Kill Bill –Vol. 1
Quentin Tarantino helpfully identifies his Kill Bill — Vol. 1 as “the 4th Quentin Tarantino movie,” but a skeptic might ask whether there have been any. Tarantino, after all, is the guy who famously raided Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong-produced City On Fire for big chunks of his cult-favorite first movie, Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction, his…
Tycoon
Pavel Lounguine’s Tycoon begins in the crumbling Soviet Union of the late 1980s and revolves around the titular Platon Makovski, who jumps on the bullet train of his country’s emerging free-market economy and, over the course of 15 years, rides it to success, corruption and assassination (we witness his death right at the start, before…
The Legend of Suriyothai
The Legend of Suriyothai is one of those glorious cinematic historical epics where everybody is royal and beautiful, and when they aren’t being carted around in luxurious litters by slaves or attending sumptuous ceremonies, the dramatis personae are advancing their stations by bed-hopping, double-crossing or invading a neighboring kingdom. And no matter what the minute…
Well-spoked
Todd Martin considered himself a liberal — definitely more liberal than his parents, themselves a couple of lefties. But he had to recalibrate after the Thanksgiving he spent with members of Bicycle InterCommunity Action and Salvage. Martin, then a film student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, got a fresh perspective on the holiday while…
Missing the Appoint
In recommending an appointed Pittsburgh school board replace the current elected one, the Mayor’s Commission on Public Education blamed lower voter turnout in school-board elections. But the numbers tell a different story. To make their case, the commission claims that school-board elections have even lower voter turnout than do mayoral or county executive…
Board Games
The likely state takeover of City of Pittsburgh finances has some Democrats worried — and has Republicans denying that they’re engaged in a power grab. Within days General Assembly Republicans are expected to introduce legislation that creates an oversight board with virtual veto power over the budgets of the city and its quasi-independent authorities.…
Perishable Goods in the ‘Hood
When does a neighborhood that has gained 1,500 new housing units in the past five years — a neighborhood where a home sold for more than $300,000 recently — have trouble getting a grocery store to move in? When that neighborhood is the Hill District. Because few grocery stores can be found in…
Parking Up the Wrong Tree
“It’s probably one of the nicest parking lots in the city,” says attorney Dusty Kirk, about a contested lot on the corner of Baum and Aiken in Friendship. Kirk represents Don Allen Associates, the lot’s developers and owners of the automobile dealer across the street. And she’s right about the lot.…
Populist Mechanics
Jim Hightower, one of today’s most visible and voluble espousers of populism, is a national radio commentator, syndicated columnist and the author of four books including If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, and the recently published Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time…
Opek’s Moment in the Sun
Chicago, 1943. Young black American GIs, white middle-aged society types, hustlers, pimps, brokers and dips fill the tables of a seedy club, stuffing bills between the breasts of cigarette girls. At the piano, a turtle-faced, beshaded bebopper improvises on 12-bars and formula standards, killing the minutes before red-light dancers hit the stage to reap boob-bounty…
I see that mysterious hulking building on Sixth Avenue with well-dressed people going in and out. What goes on in the Duquesne Club?
Sacrifices. Human sacrifices. Ha, ha! If only it were so interesting. The truth is that to look at them, some of those “well-dressed people” could have died years ago. The Duquesne Club was founded in 1873, in an attempt to provide the city’s newly affluent industrialists with a place to unwind after a…
Read My Apocalypse
How do you know Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey’s re-election campaign is getting desperate? His latest TV ad lauds the wisdom of…City Controller Tom Flaherty. That would be the same Tom Flaherty of whom Roddey’s fund-raising materials have said, “Tom Flaherty…and [his] cronies in the old Democrat machine will take us back to the dark…
The Neal Pollack Invasion
I first met Neal Pollack in a small, out-of-the-way Chicago rock bar, after spending an afternoon cowboy-boot shopping and drinking dollar beers with a three-fingered Mexican factory worker. Pollack was nervous, as that night was to be his debut as a rock singer; he showed none of the cocky bravado that’s made him not just…
Rufus Wainwright
I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to be a pop artist these days. It seems like nearly every performer currently on the pop charts is a prefabricated design created by the music industry to sell records and promote a certain lifestyle. These flash-in-the-pan performers are tantamount to a fast-food meal. They satisfy…
Josh Rouse
As a child in the 1970s, our bookshelves were always lined with tales of poppy-strewn French fields, Belgian graveyards, lowland farms choked by wafting smoke and mustard gas. Surrounded, at least in extended family-tree fashion, by gruff-talking D-Day vets and their admirers, it didn’t make much sense to be so consumed with the Great War…
A conversation with Billy Pepmeyer
How did you get into this business?Fourteen years ago, I wanted to have a positive effect on things. Approached a friend who worked at the Park House — the gentleman who [owned] it [then] was very into the environment — and he said, “Sure, you can do it.” So I started doing it part-time after…
Perfectly Frank about Fallingwater
Since its completion in 1939, Fallingwater has received enormous publicity and achieved global mythical status among both architects and normal people. So it’s only fitting that architectural historian (and my former professor) Franklin Toker addresses PR and myth in his new book, Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann and America’s Most Extraordinary House. Toker…
