Old is the new new at the Carnegie’s Hall of Architecture turns 100.
The present is just like it always was. It’s the past that keeps changing.
Playwright David Turkel confronts the fear of the future in the surreal Key to the Field.
“I hate the idea of a stage baby,” says Turkel without heat, “this phony crappy thing with the mom cooing over the baby.”
Attention Starved
It’s easy to ignore the fact that Mike Butler is going hungry. It’s easy to walk down the 3700 block of Forbes Avenue in Oakland and pay no attention to his protest. Which means he has a lot in common with Iraq War he opposes: It’s easy to avert our gaze from each. Butler, an…
Legume Bistro
This is an ambitious little restaurant that has utterly transformed an old pizzeria with an atmosphere as easygoing as its palate is sophisticated.
Global Warning
Thanks to yokel TV news, we can all stay up-to-the-second on the dangers of life in the local land. Which — if you’re counting — are pretty much infinite. This week’s worth of warnings alone was enough to keep ‘fraidy cats cowering behind their curtains. But not me: I go out there, and bring it…
Letters To The Editor: Sept 19 – 26
Feedback from our readers.
Penn Avenue Fish Company
Trance music and larger modern metal sculptures set the tone for the newest addition to the fish fold in the Strip District. Not your grandpa’s fish market, the Penn Avenue Fish Company may have created a new style: Deep Sea Chic. The décor and the menu are designed to hook the next generation of fish…
New Invisible Joy returns to the stage with Kontakt
In early 2005, New Invisible Joy decided to take a hiatus from playing live, with the idea of taking a couple of months off to record material the band had been stockpiling — an artistic decision more than a practical necessity. “Most local bands are working,” explains guitarist Mike Gaydos, “and are really not afforded…
Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films
While Filmmakers’ selection includes some familiar titles, most of these films — Buñuel’s Viridiana, Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Bresson’s Pickpocket among them — have not appeared on local screens in at least a decade. Yet the impact of these films stretches deep into today’s visual media, whether it’s America’s continued embrace of foreign cinema,…
Fall Arts Preview
(Click the following links for a look at other cultural events coming up this fall) Theater Music Dance and live performance Art & Exhibits Lectures and literary events Film In 2004, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust engineered a pair of hits with its Quebec Festival and the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, both multi-genre series of…
William Bouguereau, his students and his up-and-down artistic reputation are on display at the Frick.
If one looks past the insipid themes in many of Bouguereau’s paintings, and views them through a contemporary lens, it is — ironically enough — easier to appreciate the work.
In the Valley of Elah
The drama concerns Sgt. Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a long-retired military-police investigator, now drawn to investigate why his Iraq-vet son was brutally murdered after returning to his U.S. base. Along the way we get a bitter dose of our current reality: Iraq is an insane bloodbath, the military will not look after its own,…
Fall Arts Preview: Theater
Don’t go because you “need some culture,” or you’re “supporting an actor friend,” or your spouse wanted you to go. Go because it’s fun.
Lauded experimental novelist Mark Z. Danielewski makes his first visit to Pittsburgh.
When Danielewski met his readership after Only Revolutions was published, a year ago, he says, the response “was nothing but panic.”
Eastern Promises
The diary of a dead teen-age prostitute leads a midwife (Naomi Watts) into the shadowy world of London’s vory v zakone, or Russian organized crime, a diasporic culture nimbly adjusting to the very worst aspects of an open society. Her concern and blithe impulsiveness provide the catalyst to the film’s real drama — a three-way…
Fall Arts Preview: Music
As you say goodbye to Post-Gazette Pavilion and hello again to Pittsburgh’s various indoor venues, you may have more options than you realize.
Local mystery author Kathryn Miller Haines has a winning character in ’40s actress Rosie Winter.
Her fascination with theater and with the World War II American homefront (especially the new roles women played) fed into the creation of Rosie. So did that era’s hard-boiled detective novels.
The Hunting Party
Inspired by a 2000 Esquire article about a handful of international reporters in the former Yugoslavia who were mistaken for CIA agents, Richard Shephard’s film is wobbly hybrid of political thriller, action adventure, black comedy and cynical history lesson. It’s postwar Bosnia, and a discredited reporter (Richard Gere) is driven to catch an elusive war…
Fall Arts Preview: Dance
Fortunately for Pittsburgh dancegoers, the 2007-08 season should be among the best in the Northeast.
Music on the Edge series presents “Powerhouse Pianists” mini-festival
“It showcases the full spectrum of New Music being written for piano.”
Mr. Woodcock
In Craig Gillespie’s comedy, a former weakling turned successful inspirational author (Seann William Scott) returns to his small hometown. But after discovering that his mom (Susan Sarandon) is engaged to his old nemesis, junior-high coach Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton), he freaks out. Thornton is barely breaking a sweat here — fans have already seen…
Fall Arts Preview: Art and Exhibits
A timely entry is What’s for Dinner?, at the Silver Eye Center for Photography — a show of large-scale color images by Diana Shearwood, who documents trucks bearing super-sized images of the food inside.
System Disabled
Unlike older workers who file claims for disability benefits, “They’re hitting their peak earning years,” VonHofen says. “And all of the sudden their careers are taken away.”
Franklin skate punks Oh Shit They’re Going to Kill Us
“We’d set up in abandoned buildings, build ramps and bring boomboxes, skate and spray-paint and drink beers.”
Fall Arts Preview: Lectures and Readings
The Drue Heinz series opens strong — with Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azir Nafisi (Sept. 24) — and only gets stronger: The Oct. 8 talk is by 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.
Casinos: The battle for a Community Benefits Agreement Moves to the North Side
On Sept. 15, Pittsburgh UNITED kicked off its second grassroots campaign in front of a bank of TV cameras. The foundation-funded economic-justice group vowed to strive for a Community Benefits Agreement for North Side residents from the casino’s builder, PITG Gaming. But while organizers didn’t mention it, PITG already had struck a bargain with neighborhood…
One-man band Bob Log III performs at the Warhol
“I like people who glue macaroni to a piece of cardboard and paint it gold.” — Tom Waits
Fall Arts Preview: Film
Summer is officially over and we can expect more serious fare at the movieplex: dramas about the Mid-East, quirky indies, wrenching exploration of family dysfunction, top-notch adventure and fantasy epics, and, well, Saw IV. Jigsaw won’t lie still, and neither, it seems, will the Middle East. Hollywood has put some of its best earners on…
City Government: Mayor finds the most talented officials in America close to home
When Mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced that he was reviewing the future of 10 city department heads, he promised to conduct a national search for the best-qualified people. By an amazing coincidence, in eight of 10 departments, the best-qualified people in the country were the ones who already had the jobs. On Sept. 13, Ravenstahl accepted…
Going Through the Motions: Sept. 11-12 and 18, 2007
If you thought Dan Rooney would blow his O-ring when the new casino was green-lighted for the North Side, imagine what will happen if a proposed nudie bar makes its way next door to the gambling parlor. A developer has filed an application to open a gentlemen’s club at 1025 Beaver St. (insert joke here).…
Universities: CMU students not alarmed by terror threat
Three times in the past three weeks, Carnegie Mellon University has received bomb threats in anonymous e-mails. Like a dozen other universities across the country receiving similar threats, CMU evacuated buildings and swept them for bombs. But nothing has been found — and if the e-mailer is hoping to terrorize students, it isn’t working.
James McBride
The play, by Pittsburgh Playwrights artistic director Mark Clayton Southers, starts promisingly, with three old Irish guys complaining to each other — humorous enough to count as budget Beckett. But all too soon we realize that it’s part of an over-rigged lead-up to a painfully obvious “joke”: The winner of an Irish literary award is…
Bill Was Due
Few things make me happier than watching sacred cows get their comeuppance. And I’m not alone. Thanks to the holier-than-thou Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, football fans from Philadelphia to St. Louis, from Miami to New York, hated the Patriots for their hubris and petulance. We also hated them because they won a…
A Window to Home
“A Window to Home” is a quiet story about lonely people in the big city — their frustrations, their losses and grievances. If the story feels slow and a little cluttered, it’s because the “plot” barely matters: The dialogue is so believable that the conversations seem real. But it’s a fragile work, and the actors…
Savage Love
I have a swim-cap fetish. I don’t know why; it’s not like I saw my grandmother bathing with a shower cap on or anything like that. My GGG girlfriend is willing to wear a swim cap during sex, and I think that’s wonderful, but it goes beyond that. I go to the pool several times…
The Melville Boys
Eventually the audience-friendly humor gives way to something worth thinking about.
Trauma Queens
Where were you on Sept. 11? No, not Sept. 11, 2001. Sept. 11, 2007. I was at the Brillobox, a bar which doubles as performance space in Lawrenceville. I was doing some Sept. 11-themed material. Because really, what’s funnier than the events of 9/11? Don’t get your back up: Nobody’s happy about religious fanatics from…
Zombies From Beyond
The story finds a group of hapless but earnest military and scientific yahoos, from their secret command center in Milwaukee, looking into the heavens with their new outer-space camera and discovering a UFO about to attack. It turns out that the aliens hail from Planet X and, as their leader, Zombina, explains, all the guys…
