“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” exhibit opens with discussion panel
Permanent exhibit is first long-term show to feature artifacts from the Neighborhood
Listen to this issue in Listen Up!
Each week, I make a playlist of artists featured in this week’s paper and/or playing shows that didn’t make it into the section. This way, you can listen via Spotify to the music you’re reading about in the section! This week’s Listen Up! playlist, with everyone from Flow Tribe to Ani DiFranco and Pharmakon, is…
Napoleon Author Gives Rescheduled Talk
If you’d hoped to see historian Andrew Roberts speak here last fall but couldn’t make it, here’s your chance. Roberts himself couldn’t make that November date, at Carnegie Music Hall, and his rescheduled spot at the Monday Night Lectures is tomorrow night. Roberts is the author of The Storm of War and Masters and Commanders.…
1200 marchers take part in MLK Day event
About 1,200 people marched from Oakland to Downtown Monday night during a rally to “Reclaim MLK.” They made their presence known with their numbers and their voices. Produced by Ashley Murray “From Ferguson to NYC stop police brutality.” “Fists up. Fight back.” “The people united will never be defeated.” “I think the turnout tonight speaks…
Cold During Wartime: Mayhem, Watain & Revenge in Cleveland
Sweet, merciless Satan: Dutch Pearce goes to Cleveland for a metal show and comes back with a cold.
MP3 Monday: David Wilson
This week’s MP3 Monday offering comes from local singer-songwriter David Wilson. Late last year, Wilson released a solo album, Songs from Wood Street; we reviewed the record a couple of weeks ago. Now, we bring you “Jefferson,” a track contained therein. Enjoy! To download, right-click here and choose “save link as”
Lynn Cullen Live 1/19/15
Video Archive A live reading of excerpts from A Letter From A Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. Pope goes to the Philippines and is confronted with a question he can’t answer. The world is heating up, with 2014 being the hottest year on record. Audio Only Archive Listen to the Audio Archives on…
Trailer for Sale or Rent: Paddington
We review a new movie based on the only thing we have access to: the trailer.
Lynn Cullen Live 1/16/15
Video Archive Phat Man Dee joins us on the show to talk about anti-racist events in the city. Bloomfest goes down tonight in Bloomfield. Proceeds benefit We Change Pittsburgh. Brian Drusky moves forward in making amends for his online statements. Lynn and Phat Man Dee reminisce hilariously on the Women’s March on Washinton and a…
Bobby Wilson to challenge Darlene Harris for District 1 Pittsburgh City Council seat
University of Pittsburgh researcher and Spring Hill resident Bobby Wilson announced this morning he will challenge Darlene Harris’ City Council seat in the Democratic primary this May. “As a fifth generation North Sider, I understand the changes affecting our communities for better and worse,” Wilson said in a press release. “What sets me apart is…
Lynn Cullen Live 1/15/15
Video Archive This may be Boyhood’s year at the Oscar’s. Tom and Lynn discuss the ups and downs of the nominees. NRA sues Pittsburgh over implementation of gun laws. IRS cuts thousands of employees. Goa intends to put it’s queer teens in corrective camps. Pink triangles to come. Audio Only Archive Listen to the Audio…
Marcus Rediker’s Outlaws of the Atlantic
Outlaws of the Atlantic By Marcus Rediker Beacon Press, 241 pp., $26.95 A big theme in the work of historian Marcus Rediker is his critique of “terracentrism”: the idea that history happens only on land. In his newest book, the University of Pittsburgh professor adds more wind to the sails of the notion that the…
A Description of My Mother
Grit, a word seldom spoken anymore. Like its cousins pluck, fortitude, mettle. Old-fashioned words, once the description of flinty women who left the soft rounded East for desolation, isolation, dust, hail, tornadoes. A house of sod where puny plants grew yellowed leaves and stunted fruit. Where grit, true grit, lived under fingernails, cracked skin, grooved…
Selma
Selma Directed by: Ava DuVernay Starring: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo Selma opens with a well-known event. It’s 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr. is in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In a scene between King and Coretta Scott King, we’re shown a man out of his element. “It doesn’t feel right,” says King…
La Tavola Italiana
La Tavola Italiana 1 Boggs Ave Mount Washington 412-481-6627 Hours: Mon.-Wed. 4-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 4-11 p.m. Prices: Antipasti $6-13; pasta and entrees $17-25 Liquor: BYOB While Bloomfield is nominally Pittsburgh’s Little Italy, the truth is, Italian dining is woven throughout the complex ethnic tapestry of the city’s neighborhoods and suburbs. Some of our Italian restaurants…
Inherent Vice
The scent of elegy is as strong as the odor of burning pot in Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel about Southern California doper private eye Doc Sportello and the end of the 1960s. The film opens in 1970, and neither the decade nor Doc’s newly reappeared old girlfriend, Shasta…
With the chill digging in, we toast winter warmers
After the snow-less holiday bonanza of recent weeks, it was easy to pretend Pittsburgh might waltz through a mild winter. However, now that January is here, my visions of drinking gin-and-tonics on the banks of the Mon have been quashed. In search of more satisfying seasonal drinking, I went to see Lynn Falk, co-owner of…
Little Accidents
The three intersecting dramas in writer-director Sara Colangelo’s feature debut are set against the backdrop of a fatal coal-mine accident months earlier. Soft-spoken miner Amos (Boyd Holbrook) is the sole survivor, and is caught between factions who want him to stay quiet and protect the small West Virginia town’s jobs and those who suspect he…
Jacques Torres chocolates pop up off the beaten path in Shadyside
Squirrel Hill native Lissa Guttman lived elsewhere for a couple of decades, and underwent a career transformation, from computer scientist to chocolate expert, after a move to New York City in 2001. Now, she’s back — and she’s brought famed Jacques Torres chocolates here for the first time. Torres, a renowned pastry chef who’s no…
Inaugural Strip District Music Festival lands at venues throughout the neighborhood
STRIP DISTRICT MUSIC FESTIVAL 11:30 a.m.-2 a.m. Sat., Jan. 17 Multiple venues throughout the Strip District Pay what you want. stripdistrictmusicfest.com For most, the phrase “music-festival season” conjures images of warmer days and crowds bouncing beach balls around at outdoor venues. Snowballs might be more the order of the day at this weekend’s Strip District…
3D Printer at Carnegie Library – CP TV
Video by Ashley Murray
Moon Baby on the rise after landing in Pittsburgh
MOON BABY with WHITE TUXEDO, SLOWDANGER 9 p.m., Fri., Jan. 16 Assemble 5125 Penn Ave. Garfield $7 iamthemoon baby@gmail.com Moon Baby, the story goes, is a “celestial deity” — a character straight out of space, who “after a brief affair with Neil Armstrong” came to Earth. And judging from Moon Baby’s ethereal vocals on her…
Here comes the chill
In a city known for cold weather and bitter winters, Joel Kellem creates a different type of “chill.” He identifies with what he calls the “chill movement” — and goes by the nickname “The Chill God.” “People are responding to me and they love the chill movement,” he says. “Yeah, it’s a different style; there…
Critics’ Picks, Jan. 15-21
[LOCAL] + FRI., JAN. 16 Tonight’s festivities on Liberty Avenue and its general environs came together quickly, after several bands dropped off of tomorrow’s Strip District Music Festival in reaction to online comments made by the head of the festival’s promoting partner, Drusky Entertainment, back in December. Some wanted to create an alternative event, and…
On the Record with Ken Vandermark
KEN VANDERMARK-NATE WOOLEY DUO 8 p.m. Wed., Jan. 21 The Andy Warhol Museum 117 Sandusky St. North Side 412-237-8300 or warhol.org Saxophonist Ken Vandermark’s massive discography runs the gamut from solo albums to quintets and everything in between. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship grant, the Chicago resident doesn’t worry about being too prolific: “My…
New Dimension: Carnegie Library opens new doors with its 3-D printer
Wes Roberts often finds himself perched over the Carnegie Library’s $2,300 3-D printer armed with nothing but a purple bottle of hairspray. The hair product, he explains through a spray of mist, is essential in keeping objects it’s printing from sliding around inside the machine, ruining them. “The machine isn’t as intelligent as people assume,”…
Left Behind: Pa. ranks low in pre-K services for low-income students
Last August, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Pittsburgh to announce a grant competition, offering a total of more than $200 million for early-childhood education. That same month, Mayor Bill Peduto formed a blue-ribbon task force to focus on early learning and to make recommendations for the state’s application. At the time, it seemed…
Tom Coleman sets musical instruments back 10,000 years … on purpose
Before you can understand why Tom Coleman makes stringed instruments from driftwood and bone, and rebuilds old guitars for traveling buskers to play amid rubble along the Monongahela River, at a spot dubbed the Temple of the Dog, you have to understand his philosophy: If you’re going to do something right, you might as well…
French Lessons: The best way for journalists to honor those lost in Charlie Hebdo massacre: become better journalists
Last year, as a professional journalist, I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 stories for this paper. Some, I think, were important — highlighting the need for legislation criminalizing revenge porn and legalizing medical marijuana, for instance. Others were fun — an interview with Henry “The Fonz” Winkler and a story about how 2014…
Savage Love
My fiancée is extremely bothered by me looking at porn. It revolves around insecurities that have gotten so bad that even other girls bother her. (We can hardly go to a beach anymore.) I don’t have any weird relationship with porn — no addiction, no violent stuff and I look pretty infrequently. She acknowledges that…
Artists explore their Obsessions at Space
OBSESSIONS continues through Jan. 25 SPACE 812 Liberty Ave. Downtown 412-325-7723 or spacepgh.org Obsessions takes its title subject personally. The pieces in this SPACE gallery exhibit are not sweeping social commentaries or cultural criticisms, exploring a society prone to obsession — with money, objects, celebrities, taking pictures of themselves. Rather, each artist narrows in on…
Shortlist: January 16 – 20
SPOTLIGHT: Sat., Jan. 17 – Festival With racism again making headlines as a matter of life or death, and Selma in movie theaters, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day feels especially timely. Commemorations blend social conscience, service and art. The annual free Let Freedom Sing concerts on Sat., Jan. 17 (Ebenezer Baptist Church, Hill District),…
Reviews of poetry chapbooks The Buried Return, by Christine Stroud, and Argot, by Fred Shaw
The Buried Return By Christine Stroud Finishing Line Press, 25 pp., $12 In Christine Stroud’s strong debut chapbook “The Buried Return,” songs of innocence are sung through the veil of experience, songs of experience are touched by an innocence that won’t yield. About half of these 20 poems by Stroud, associate editor of Pittsburgh-based Autumn…
Stuff We Like
Classical Music in the Wood Street T Station. An agreement between the Port Authority and WQED-FM, with sponsorship from the folks at the airport, brings music to your trolley wait. It all lends an ironic elegance to the sight of fellow commuters shuffling off to Cube Land. The Americans. Follow a suburban husband/wife KGB duo,…
Lynn Cullen Live 1/14/15
Video Archive In a twist of irony, MLK’s children fight over custody of his Nobel Peace Prize. NY Times defends it decision to not print Hebdo’s most recent cover. The power of women. Audio Only Archive Listen to the Audio Archives on with our new Apple and Android Apps or the computer audio player.
