While stuck in traffic on the 31st Street Bridge, I felt the bridge shake from a single jogger. How much more of the bridge can dissolve before it gives out?
The first question PennDOT spokesperson Dick Skrinjar had when asked this question was: “What did this jogger look like? The giant marshmallow guy from Ghostbusters?” I should note right off that Skrinjar is the bad boy of PennDOT. Ask him how the construction season is going, and he says: “You know, it’s really all…
Artists Embargoed
When the Mattress Factory’s newest artists-in-residence exhibition opens in October, the North Side gallery will have a building full of art and plenty of people to view it. The only thing missing will be the artists intended to be in residence. In a first for the 27-year-old museum, every single artist of the 10…
Overground Bikeroad
“Why would we think that cycling has somehow escaped the racism that has affected other parts of our society?” says Dr. Steven B. Thomas, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Minority Health. “We want to get African Americans linked to cycling by showing them their history in it.” Thomas and the Center…
Bush League
“They Knew …” It’s all coming back to us now: Iraq’s fearsome nuclear-weapons program. The cozy, conspiratorial trysts between Saddam and Osama. Those scary aluminum tubes. “Significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The secret biological and chemical weapons, deployable in 45 minutes. Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, et al., were all warned repeatedly — by…
Hot Pedal Bridge
In the midst of the city’s financial writhings, there’re two surprising flashes of good news: The City Planning department has found enough change in the seat cushions to actually finish the bicycle-pedestrian half of the Hot Metal Bridge, and a study is underway to see if as many as five new bike lanes could be…
Buried Treasure
Drawing courtesy of: LaQuatra Bonci Landscape Architects Burning your bridges is supposed to be a bad thing; you should bury the hatchet instead. Here in Pittsburgh, as if through some terrible collision of bureaucracy and semantics, we’ve managed to bury a bridge. What had been the Bellefield Bridge, built in 1897 near…
Various Artists
When Stephen Foster died 140 years ago, one of pop music’s first statistics — booze and economic foolishness combining to drop him in a Bowery flophouse — he wasn’t just the greatest American songwriter of that century. He was, arguably, the first truly “pop” American songwriter. Pop, that is, in the sense of a synthesis…
Collateral
Collateral, billed as some kind of bone-hard thriller, opens in a lovely and unexpected way. Its protagonist is Max Durocher, a Los Angeles cabbie who’s a particular kind of Everyman. Seated in the garage, waiting for his shift to begin, he pencils a crossword puzzle, then slips into his ride. Shot in extreme close-up by…
The Five Obstructions
For his latest experiment in strange cinema, the Danish director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) has collaborated with Jí¸rgen Leth, an elder statesman of Danish cinema whose 13-minute pseudo-documentary, The Perfect Human (1967), von Trier considers a masterpiece and an influence on his own work. In The Five Obstructions, he challenges…
Maria Full of Grace
Like so many other girls in her small, working-class Colombian town, 17-year-old Maria wants out of every aspect of her dismal, pre-ordained life. But unlike her peers, who accept their fate, she’s independent and sometimes defiant, and she has dreams in a place that routinely shatters them. So one day, after she quits her…
A Home at the End of the World
By the time Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, gets done eviscerating his 1990 first novel, A Home at the End of the World, into a screenplay, and by the time its producers get done trimming 120 minutes of film down to a fleet 92, there’s not much left of his beautifully…
The Lost Boys of Sudan
Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk’s documentary follows the physical and emotional journey of two Sudanese “lost boys,” young men made homeless by civil war who are re-located by charities to the United States. While some aspects of their lives improve, the camera quietly records what our warm fuzzy assumptions about charity often neglect. Peter and…
Riding Giants
Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) splits his documentary — a collection of archival footage and contemporary interviews — into three sections depicting significant moments in one aspect of surfing, riding big waves. There is the enviable insouciant SoCal crew who relocated to Hawaii in the late ’50s and early ’60s to master the “cursed” huge…
Fiction On Fire
We got stories about arsonists. We got stories about accidental house fires. We got one about a fire-jumper, one about a dragon and one told from the point of view of a doomed cigarette. Plus a few more about arsonists. But after all the submissions for CP’s third annual short-fiction contest were read — first…
Girasole
Location: 733 Copeland St., Shadyside. 412-682-2130 Hours: Tue.-Thu.11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun. 4-9 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $8-12, entrees $11-21 Fare: Imaginative Italian Atmosphere: Boisterous bistro Liquor: Semi-full bar If you could go anywhere you wanted to on vacation this summer, if the world were truly your oyster, where would you go? This…
Steel Waters Run Deep
Chiodo’s Bar in Homestead has gotten a lot more crowded in recent weeks, which is a bad sign for those of us who love it. There’s a developer who wants to buy the place, tear it down and replace it with a drug store. It would be the classic Homestead story — uncaring corporate…
