Reel History
A few years ago I showed my parents some Super 8 mm movies I’d made. When the lights came back on, my dad got up and left the room without a word. I wondered whether one of my student films had offended him somehow. But a minute later he returned from the garage carrying a…
Crossing Swords…
The scores of laid-off Pittsburgh crossing guards gathered in front of the Sheraton Station Square Aug. 6 cheered pretty much all of the politicians who stopped to speak to them prior to Gov. Ed Rendell’s news conference inside the hotel. But one, Sen. Jack Wagner, got mixed reviews. Wagner, a long-time rival of Mayor Tom…
…And Crossing Signals
Though the closing of 27 pools, 19 recreation centers and four senior centers has had more immediate impact on the city, and the layoff of 102 police officers has created more uproar, in three weeks the city’s 203 laid-off crossing guards will certainly be missed. Whether they will be re-employed by the school district remains…
Firing A Shot
Mayor Tom Murphy’s decision to lay off 731 workers will save the city a projected $6.5 million a year. But the city may lose much more than that in goodwill — which has been in short supply throughout the city’s public safety department lately. Murphy hopes to merge the city’s fire bureau and paramedics, a…
Lilya 4-Ever
From the look of things in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever, it takes a village in the new Russia to annihilate the spirit of a 16-year-old girl and leave her no options but prostitution and despair. The girl is Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), whose spirits are especially high when she tells her friends that she’s moving to…
S.W.A.T.
In the late ’60s, Los Angeles created the S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons and Tactics) police spin-off, a militarized special-forces unit formed in response to urban crises deemed too tough for regular flatfeet. Later, L.A. gave us S.W.A.T. , a short-lived mid-’70s TV series about such cops noted at the time for its shoot-first violence and remembered,…
Adrian Sherwood
A cup of Earl Grey steams on a table, with a fat, mighty spliff crackling in an ashtray next to it. The intellectual and cultural symbols of empire — tomes of South Asian philosophy, framed palm leaves, a bottle of Jamaican cane rum scattered throughout the room, not as trophies of victories, but as the…
Behind Closed Doors
We know that architects don’t have a secret handshake, because so few of them could actually keep it a secret. But you can tell that some people are architects simply through their flamboyant details. They wear weird black shoes and shirts with unconventional collars buttoned at the very top. They write with frightfully expensive pens.…
Why is our baseball team called the Pittsburgh Pirates? What do Pirates have to do with Pittsburgh?
Good question. After all, it hardly seems fair to associate Pittsburgh with piracy. Calling our ball team the Pirates is an insult to piracy everywhere. Genuine piracy, after all, turns in steady profits — unlike our squad, whose owner claims to have lost $10 million a year over the past three years. And while pirates…
Bolden the Beautiful
“I noticed today, most of these reporters when they come in, the first thing they do is apologize because ‘I’m dressed like this,'” says the 90-year-old Godfather of black journalism, Frank E. Bolden He sits up in his hospital bed and scowls a bit — his cheeks swollen, not unlike Marlon Brando in The Godfather…
Belly Flop
Christine Horwat and her two daughters had only a day and a half left to enjoy their neighborhood pool in Bloomfield. But they spent the lunch hour of Aug. 7 on the steps of the City-County Building instead. “It’s Murphy’s fault” the pool is closing along with 25 others citywide, Horwat says. The closures…
A Conversation with Robert Fisher
Where is this pipe organ from?This organ has had several incarnations. It was once a practice organ at the Boston Conservatory, but we retrieved it from Kansas City. Unlike most of the organs on this campus, which are so-called Baroque organs, this is of the Romantic school that thinks of the organ in terms of…
Modey Lemon
Seventeen seconds. That’s how long it takes to know that Modey Lemon’s new Thunder + Lightning is going to send anxious young cretins and sorrowful maidens running to the bathrooms to vomit joyfully; to burn incense in near-dead automobiles to cover their wrongdoings; to buy the “Here Be Monsters” maps of rock ‘n’ roll that…
Democracy Sooner or Later
In early August, Carnegie Mellon University’s student-run radio station WRCT 88.3 FM began airing the 7-year-old Democracy Now!, a habitually hard-hitting news and current affairs radio (and more recently television) show, known for its direct commentary and “non-Pentagon-approved” interviews. For example, co-host Amy Goodman’s notorious and widely reported 2000 exchange with President Bill Clinton was…
A-Pickin’ And A-Shoppin’
The newly opened Acoustic Music Works shop in Squirrel Hill may not yet be fully stocked; the CD racks in the back might be half-empty; and the basic logistics, like turning the “Open/Closed” sign around, are getting their kinks worked out. But the acoustic-music specialty shop’s most important feature is firmly in place. “I asked…
Open Range
There’s no mistaking the hero worship in the opening shots of Open Range, actor-director Kevin Costner’s movie about cowboys and ranchers facing each other down in the old West. In their picturesque hats, vests, chaps and bandannas, Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charlie Waite (Costner) are the picture of prairie competence, self-reliance and rectitude, photographed…
