A conversation with Philip Glotfelty
Philip Glotfelty turned his youthful hobby into his adult livelihood. Nine years ago, he opened Game Masters, a store on Babcock Boulevard in the North Hills that not only sells gear for games like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, but also provides a gamers’ rendezvous in the store. Glotfelty also hosts…
Holding Out for a Hero
Spider-Man, Batman, Catwoman: Clearly, the superhero world places no limitation on eccentricity in determining what makes for an allowable special power. In fact, the Incredible Hulk’s ability to achieve superhero status based on suppressed rage ought to be inspiration for architecture critics everywhere. But that’s just not enough: Even though I have seen a few…
Drive-By Truckers
Though my devotion back then would’ve embarrassed me, I just about wore out the Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day on a lot of slow, bittersweet trips down to Fayette-nam and Brownsville last summer. It seemed like a perfect match. Drive-By Truckers had three records behind them when their hugely ambitious two-disc Southern Rock Opera of…
Marah
What is that tickle in the back of the mind at the beginning of “East,” the lead-off track on Philly rockers Marah’s latest disc? What do that heartily strummed acoustic guitar, militant snare roll, twee tapped bells and cigarette-lighter Keef-esque guitar lead add up to in the gray matter mush of pop-culture references? Is it…
Milo Pullman
I can’t claim to begin to understand Milo Pullman’s songs. Chickens, geese and roosters; the Crimean war; lords and knights; six-minute epics and 90-second blasts of confusion. Pullman’s lyrics bounce between moments of inspiration, moments of madness and moments of unbelievable shlock, sometimes in the same song — or the same phrase. It’s as though…
Another Saturday Night
At 9 o’clock on a Saturday night, the studio at 90.5 WDUQ-FM is a diving submarine. Dale Abraham logs on to multiple computers and digital recording systems. Mike Plaskett flips through records, tossing picks out to form a makeshift play list. Ken Crawford swings microphones around, looking for the one with the right reach and…
Mean Creek
Smack dab in the middle of Hollywood’s loud-and-dumb season, larded with predatory aliens and car-banging thrillers, comes a thoughtful little indie film about kids and how they can go wrong — or go right. Writer and director Jacob Aaron Estes’ debut feature, Mean Creek, is a morality play writ both small and large,…
Abay Ethiopian Cuisine
Location: 130 S. Highland Ave., East Liberty. 412-661-9736 Hours: Lunch: Tue.-Sun. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner: Tue.-Sat. 5-10 p.m. and Sun. 5-9 p.m. Prices: Lunch $7-8; dinner $10-11 Fare: Traditional Ethiopian Atmosphere: Bright and friendly Liquor: BYOB Ethiopian food has long been conspicuous in its absence from Pittsburgh dining, even as other exotic cuisines have arrived.…
The Brown Bunny
In the first 15 minutes of The Brown Bunny, we learn everything we need to know about the desperately lonely and pathetic character portrayed by Vincent Gallo, who also wrote, directed, produced, edited and photographed the movie. Bud (he’s waiting to blossom) Clay (he’s malleable) races motorcycles and pines for his…
The Mayor’s Day at the Beach
This was supposed to be a long, hot summer for Mayor Tom Murphy. Before Memorial Day, he was at loggerheads with the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, a five-member panel created to oversee the city’s struggling finances. By all appearances, the excrement was about to hit the City County Building’s air conditioning. When Murphy proposed a financial…
Zhou Yu’s Train
Zhou Yu’s Train is the most un-Chinese Chinese movie we’ve seen in a long time: With its brooding, haunting, sometimes lugubrious atmosphere, and its occasional use of techniques like slow motion and jump cuts, it feels more like an art film from France or Hungary — its musical score is in triple time,…
On the alley side of the Culinary Institute building (Penn Ave. and Strawberry Way) there are four carved portraits on the wall. One is clearly Abe Lincoln. Who are the other three?
This is one of the more pleasant mysteries one encounters in the alleyways of Downtown Pittsburgh; most of the others are of the “What is that smell?” or “Can I get away with parking here on a Sunday?” variety. But the answer is every bit as elusive. Measuring only 3 feet by 2-and-a-half feet,…
Instructional Video
In the world of documentaries, before a filmmaker makes the movie, the subject sometimes creates the filmmaker. So it was when Jeff Ritter heard that 20 young Rwandans were soon to arrive at LaRoche College, where Ritter teaches communications. It was 1997, and a group of Bosnian students had just graduated; Ritter wondered…
Statute of Liberty
About 400 members of the New York-based War Resisters League were milling around the Manhattan subway entrance at Ground Zero among the tourists and commuters on Aug. 31 — the day chosen by activists for mass civil disobedience during the Republican National Convention. Members of this 80-year-old pacifist group — founded by former World War…
CRIMINAL
Greg Jacobs’s debut feature is a faithful Americanization of the 2001 Argentine hit Nueve Reinas. Seasoned con man Gaddis (John C. Reilly) intercepts a young grifter, Rodrigo (Diego Luna), and agrees to tutor him. And just in time, because Gaddis get word of a hot big-money scam involving rare currency that could use Rodrigo’s assistance.…
Shades of Grey Prevail on Council …
City Council raised the white flag Sept. 1, but not before a few of its members made plays for the black vote. For months, council has been wrestling with the terms of a cooperation agreement with a state-appointed financial oversight board. The agreement would give the five-member board a veto over city budgets, and…
FORCES OF NATURE
The opening screen announcing that this IMAX documentary about Mother Nature’s destructive acts — specifically, volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes — is presented by Amica Insurance casts a distracting shadow. As George Casey turns his large-format cameras upon a handful of scientists working feverishly to predict the unpredictable, one can almost hear the off-screen mutterings of…
Terror Eyed
“I’ve been exposed to the issue of terrorism since I was a boy, living in Chile, where we endured a government coup d’etat,” says Andres Tapia-Urzua of Highland Park. This 18-year veteran filmmaker is using his childhood experience as inspiration for a planned Pittsburgh film festival portraying the social effects of terrorism. Titled “My Terrorism,”…
WICKER PARK
Up-and-coming ad man Matthew (Josh Harnett) bolts from a business dinner, believing he has caught a glimpse of his lost love, Lisa (Diane Kruger), who disappeared from his life two years earlier. Matthew’s obsessive quest leads him into an affair with Alex (Rose Byrne), a needy girl with an obsession of own. Paul McGuigan’s romantic…
Press Release of the Week
Who’s A Rat (www.whosarat.com) is the first site to allow users around the country to post local, state and federal agents’ and informants’ names, pictures and related information. Legal? The founder of Who’s A Rat says yes — and has case law to prove it. Ethical? Regardless of your answer to that question,…
Bush League
“Shh, Don’t Tell the Swing Voters.” You know where he stands, he says. But does the president-select — who was first against, then for the 9/11 commission; positive about, then unaware of, a Saddam-Al Qaeda link; determined to capture, then utterly unconcerned with, Osama bin Laden — need a GPS to find himself? In…
Questioning Inquest
As Joyce Rogers sat for the third inquest in the death of her son, Bernard Rogers, at the hands of city Housing Authority police officers, she turned to her assembled family. “When they make the recommendation ruling in favor of pressing charges,” she said, “we will say, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ We will not cheer.…
Fighting for a Spoil
Ralph Nader is off the ballot in Pennsylvania but not off the stump. Kept from Commonwealth presidential polls by a rule against independents who accept a party nomination elsewhere (Nader is the Reform Party candidate in Michigan), Nader is now planning a Sept. 11 evening rally at 7:30 p.m. to be held at the…
