So many announcements! Chatham Baroque, Warhol Sound Series, VIA, more
Greetings! Lots of things to get to today. First, let’s talk about not-pop-music stuff. Yesterday, Chatham Baroque announced the winners of their first-ever new works competition — three composers who will work with the group throughout the next year, preparing new works to premiere in fall, 2012. The panel — the group’s three principals, plus…
Quantum Theatre’s Twelfth Night
Probably the most intriguing anachronism in the delightful production of this Shakespeare comedy is the prop lists’ inclusion of American Express cards. Whenever the script calls for “gold” or a “purse” to be handed over, out comes the plastic. It’s not the anachronism itself that’s interesting. Shakespeare himself put a mechanical clock in Julius Caeser,…
Foreign students visit Pittsburgh, tell of bitter experience at Hershey chocolate (UPDATED)
Zhao Huijiao, a student from Dalian, China, thought she knew what her job in America would be like. “They told me were just packing chocolate. I think, chocolate is sweet.” Bittersweet, perhaps. Zhao was among some 400 students who have spent this summer packing Hershey’s chocolate at a distribution facility in Palmyra, Pennsylvania. She and…
Extended interview: Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top
Here’s a less abridged version of our interview with Billy Gibbons, a prompt and polite e-mail correspondent! A reporter asked you in 1986, “does touring get old?” and you said, “You should see it from our side. Ain’t nothin’ old.” Is that still true? We’ll stand by that statement, especially in light of recent…
What Trees Do
Meet my air conditioner. It’s 30 feet tall — a street tree that the City of Pittsburgh planted about 15 years ago, at the request of my wife and me. Since it matured, the tree, a Bradford pear, has mostly shaded the front of our South Side rowhouse from the afternoon sun. Even on the…
Short List: Week of August 17 – 24
The Moth Mainstage visits Pittsburgh again with perhaps its most diverse cast here yet. The New York-based phenomenon features people telling their own stories, without notes. The Aug. 25 Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures installment called UPHILL: Stories of the Impossible is hosted by comedian Rudy Rush (Def Comedy Jam). Storytellers include Kimberly Reed, a transsexual…
Red
A poem by Madeleine Barnes
Affogato
If ever there was a reason to eat pie before 10 a.m., it can be found at Affogato. At the coffee shop along Bellevue’s main drag, Wednesdays have become “pie day”: That’s when employee Angelica Ross bakes. Her pies, based on her mother’s crust recipe and “things I’d like to eat in a pie,” currently…
Savage Love
I went to Craigslist to look at the kinky shit people are into. And I found a picture of my sister. Her eyes are blurred out, but one pic is of her nude and one is of her giving head, and there’s a tattoo that’s unique to her and clearly visible. I’m 99 percent sure…
Taking Notes
We’re here in Propel School, McKeesport, and Emmai Alaquiva is working the crowd, a dozen middle-schoolers being introduced to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of hip hop. “You’ve got your pencils,” the tall thirtysomething says. Stylishly dressed in a brown fedora, pink shirt and striped pink-and-gray rep tie, he’s strong, supportive, very much in charge. The…
Smoke Barbecue Taqueria
As business-trip destinations go, one could do a whole lot worse than Austin, Texas. Sure, there’s the famous live-music scene, but to a foodie, the renowned dining scene provides just as much incentive to cut boring meetings and indulge in baser pleasures. For Jason, whose good fortune it is to make these occasional forays, each…
On The Record with Duquesne University law professor Bruce Ledewitz
Duquesne University law professor Bruce Ledewitz has written three books on the role of religion in public life. Most recently, Indiana University Press published his book Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism, which attempts to find common ground in the separation-of-church-and-state debate. What is religion’s role in American life? Obviously religion is…
Economics 101: Students heading back to class for first time since Corbett budget cuts
Ever since Gov. Tom Corbett announced funding cuts for Pennsylvania colleges and universities, many students have wondered what the cuts would actually mean to them. With the fall semester right around the corner, they’re about to find out. The state’s 14 fully public universities took a $90 million funding cut in the current year’s budget.…
Broken Street, Broken Promises: Neighbors say city hasn’t delivered on crumbling Lombard Street
Joanne Dunn remembers taking Mayor Luke Ravenstahl on a tour of Lombard Street back in the spring of 2009. Dunn, along with other residents of Lombard, says she showed the mayor and Public Works employees the deplorable conditions on the winding Hill District side street: crumbling, weed-infested sidewalks and steps; badly damaged fencing along the…
Critics’ Picks: Aug 18 – 23
[POP PUNK] + THU., AUG. 18 The members of The Missing hail from Cleveland, but have an affinity for Pittsburgh. (Can you blame them, really?) The catchy pop-punk outfit is buds with some locals — Spontaneo, Punchline — and some of the tunes on its latest release, City of Curses, were produced by pop-punk man…
A Taper’s Life
The first thing we should get straight is this: Steve Toney is a taper, not a bootlegger. The 53-year-old from Greensburg, whose day job is in nuclear energy at Westinghouse, likes recording concerts for posterity, but he’s not hiding microphones under his jacket and down his pants. “There’s always been the sanctioned and unsanctioned recording,”…
The Two Man Gentlemen Band brings old-time music to Thunderbird Café
The Two Man Gentlemen Band — Andy Bean and Fuller Condon — plays old-time, vaudevillian swing music using banjos, guitar and upright bass. The hard-touring band formed in the early ’00s when the pair were students at Columbia University; guitar-and-banjo man Andy Bean spoke with City Paper while preparing for the current tour. Let’s…
Tally Hall charts its own course from Ann Arbor to Brooklyn — and indie success
Even the members of a cheeky indie-rock band can suffer the pains of a quarter-life crisis. Six years ago, Tally Hall recorded its well-regarded debut, Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum, which boasted the geeky humor of They Might Be Giants and the nervous energy of Talking Heads. Since then, the Ann Arbor quintet — known for…
Op-ed: Let’s just shut up about Santorum being shut out
Last week, I had a little fun with Rick Santorum’s appearance in a GOP presidential debate in Ames, Iowa. Santorum whined about how he hadn’t been asked enough questions in the debate, faulting the “national media” for overlooking him. Given that Santorum had, until announcing his run, been enjoying a cushy contract at Fox News…
On the Record with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons
How does ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons occupy his time when he’s not rocking out, judging facial-hair contests or whipping up his famous Renegade Guacamole? Promptly replying to CP’s emails, of course. A reporter asked you in 1986, “Does touring get old?” and you said, “You should see it from our side. Ain’t nothin’…
30 Minutes or Less
Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) directs this so-called comedy, loosely based on the failed pizza-man-wearing-a-neck-bomb robbery in Erie. In essence, it’s a double buddy-comedy, with one pair of foul-mouthed doofuses — bratty loser Dwayne (Danny McBride) and dumb loser Travis (Reno 911’s Nick Swardson) — forcing another duo, composed of pizza-delivery loser Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and schoolteacher…
One Day
The 20-year relationship of two almost-lovers and on-again-off-again friends is charted by checking in with them each year on July 15, the day they met after graduating college in 1986. Fortunes rise and fall; jobs come and go; so do lovers and spouses. But always Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) wonder if, in…
The Help
If you loved Kathryn Stockett’s mega-selling novel about the fraught relationships between white women and their black maids in early 1960s Mississippi, you will likely love — or at least like — this big-screen adaptation. At nearly two-and-half hours, Tate Taylor’s dramedy faithfully renders the key narrative, in which recent college graduate Skeeter (Emma Stone)…
Fright Night
Normally I’m the first one groaning at remakes, but Craig Gillespie’s take on the 1985 vampire-next-door horror comedy proves the exception. Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) sets the film in Las Vegas, where it makes great use of the city’s 24-hour clock, its transient population further decimated by the housing crisis and the cheesy…
Another Earth
On the night of her high school graduation, Rhoda (Brit Marling) causes a terrible auto accident. Four years later, Rhoda is released from jail, and under the guise of being a housecleaner, she begins a relationship with a depressed composer named John (William Mapother), whose family died in the accident. The re-building of these two…
Project Nim
You can go to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and cheer when the chimps achieve self-knowledge and overthrow their human caretakers: That’s fantasy fun. Or, you can watch James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim and see what happens when a chimp is raised among humans to be more like us: It’s a real-life scientific…
Choreographer Maria Caruso builds a new work around a simple sofa.
Consider the humble sofa. We have courted one another on loveseats, bared our souls on the shrink’s sofa and traded our dignity for the chance at fame and fortune on the casting couch. More than just a piece of furniture, the sofa is a gathering place for ideas, dreams, social interaction and human bonding. Friday…
George M!
The cast in The Theatre Factory production of the 1968 juke-box musical George M! does George M. Cohan’s grand old songs proud, singing and dancing with polish and spirit, with lots of infectious tapping footwork. Unfortunately, neither they nor director Jeremy Czarniak do much to get the clumsy book to work. Czarniak is also constantly…
The Psychic
Two things upfront. First, whatever my opinion of Sam Bobrick’s comedy The Psychic, at South Park Theatre, it’s important I tell you that the audience ate it up! Second, in order to discuss this play, I’m going to have to reveal some of its “secrets” (although honestly, I don’t think there’s a person alive who…
Lost Pittsburgh School is fun, trenchant satire.
There may be a “Lost Pittsburgh School” — one suspects there’s more to be mined locally than rusting sculpture and Warhol’s former teachers — but a new exhibit by that name doesn’t unearth the missing artworks that its press release claims. What Lost Pittsburgh School, at Unsmoke Systems Artspace, does do is more unexpected because…
A large-scale touring show of Pittsburgh-tied artist Romare Bearden offers insight into his creative process.
“You ain’t taking that piano out of my house,” says Berniece, a character in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play was inspired by Romare Bearden’s artwork of the same name. Bearden, like Wilson, had Pittsburgh roots, and so it is fitting that the August Wilson Center for African American Culture hosts an…
Green initiative offers employers bragging rights for sustainability
Plenty of publications run a “Best place to work” contest. But now companies have another title to vie for: the most sustainable place to work. The Pittsburgh Green Workplace Challenge will run through September until October 2012 for businesses in Southwestern Pennsylvania. This year’s competition is a pilot program of Sustainable Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh…
Review: Identity Festival
All day Saturday the 16th at First Niagara Pavilion you could see a growing swarm of people; shirtless guys and bikini-clad girls traversed the grounds of the hilly terrain, treating Identity Festival like the rave that it wanted to be. While there was no poi in sight, there were plenty of hula hoops, glow sticks,…
Citing philosophical differences, foundation, university part ways on Marcellus Shale online project
Pittsburgh’s Heinz Endowments is curtailing support of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, one of the key academic centers studying gas-drilling in the Marcellus Shale. Heinz’s support of Fractracker, an on-line resource for following the expansion and potential environmental impact of gas drilling, will continue. But most likely with someone else.…
Extended Q&A: Two Man Gentlemen Band
In today’s print edition, you’ll find an abridged version of my interview with Andy Bean of The Two Man Gentlemen Band. Since the Internet is endless, I’m giving you a look at the longer version, here! They play Wed., Aug. 24 at Thunderbird Cafe in Lawrenceville; show starts at 9 p.m. and costs $8 in…
