A Conversation With David R. Shumway
How much has popular culture influenced how people think about love? Historians of marriage and love have long maintained that there was a shift in the 19th century to a model where people expected to marry for love: Instead of a discourse of selecting the [economically] appropriate mate, marriage begins to be justified by this…
Beastie Boys
For a while there, things looked grim: six years, two towers, one Lower Manhattan, Jam Master Jay, W., so much to spit about, so many sharp darts to throw, no new Beastie Boys. Shit, I thought the terrorists had won. And then, after six years of nothing and six months of hype, “Ch-Check It Out”?…
Cottonbelly
Multi-instrumentalist and deep-dub specialist Stewart Matthewman spends his spare time as Cottonbelly, making music, and remixing that of others. That is, when he’s not laboring over one of the many day jobs he strings together to try to pay the bills and put some kind of food on the table. Besides 20 years hard toil…
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
Reviewer: JULIE MICKENS Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams is engrossing, disarming and even entertaining, but I had to read it slowly. The book tapped so much unexamined emotional ambivalence — I’m also one of those blue-collar kids with a nice college degree — that I could handle only one chapter’s worth of…
Spider-Man 2
The hero whose nemesis is a mirror image of himself is something super-dude movies seemingly can’t pass up. Tim Burton’s first Batman has his doppelganger, a revenge-twisted freak, face likewise frozen in a single expression. Bryan Singer’s good-mutant X-Men lock mind-waves with bad-mutant Y-Not Men. Ang Lee’s Hulk throws down his own dad. Hellboy slugs…
Rainbow Connections
Peppered along roadways both big and small in Allegheny County are signs with colored circles: “Green Belt” or “Orange Belt” (or Blue, Yellow, Red) with a circle of the corresponding shade. If you’ve driven on a belt — and most likely you have — you’ve probably noticed the signs. You probably also noticed that belts…
Strayed
André Téchiné’s beautifully nuanced, immutably sad drama Strayed begins and ends at war. In a prologue, he introduces us to Odile (Emmanuelle Béart), a French war widow already (it’s only 1940) who joins a long line of others in an exodus from Paris with her two children, the plucky 13-year-old Philippe and the impishly pre-teen…
Mexi-Casa
Location: 3001 West Liberty Ave., Dormont Hours: Mon.-Thu. 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Friday and Saturday till midnight Prices: $3.95-9.95 Fare: Tex-Mex Atmosphere: Friendly neighborhood tacqueria No offense, but Dormont is usually a place we drive through on the way to somewhere else. But on one of those trips, we happened to glance out the car window…
Carandiru
America feeds our prison industrial complex to the tune of two million inmates served daily — half of whom are black like me. Or black like most of the 7,500 prisoners scrunched into the 4,000-capacity Carandiru “detention center” in Sao Paulo, Brazil, up through the early ’90s. In Carandiru, adapted from a novel by…
Stack the Deck
In an average day, the Hatfield’s Ferry power plant in Greene County emits nearly 500 tons of smog-causing pollution. It belches out 27,000 tons of carbon dioxide, contributing to greenhouse gases which may someday result in severe global climate change. And each day it adds another pound or so to the 440 pounds of mercury…
King Arthur
In this reputedly “more historical” version of the fabled King Arthur’s story, don’t expect to see any sorcerers or magical swords commonly associated with the medieval Arthurian legends. King Arthur is set in the year 475 or so, and it’s a messy, bleak time. The Romans are leaving Britain, and they dispatch their top…
Everyone knows Pittsburgh is the “City of Bridges.” But how do our tunnels stack up?
Strangely enough, you don’t find a lot of places clamoring to be called the “City of Tunnels.” I did a Google search, and found only a few scattered references to the phrase, including this stirring passage from an April 2003 session of Saskatchewan’s Legislative Assembly: “Mr. Speaker, here’s a quiz for you. What city is…
Twilight Samurai
In this rather gentle film from Yoji Yamada (who helmed much of the Tora-san series), Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), a middle-aged, low-level samurai who works as a clerk, is nicknamed “twilight” by his colleagues, because he forgoes the after-work boozing and goes home early to care for his family. He ekes out a subsistence living –…
Breaking the Date
So I’m sitting in PNC Park a couple of Sundays ago and right before we sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” the PA announcer says some guy’s going to sing “God Bless America.” Fine. But the other stuff he says annoys me. It’s something like, “Please join us in honoring the victims of…
PCTV Raises Its Volume
For years, it’s been an irony as well as a logistical problem: Pittsburgh Community Television, designed to give regular people a chance to make and show TV programming, has been headquartered in a building many of its users have a hard time getting to. Located since 1986 in a nondescript, one-story concrete structure near the…
What’s the Big Idea?
The Big Idea bookstore, says clerk Kevin Finn, is “an epicenter [for] a certain sense of consciousness.” The Bloomfield store is dedicated to rare, radical publications on everything from alternative religion to organizing social movements and anarchist philosophy — texts not usually available at the chains. “There are a lot of important social and political…
Follow That Story
Former Carnegie Mellon University art professor Steven Kurtz [see “Curtailing Kurtz,” June 23] who was arrested and investigated after an ambulance crew responding to the death of his wife noticed the biological materials he uses for his art, was charged on June 29 with “petty larceny,” according to a release from Kurtz’s lawyer, Paul Cambria.…
F#ck The Vote (www.fthevote.com)
Pittsburgh, PA – FtheVote.com encourages liberals to use their sex appeal to seduce and bed George W. Bush supporters in exchange for a vote against the incumbent in the November Presidential election. F#ck The Vote (FTV) launches its website www.FtheVote.com on July 4, 2004 which invites its visitors to trade sex with conservatives in swing…
Bush League
“Coalition Faulted for Lax Controls.” Now dissolved by inscriptions on paper, the Coalition Provisional Authority can rest on its laurels — which, as recently reported by the agency’s own inspector general, include wasting loads of money. Under one contract with Halliburton Co., for instance, the CPA lodged government employees at top-notch hotels, one room costing…
Battle Hymns of Homestead
Local labor historian Charles McCollester has a radical solution for the city’s economic problems: “If Pittsburgh could deal with the issues of [the] Homestead [Strike], this area could be turned around. But the people who run the city don’t want to deal with it.” McCollester says we have unfinished business that’s 112 years old,…
