MP3 Tuesday: Host Skull
Hey! Listen. I was out of the office last week, and things got a little hectic. Hence my lack of an MP3 Monday. But I’ve got the track for you now. It’s from Host Skull, about whom I wrote last week. (Before I was out of the office.) They had their release last Thursday; the…
Breaking: Prison guard ID’ed in lawsuits arrested
This morning, SCI-Pittsburgh prison guard Harry F. Nicoletti was arrested on dozens of charges of sexual and physical assault involving prison inmates. Nicoletti was named in a lawsuit first reported by City Paper last week, and was the target of graphic abuse allegations in a separate legal action filed the day after our story came…
A conversation with Steve Perry
Steve Perry is the founder and principal of the nationally recognized Capital Preparatory Magnet School, in Hartford, Conn. He is also a CNN education correspondent and the author of Push Has Come to Shove: Getting Our Kids the Education They Deserve (Even if it Means Picking a Fight). Perry, an advocate of school choice and…
Bricolage’s Bootleggin’ and Bathtub Gin
The troupe’s Midnight Radio series is a good chance to see local stage talent let their hair down. That might seem a funny thing to say about old-school-radio-style plays where sound takes precedence over image. But watching/hearing folks you’ve seen do Shakespeare or Stoppard break out their cartoon voices and bat around potty humor (in…
More SCI-Pittsburgh abuse allegations surfacing
As City Paper first reported on Wednesday, allegations have begun to surface involving Pittsburgh prison officials who are apparently at the heart of a grand-jury investigation involving the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh. Grand-jury deliberations are secret, and so the allegations at issue are hazy. But as we reported, one former SCI-Pittsburgh inmate, Rodger Williams,…
Sympathy for the Blue Dog
OK, “sympathy” may be too strong a word. But Jason Altmire deserves … I don’t know … pity? The kind of liberal compassion that blames social ills for a person’s shortcomings? Yesterday, Altmire was one of just six Democrats to vote in favor of HR 2068, a House GOP measure that would fund disaster-recovery efforts…
Political news that DOESN’T make me want to kill myself
This space has largely remained quiet on the race for Allegheny County executive race. That will change in the days ahead, but part of the reason it’s been so quiet is that your City Paper editor finds it depressing. We have two candidates — Democrat Rich Fitzgerald and Republican D. Raja — who are smart…
Short List: Week of September 22 – 27
The $78 million collected each year from the Allegheny Regional Asset District’s 1 percent sales tax has many uses. Much of it keeps the lights on at libraries, supports parks or helps out your favorite arts group; some pays down stadium debt. But once a year, ARAD thanks taxpayers directly with RADical Days, a run…
Moving Mountains: Activists taking the battle to mountaintop-removal companies
Throughout Appalachia, mining companies are blowing up mountains for coal. More than 500 mountains, and 1.2 million acres of forest, have been leveled in Appalachia as a result of mountaintop-removal (MTR) mining. In this version of strip-mining, lush woodlands are turned to wastelands, and debris is dumped into neighboring stream valleys. Activists say that flooding…
Bite Bistro
It’s an exciting time to be a foodie. Partly it’s the growing availability of excellent ingredients, whether from local farms or exotic locales. Partly, the national restaurant scene right now is probably the most exciting and innovative it’s been since California cuisine — with its simple, fresh, seasonal approach to cooking that we now take…
Going smoke-free a success at New Amsterdam — so far
Jimmy Woods was surprised when the state sent him a letter in June informing him that his bar — the New Amsterdam in Lawrenceville — could no longer allow smoking indoors. Woods had reason to be anxious, too. The last time Woods tried to banish smoking, “I tried it for like a week, maybe a…
Hunting the Wild Mushroom
“You can’t run a business solely off of foraging,” Cavan Patterson says as his brother Tom tramps through nearby trees, hunting mushrooms. “But it’s really cool.” The office environment is tough to beat, anyway. Most days, the staff of Wild Purveyors delivers produce from farms to cutting-edge restaurants like Habitat and Elements. (They also have…
Stepping on the Gas
While you were taking summer vacation, city officials were wrangling over the politics of natural-gas drilling. Pittsburgh City Council sought to put a referendum on the November ballot allowing voters to ban such drilling in city limits. The effort failed in the face of opposition from Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. So should you expect a crop…
Savage Love
I am a 22-year-old who has been living at home for the last year. My parents are divorced, so I’ve gone back and forth from one place to the other. The other day, I was using my father’s computer, and the history came up on the search engine. It turns out that my father views…
Say, What?: Exec candidates struggle to address community concerns in BPEP debate
In the race for Allegheny County executive, Republican D. Raja and Democrat Rich Fitzgerald have become experts at both citing their own proposed policies and at taking political jabs at one another. But during a televised Sept. 15 debate at Pittsburgh’s CAPA High School, the two men seemed to be out of their element when…
Questions Mounting: Lawsuit makes sex-abuse allegation against officer named in SCI-Pittsburgh probe
Five months ago, reports surfaced that eight corrections officers at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh had been suspended without pay, pending a grand-jury investigation. So far, little has been said publicly about the investigation’s scope, or the nature of the allegations. But outside that investigation, accusations of wrongdoing have begun to surface. In a…
Sidewalk Art: City man spends a year observing life from street level
If you work Downtown, shop in the Strip District or party on the South Side, chances are you’ve walked to the beat of Price Bennett’s drum. Since last summer, the North Side musician has provided the soundtrack to Pittsburgh’s sidewalks, matching his percussive rhythms to the pace of pedestrians’ footsteps. A welder by trade –…
On the Record: Bill Toms
Bill Toms spent almost 20 years as lead guitarist in Joe Grushecky’s band, the Houserockers. More recently, he’s toured and recorded solo, and with his band, Hard Rain. This week he releases his latest full-length, Memphis. Why Memphis? I started to explore the characters on the album, and I realized that most of these…
Critics’ Picks: Sept 23 – 28
[HIP HOP] + FRI., SEPT. 23 Trey Songz is reportedly now at work on his fifth full-length in six years; the hip-hop/R&B idol established himself in the late 2000s as a major player, and as the sexting anthemist of a generation (with “LOL Smiley Face” in 2009). Today is Trey Day in Monroeville, it would…
Shade Cobain goes from selector to MC to producer
Globally acclaimed by blogs and active locally as sound designer for the Shadow Lounge’s weekly open mike, Shade Cobain is humbly determined to make an imprint as one of hip hop’s most gifted producers. Even in his youth, Shade (born Charles Taylor) played the role of record selector for family. “My mom and her friends…
Cerebral Rock
The first 15 seconds or so of the title track of Host Skull’s new Totally Fatalist LP could be mistaken for an Arnold Dreyblatt track, or something from Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals. Minimalist and repetitive, it builds tension — then turns suddenly into a pop song. It is, in essence, a typical Dave Bernabo operation. Bernabo…
New Shouts Shout New Songs on Sing New Shouts
Late one evening a few months ago, a fairly productive practice and recording session was winding down for Pittsburgh retro pop-rock outfit New Shouts. They were in the process of putting the finishing touches on a piece of garage-rock buckshot that would eventually become “Dolly Bird” (on the group’s recently released debut album Sing New…
The Interrupters
From documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams), working with author Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), comes this tough but affecting portrait of inner-city youth, and the work of one organization named Ceasefire that seeks to stem the endemic violence in the community. The film jumps right in, for a fly-on-the-wall approach to one year,…
Dolphin Tale
On the one hand, Charles Martin Smith’s family-friendly feature Dolphin Tale, about a sad boy and a hurt dolphin, is an overstuffed kid-vid. The “real events” it’s based on likely include only this: A rescued dolphin in Florida suffers an amputation and is eventually fitted with a prosthetic tail, thereby allowing it to survive and…
Straw Dogs
Straw Dogs, directed by Rod Lurie, is a remake of 1971’s Straw Dogs, directed by Sam Peckinpah, whose ballets of machismo and violence got taken up by a film culture that “understood” them. Do such visually arresting films make it too easy to overlook the pleasure that they give viewers and that the artist obviously…
Camino
In the near future, people wear wristbands that trace their movements. Police are private contractors, smartphones contain all a citizen’s data and convicts are detained in for-profit prisons. The world of Camino is closer to ours than Minority Report. Any day, we could fall headlong into this lifestyle. Just wait. But Camino, the premiere production…
Bootleggin’ and Bathtub Gin
The 9 p.m. “curtain” is a bit deceptive when Bricolage Production Co. cranks up a Midnight Radio production. Yes, an original radio play — in this case, Bootleggin’ and Bathtub Gin — starts at 9, but the full theatrical experience begins as soon as audience members arrive. The lobby, tricked out not only to resemble…
Wicked’s an entertainment-industry juggernaut — but it’s also a good show.
An interesting aspect of the 2003 Broadway musical Wicked is how it has been transformed over the years from an entertainment into an industry. This re-imagining of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz (via Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel) features music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a script by Winnie Holzman. The concept is…
Reviews of new poetry books by Lori Jakiela and Bob Ziller
The Mill Hunk’s Daughter Meets the Queen of the Sky. Lori Jakiela’s latest chapbook, on Finishing Line Press, takes a mere 26 pages to depict the lot of an airline stewardess through the prism of her relationship with her blue-collar Pittsburgh father. Anyone familiar with Jakiela’s nonfiction — like her fine 2006 memoir Miss New…
A conversation with superhero-comics artist Alex Ross
You can’t walk 4 feet in most comic-book shops without seeing something painted by Alex Ross. For the connoisseur, there are no better images of iconic superheroes like Batman, Superman and Green Lantern to plaster onto T-shirts or posters than those of the American Academy of Art-educated Ross. His lush, photo-realistic style does much to…
