Udin’s Undoing Won’t Be Cultural Center’s, Head Says
Thanks to a grant from the Eden Hall Foudation, the African American Cultural Center just inched $1 million closer to finishing fund-raising on its multi-disciplinary, interactive Downtown venue, which is estimated to cost close to $33 million. The AACC building is scheduled to open in 2007, pending all fund-raising efforts. President Neil Barclay isn’t…
Growth Strategy
Something historic happened last month, something almost unprecedented. Few of us saw it coming, and once it happened, few of us noticed. But for a brief moment — the time it takes to flip a switch or, in this case, a lever — Pennsylvania voters undermined much of the conventional wisdom of recent years. And…
Regrowing a Greenhouse
Maybe it was the early years in a school too close to the open-hearth furnaces in Homestead, or the adolescent afternoons spent washing commensurately sooty cars for extra money. Whatever the reason, a hankering for cleaner air and buildings led Ernie Sota to study environmental design and architecture at Penn State in…
How were those four statues outside the Carnegie museum chosen?
Well, they weren’t chosen with an eye toward inclusion or political correctness, that’s for sure. If you entered the museum through its original main entrances on Forbes Avenue, you had to do so beneath the unrelenting gaze of four dead white European males. Of course, when the museum was being built…
It’s Bob’s Time
“I have so many people to thank for this overwhelming victory,” Bob O’Connor told the crowd at his May 17 mayoral primary victory party. “I want to thank business and labor, especially labor — I know we have a lot of labor people here.” He also had a lot of suits, seniors, young people, women…
Mosquitos
Mosquitos guitarist and singer Chris Root claims that his band’s self-titled debut album was intended to be nothing more than a love letter to its lead vocalist, Juju Stulbach, whom he met while working on a film set in Brazil. (As authentic as their breezy style of bossa nova appears, Root and the group’s…
A Conversation with Brandy Saddler
Brandy Saddler, 24, of Fineview, is, in a word, a hustler, baby. On any given day when she’s not attending classes at Robert Morris University, you might find Saddler passing out her business card Downtown offering her services: job advocate, van driver and book retailer. On the side, she’s planning and promoting events…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The four gal pals at the good heart of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants live comfortable middle-class lives in suburban Maryland, and they’ve sort of been friends since before birth, when their mothers met at an aerobics class for pregnant women (the girls didn’t know each other as sperm or egg). But…
Turtles Can Fly
The opening moments of Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly leave you with no misunderstanding about the insurmountable despair to follow: A stone-faced little girl, perched on a cliff above a rocky canyon, contemplates her situation for a long moment, then steps off the edge into the fatal abyss. This is not…
Layer Cake
You’ll want to be sure not to mistake Layer Cake for an epicurean chick flick like Mystic Pizza. In fact, the flick’s only chick — aside from the screaming psycho bitch who gets a bullet in the head — is portrayed by an actress whose importance to the film earns her about 15th…
Gay-Friendly T-Shirt Banned (Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It)
It’s the constant, casual use of “gay” and “fag” as epithets that gets to you, says Sam Brown. Brown, 18, is president of the dozen-member Gay-Straight Alliance at Sewickley Academy, a private school of about 900 students in this northern suburb. “It’s really a risky club to be in,” he says. Last…
“Car Free” Next Best Thing to Free Gas
Katie Bombico figures she and other local cyclists must have looked pretty ridiculous barreling down Penn Avenue on May 12 with dozens of T-shirts, a partly broken-down clothing rack and a big rolled-up banner strapped to their backs. But it just wouldn’t have been right to drive these materials to Garfield’s Quiet Storm coffeehouse…
