bright burnt orange an ancient ruined cathedral roofless under a Yorkshire sky Clouds big-bellied graphite billows fast forwarding unfolding patches of nitrogen blue mitred shafts of sun In my chest a tempest I’m immobilized in this tumult of beauty portent of the…
Bacchus
Although the name, the décor and the menu all lean Italian, the kitchen offers a broader range than marinara and veal, as Mediterranean staples such as basil and goat cheese stand side by side with curry, chocolate and remoulade.
A new photo exhibit challenges stereotypes of lesbian couples.
“There are butch women, there are transgendered women, but the women are in love.”
LABCO’s annual Black Box showcase marks a decade.
The recent Slippery Rock University graduate says she was interested in stepping out of her artistic comfort zone with the piece.
Education: Some local universities falling behind in hiring of women
For decades women have grabbed a bigger and bigger share of the degrees given out by institutions of higher education. But getting a job at those same universities has been a different story.
Courts: Gay plant worker looks to appeals court to condemn harassment
Few will dispute that Brian Prowel was harassed at work, but in order to win a lawsuit against his former employer he’ll have to prove it was not because he has sex with men, but because he sometimes acted too much like a woman.
Pittsburgh poets read Oct. 12 to benefit Obama/Biden.
Peruse the line-up for Oct. 12’s “Poets for a Better Country” fund-raiser, and it’s clear that if Pittsburgh’s top poets constituted the electorate, we could call Nov. 4 today. Organized by poets Toi Derricotte and Judith Vollmer — who are working to spark similar events that day in other cities, too — it’s a veritable…
Anthony Varallo’s Out Loud nabs the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
“The stories in Out Loud are just awfully damn good,” says Scott Turow. The federal prosecutor turned writer of best-selling legal thrillers (Presumed Innocent) was among the Drue Heinz Literature Prize judges who chose the collection, by Anthony Varallo, as winner of the prestigious annual contest for a book of short stories. Out Loud (University…
Paul Muldoon brings his virtuoso verses to the International Poetry Forum.
The poet Muldoon (Paul) writes what he writes what he writes. He, Joycean, busies himself within the very business of writing, layer upon lair. “Small birds were sounding the alert / as I followed her unladen / steed through a dell so dark and dank / she might have sported the waders / her grandfather…
Novelist Walter Mosley has a proposal for creating real democracy in the U.S.
“We have to get over the way they fool us into hating each other.”
The Other Shore
The audience, and specifically its comprehension of the event at hand, is the last thing they’re worrying about.
Savage Love
I feel ridiculous e-mailing you but I figure that if anyone has seen or heard of all manner of asshole behavior during sex, it would be you. I’m a 17-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one boyfriend — who was, at the time, 21 and, I thought, completely perfect. I’m glad it’s over, and I…
Despite the chill, Centipede Eest rocks the dirty boulevard
Edgar Um kept up the rattle-trap grooves and weirdness on the turntables, as bundled-up attendees browsed a spread of kabobs and chips, and quaffed PBRs.
Carol’s Restaurant
Detours worth the effort to this West End eatery.
New concert series CP Remixed debuts this Thursday
It’s not dance music in the typical sense, but there will be plenty for your feet to lock onto as you feed your head.
Tributes lined up for celebrated Pittsburgh DJ Mad Mike
The late, influential local DJ Mad Mike gets a CD tribute
Indonesian superstar Rhoma Irama gives a free concert at Pitt
Dangdut‘s lilting, gooey melodies and cult emphasis on singers also bears a resemblance to Algerian rai.
A local Presbyterian minister is acquitted for conducting a same-sex wedding by the church; but don’t call it an endorsement of the practice.
Even before the not-guilty verdict in the Oct. 1 Presbyterian Church trial of Rev. Janet Edwards — accused of violating church and Biblical rules by performing a same-sex wedding — other sympathetic ministers of the denomination were predicting the outcome. “They’re nice people, they don’t like conflict, they want it to go away,” said the…
Jazz returns to Downtown with the opening of Little E’s
Kazas has created an intimate loft that is ideal for listening, and which can accommodate about 35 customers.
Emergency Operation
Since taking office early this year, Pittsburgh City Councilor Bruce Kraus has fielded calls from South Side residents about everything from unruly drunks to the city’s decision to relocate the Zone 3 police station. But nothing compares to the uproar he’s heard over the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s plans to close South Side Hospital.…
Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa premieres new work at the Festival of Firsts
“When I was in India, I learned a lifetime of stuff to deal with as a composer and improviser.”
Edward Clug and Ballet Maribor set Romeo and Juliet to Radiohead.
The movement is minimalist, at times bravura, and decidedly European in style.
Susanne Slavick’s Artist of the Year show revisits, reframes and reclaims.
It goes to black while snowy curtains ghost in windows, and is finally resurrected in a warm Valentine pink glow, with railings rebuilt and safety restored.
