Belated Wye Oak review, and, a chanteuse doubleheader at Club Café this week
Some old business first: You may have noticed yesterday that there was no MP3 Monday. And you may have then thought, “That jackass will probably post an MP3 tomorrow!” But that part would have been wrong. MP3 Monday is taking a week off; it’ll be back and better than ever tomorrow, though! Now then. Some even…
Sprout Fund Downtown Art Project Call for Artists
For years, Pittsburgh’s City-County Building has faced a giant canvas many an artist would envy: the blank, beige side of Downtown’s multi-story Law and Finance Building, which looms across Grant Street between Fourth Avenue and Forbes, over a small surface parking lot. If you think you have what it takes to make that dull wall…
Council trying to save gas-drilling ban
Mayor Luke Ravenstahl may be trying to euthanize a proposed gas-drilling referendum. But city council is looking for a stay of execution. As originally reported by the Post-Gazette’s Tim McNulty, a six-member council majority has signed off on an “interim approval,” which it is submitting to the county elections department today. Drafted before the mayor…
Review: Pictureplane, Teengirl Fantasy, Gatekeeper, Majeuere, Cutups at Belvedere’s
Tuesday is never a good night for shows. The gloomy cloud of Wednesday morn shuts in those who normally come out to dance and rage. Being that it was one of those odious weekdays, the amount of people at Belvedere’s on July 26, for the final VIA Presents show of the season was impressive –…
Op-ed: Ravenstahl rebuke may clear the air on gas bill
So today comes some fairly unsurprising news: Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has informed council that he will not approve a measure to put a ban on natural-gas drilling before voters this November. And he has timed his move in such a way as to make it impossible for council to reverse the action. Had it passed,…
Critics’ Picks: Aug 4 – Aug 9
[ALT-FOLK] + THU., AUG. 4 The self-titled debut from Cult of Youth runs the gamut: classic country, Anglo neo-folk, sea shanty. But it’s all underscored by a sinister post-industrial vibe that recalls Savage Republic. The band is headed up by Sean Ragon, who runs a tiny record shop in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, and…
Local house venue ceases to host shows after police raid
For nearly two years, a Lawrenceville house venue called Helter Shelter served as an all-ages, do-it-yourself venue for local bands, while also hosting touring punk, hardcore, electronic and noise acts. But after a visit from police last month, the venue appears to be shuttered for good. Unlike crammed house shows in basements or living rooms,…
Boaz rises from the streets of Larimer to become next big thing in Pittsburgh hip hop
Today he records music in a conventional personal studio — a sound booth with a microphone, a mixer, turntables, a computer. But local rapper Boaz’s introduction to the mic was much less orthodox. “The first time I recorded something was in my homeboy’s grandfather’s funeral home,” he recalls. “They had one of the karaoke sets,…
The Smurfs
There doesn’t seem to be much to like about director Raja Gosnell’s take on the Smurfs, who won the hearts of American kiddies in an animated 1980s TV series. The plot is contrived, the dialog is hokey, and the performances by most of the live-action cast leave a lot to be desired. Running from the…
Crazy, Stupid Love
Cal (Steve Carell) is stunned on date night when his wife (Julianne Moore) asks for a divorce. Moping in a bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a smooth-talking swinger who agrees to make Cal over into great date material. And that’s just the startl Dan Fogelman’s rom-com is dead-set on covering half-a-dozen interconnected love stories.…
City of Life and Death
In the winter of 1937, the Japanese army invaded the Chinese capital of Nanking, killing not only Chinese soldiers but hundreds of thousands of civilians as well. Chinese filmmaker Lu Chan drops viewers deep in the infamous event, providing both the broad chaos and the a handful of individual stories. City is not a bombastic…
The Change-Up
In this latest iteration, two best buds — an irresponsible slacker lothario (Ryan Reynolds) and a workaholic dad of three (Jason Bateman) — trade bodies after peeing in the same magical fountain. If you were waiting for the extra-vulgar, hard-R version of this premise, director David Dobkin (Fred Claus) delivers. But don’t get too excited:…
Bride Flight
Ben Sombogaart’s relatively sunny drama is akin to one of those sprawling, soapy novels one takes to the beach — a page-turner that follows a group of women through a couple decades. Here, three gals meet in 1953 en route from Holland to New Zealand, where their fiancés await. Shattered expectations, a couple of problem…
Submarine
The story in the wry coming-of-age comedy Submarine is familiar: Precocious, 15-year-old Oliver (Craig Roberts) wants a girlfriend, and to prevent his parents’ marriage from breaking up. Oliver wins over his mysterious classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige), and struggles through adolescent cluelessness, discovery, heartbreak and casual cruelty (the two meet bullying). Submarine is the debut feature…
Cowboys & Aliens
Back in the radical ’60s, when everything we believed in began to fall apart, Hollywood and its emerging (air quotes) radical fringe began to re-imagine the Great American Western: Cat Ballou, The Wild Bunch, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and others either looked beneath the genre’s heroic surface or played it for culturally critical laughs. Now…
The Love List
Suppose you could design the perfect “mate.” Write down a list of attributes, and within the hour, an ideal human will strut into your den, knowing everything about you and every naughty sex act you’ve ever wanted to try. As playwright Norm Foster sees it, this fantasy is like threesomes and world domination — a…
The Mistake Madeline Made
You gotta hand it to No Name Players: You never know what’s coming next. My memories of this local theater company include Big Love — one of the most extraordinary nights I’ve ever spent in a theater — and This Hotel, one of the most perplexing. This summer is following the same pattern. First came…
Twelfth Night
One of the lovely ironies of Quantum Theatre founder Karla Boos’ “environmental vision” is the fortuitous combination of black-box audience intimacy with an IMAX-scale stage. Boos’ conception of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night hits many heights and depths — literally as well as metaphorically — with actors popping in and out of many levels, and relentless Nature…
Artist makes a guerilla statement about forgotten Native American culture.
Terrence Murphy got interested in Native American culture as a kid visiting his grandfather’s cabin up in Pymatuming. There, he says, near an old Indian burial mound, “We’d find arrowheads all over the place.” These days, Murphy collects his arrowheads online. But he’s still into Indian mounds: He builds them, or at least his small-scale…
Isabelle Garbani’s 24 Hours offers one painting for each hour in the day of the life of a subway stop.
In June 2006, Brooklyn artist Isabelle Garbani began the fieldwork for a series of pastel paintings now on display at Box Heart Gallery. Entitled 24 Hours, the exhibition recalls philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “moment of vision” even as it draws unlikely inspiration from the early motion picture. Heidegger had identified the moment of…
Local writer Anna Dubrovsky discusses her Moon Handbook guide to the whole state of Pennsylvania.
Moon Handbooks has just released its guide to Pennsylvania, written by Squirrel resident Anna Dubrovsky. While the 36-year-old writer and yoga instructor has lived all over the world, she attended Mount Lebanon High School and returned to Pittsburgh in 2007. Her mammoth tome is more than 600 pages long. How do you like being a…
Short List: Week of August 3 – 9
Thu., Aug. 4 — Film By 1981, seven years before his death, Romare Bearden’s artwork was increasingly well known. The artist himself, less so — at least until filmmakers Billie Allen and Nelson E. Breen got the access to make Bearden on Bearden, a 60-minute profile of this influential artist exploring what inspired him. The…
Green Pepper
Korean food is a bit of the odd man out in the American universe of Asian restaurant cuisines. Chinese, from take-out in greasy cardboard boxes to authentic delicacies in lacquered bowls, is venerable and familiar; Japanese enjoyed such popularity in the ’80s that we now expect to find sushi alongside pasta salads in the prepared-foods…
Tangent Line
A poem by Jill Khoury.
Love and Baseball
Let’s talk about the perils of love. When I was in kindergarten I had eyes for a girl who sat across from me in the nursery-rhyme circle. For the sake of this column, let’s call her Diane. In third grade, Diane gave me a Valentine’s Day card featuring a picture of two smiling Reese’s Peanut…
Las Palmas Carniceria
It’s a typical Saturday lunchtime on Brookline Boulevard. Which is to say that a dozen people are standing beneath a blue tent outside Las Palmas Carniceria, watching Francisco Berumen manipulate chorizo — spiced pork — and seasoned beef on a propane-fired grill. Berumen turns the meat, then lines the grill with doubled-up corn tortillas. Spanish-speakers…
Savage Love
Hey, everybody: two things … First: Last week, the GOP officially “denounced” me. Because the nation is at peace, Americans are going back to work and the climate situation is completely under control — so why not go after the gay dude who gives Rick Santorum fits? Second: Last week, a Savage Love reader denounced…
Beehive offers coffee-based cocktails
A Dutch proverb claims that a cup of coffee has two pure virtues: “It is wet and warm.” Which is true … until you add a few ice cubes, mix in booze and top it with whipped cream. But in America, a country where many consumers swill coffee as copiously as they consume alcohol, it…
Two-Fer-One
A poem by Jimmy Cvetic
On The Record with Jerry “Bull” Baylor
“I’d just stay in physical therapy all day, lifting weights and doing things to get strong.”
Dude, where’s my bus: CMU-developed transit app will help riders find a ride and a seat
After years of budget deficits and route cuts, riders using Port Authority buses and light rail are accustomed to facing uncertainty. The last year alone brought layoffs, route eliminations and a question about where future funding will come from for the Allegheny County transit agency. With so many questions swirling around, riders now can at…
Sounding Board
In May, Pittsburgh City Council created a Noise Task Force hotline and email account so city residents could report noise-related issues. Boy, have they ever. Motorcycles, barking dogs and lawnmowers were the subject of most emails and voice-mail messages left with the task force, but apparently “crack heads” and “lousy bands” can cause a ruckus,…
On the Record: A conversation with Implodes’ Matt Jencik
Matt Jencik’s doorbell might be in Chicago now, but his childhood memories roam with the yard birds, and yard deer, of Pittsburgh’s North Hills. Jencik (Hurl, Don Caballero) now helms ambient psych band Implodes, along with two other ex-Pittsburghers — Justin Rathell and Ken Camden — and bassist Emily Elhaj. Let’s say that you’d…
Writer Horacio Castellanos Moya Leaves Town
The acclaimed Salvadoran novelist who came to Pittsburgh in 2006 under the auspices of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh was scheduled to leave town today for greener (or at least flatter) pastures. Quite literally, in fact — he’s off to a teaching post at the University of Iowa. Moya gave a final reading last week, appropriately enough…
