New video: Dethlehem
And now, presented without comment, for your viewing pleasure, or whatever emotion you might associate with watching it: a brand new video from CP readers’ favorite metal band, Dethlehem.
Weekend notes!
This is where I’d usually tell you what all is going on this weekend, music-wise. But there’s not a ton going on tomorrow, being Christmas Eve. Tonight you’ve got your choice of a few shows, many highlighted in this week’s paper — The Long Time Darlings at Frankie & Georgie’s; all the things I critic-picked…
$10,000 Short-Film Contest
There seems to be no shortage lately of local filmmaking contests. Just in time for the holidays, here’s another one, from the Pittsburgh Jewish Film Forum. It carries a top prize of $10,000, and two $3,000 prizes too. The forum — which puts on the long-running J Film fesival — this week announced a call…
Lynn Cullen Live 12/23/11
Video Archive Video Archive no longer available You think things can’t get worse, but they can, and will; news reporting has gone down the shitter; Jesus probably didn’t have long hair; what happened to dandruff?; Haiti’s president is a drag-dressing stripper; pigeons….as smart as monkeys?; dog parks are the fastest growing segment of city parks;…
Did UPMC just blink in dispute with Highmark?
As you may have heard, UPMC has agreed to extend its contract with Highmark until June 2013. That means Highmark subscribers will still be considered “in network” by UPMC physicians and facilities for at least another 18 months. In a joint statement, the healthcare behemoths assert Highmark and UPMC want to jointly announce that Highmark…
Occupy Pittsburgh to survive into 2012
Break out the champagne and the funny hats: Occupy Pittsburgh will remain on Mellon Green through New Year’s. Earlier this month, BNY Mellon — which owns the Downtown parklet where Occupiers have been since Oct. 15 — began legal proceedings to have the Occupation evicted. This morning, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Christine Ward held…
Lynn Cullen Live 12/22/11
Video Archive Video Archive no longer available Guest: Tom Sokolowski; UPMC/Highmark contract extended; UPMC pulling ads from PG; Chaz Bono ends relationship w/ fiancee; 19 year old soldier kills himself in Afghanistan because of hazing; fame is all anyone wants; Santorum has no problem with income inequality; truck driver wins Lamborghini, crashes; Occupy Wall St.…
Spreading some local-music holiday cheer
A Kickstarter campaign, a local holiday album on sale, and some stocking stuffer ideas.
War Horse
War Horse Directed by: Steven Spielberg Starring: Jeremy Irvine Emily Watson David Thewlis Starts Sun., Dec. 25. World War I was one of the worst things to ever happen, and consequently, there haven’t been many feel-good family films about it. Until now. With War Horse, Steven Spielberg — Mister Wonderment himself — delivers a glossy…
Gas Attack: The head of the state DEP goes on the offensive … against researchers
In May, a Duke University study was published linking Marcellus Shale gas drilling to methane contamination of private drinking-water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. On average, the study found, wells within 1 kilometer of a hydraulically fractured shale-gas well had methane levels 17 times higher than those located further away. Moreover, the…
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
El Bulli is Ferran Adrià’s avant-garde restaurant in Spain, where the deconstruction and re-presentation of food is as important as its taste. Gereon Wetzel’s vérité film, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, documents the 2008-09 season. It begins with Coast Brava restaurant being packed up and the chefs moving to Barcelona for the winter. There, for…
Greatest Gift
It’s hard to explain to those that have everything That there are those that have less than nothing. I watched an attorney’s wife Smack him on his little dome Because of my swearing. Guess no matter how hard I try to tell her It wouldn’t make much of a difference. But these are true stories…
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
The fourth iteration of the action franchise, directed this time by Brad Bird, bounces around the globe: from Prague to a Moscow prison, then stopping by the Kremlin before heading to Dubai and Mumbai, and finally grabbing a much-deserved beer in Seattle. The plot is some nonsense about IMF super-agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) being…
Preventive Medicine
In these times of partisan gridlock, it’s not easy to bring Democrats and Republicans together. But in trying to sever its ties with Highmark, the executives of UPMC have done just that. At least in Harrisburg, UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff seems to be curing paralysis so thoroughly that someone ought to try bottling his ego…
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The oddly dissolute Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his sputtering sidekick, Watson (Jude Law), return for more adventures with dastardly villains in Guy Ritchie’s sequel to his hit 2009 reboot of the detective franchise. This time out, we get more silly costumes (Holmes is variously an Oriental street-fighter, a woman, a gypsy, a chair)…
Savage Love
My sexy GGG husband and I fuck a “good friend” semiregularly. We started out wearing condoms, but our good friend isn’t banging anyone else, so we’ve moved to condom-free sex. A month ago, we had a hot threesome. Our good friend fucked me, but came on my tits. My husband fucked me, too — that…
The Long Time Darlings release first full-length
The name of the new full-length issued this fall by local rockers The Long Time Darlings, Honey Tree Evil Eye, began with a sort of silly story. Lead singer and guitarist Brett Staggs made an offhand reference to Spuds McKenzie, the dog from the old Bud Light commercials, and lead guitarist Brian Sproul noted that…
Wassail
Egg nog isn’t for everyone. Maybe you’re not a fan of the frothy, dairy-based holiday drink, but you still want something to help numb your brain around variously problematic relatives. There’s another alcoholic holiday beverage you should try: wassail. Wassail is a spiced, mulled punch typically served during the holiday season, with origins that date…
The Adventures of Tintin
In some respects, I’m not the right person to review this film, a motion-capture-animated 3-D version of the classic graphic novels created by the Belgian artist known as Hergé. As a kid, I read and re-read these tales of the young reporter; I still own them. Would a film version, especially one directed by Steven…
Make Mine An Old Fashioned
If you fancy a bit of history with your happy-hour drink, the Society of Tavern Seekers (SOTS) is ready to bend your ear. Held every three months, SOTS events are a hybrid of cocktail-hour networking and history lesson, where the focus is on highlighting some local historic landmarks. “We are bringing together people who are…
The Early November gets back together, comes to town in late December
Defining “emo” has become a scene parlor game not unlike trying to pin down when punk rock began: Everyone’s got a different answer, and most people are right in some respect. The earliest bands to wear the tag played an intense brand of non-commercial hardcore; through the ’90s, bands like I Hate Myself carried the…
Short List: December 22 – 29
Artist Jeffrey Vallance never really knew the chicken he named Blinky; it was a supermarket find, pre-plucked. But Vallance made it a posthumous pet, formally interred it and, later, exhumed it for an autopsy. He saved one bone for a reliquary that’s now part of his installment in The Andy Warhol Museum’s “Word of God”…
Mega-Def mixes hip hop, metal and funk
Mega-Def’s first practice was in the basement of Shadow Lounge, and its initial performance thrown together in only four days, for that venue’s 10th-anniversary show. But the self-described “funk-punk-psyche-hop” band ended up clicking. “We worked pretty well together right from the beginning,” explains D. Licious. “It was easy to talk to everybody and easy to…
CD Reviews
The Garment District Melody Elder (Night-People) Inaugural cassette-tape release from the solo project of Jennifer Baron, founding member of The Ladybug Transistor. Layered synth-and-guitar soundscape work with some haunting vocals courtesy of Lucy Blehar; these are slow-building and disintegrating compositions, complex, weird and gorgeous. Just when it’s on the verge of being glitchy, discordant and…
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
In most cases, the book is better than the movie, and the European film is better than the American remake. But Girl With the Dragon Tattoo seems to have escaped these pitfalls. Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling novel was a solid thriller, with a moody vibe and a break-out star…
Critics’ Picks: December 22 – 23
[PUNK] + THU., DEC. 22 Earlier this year, White Wives took the punk world by storm, releasing their debut full-length on big punk indie Adeline Records. The band — headed up by Roger Harvey of Dandelion Snow and Chris #2 from Anti-Flag — has been on tour since, basically anytime the members’ other projects permits.…
Lynn Cullen Live 12/19/11
Video Archive Another Pgh/Green Bay superbowl?; anyone who retains the ability to see beauty will never grow old; we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children; Obits: Vaclav Havel, Kim Jong Il; Virginia & global warming; Newt looks like a Lego man, makes assesments on the judicial system;…
Lynn Cullen Live 12/21/11 – PART 1
Video Archive Guest: Chris Potter; WSJ editorial page slams down Repubs; gerrymandering is okay if not race related; 2012 PA budget woes, Corbett won’t increase taxes or establish a gas tax; Repubs think unemployed people are lazy bums; are Repubs capable of empathy?; North Koreans in mass hysterics over Kim Jon Il’s death; does Santorum…
The Warhol’s leg of the Pittsburgh Biennial spotlights provocative work by local female artists.
Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, dedicated her life to activism and helping women. Despite being pistol-whipped and imprisoned, she never stopped fighting. The late Maathai, who got her master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, must have been in good company around here, because this city has had…
Lynn Cullen Live 12/21/11 – PART 2
Video Archive Guest: Chris Potter; WSJ editorial page slams down Repubs; gerrymandering is okay if not race related; 2012 PA budget woes, Corbett won’t increase taxes or establish a gas tax; Repubs think unemployed people are lazy bums; are Repubs capable of empathy?; North Koreans in mass hysterics over Kim Jon Il’s death; does Santorum…
The Tides of Provincetown encapsulates a full century of American art.
The whole history of Western art in the 20th century plays out in 3,000 square feet under the roof of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art — or at least its big, general story arc does. The Tides of Provincetown features works created in the sandy town at the tip of Cape Cod from throughout…
System Recheck: One final glimpse at the stories that made 2011
Looking back, it’s tough to put a label on 2011 because the stories that made up the past 365 days vary so widely. Some stories, like the Jordan Miles abuse case, were year-long holdovers in the headlines, and some — the Penn State sex-abuse scandal — rocked them. There was a nasty election, a new…
The Day the Empire Fell is a veteran local peace activist’s episodic memoir.
In January 1995, Vincent Scott Eirene made a pilgrimmage to Los Alamos National Laboratory to protest the building of nuclear weapons. He walked through a New Mexico snowstorm and — somehow — right through the Lab’s security gates. Then, as he writes in his memoir-like anthology The Day the Empire Fell, I knelt down to…
Root174
Root 174 1113 S. Braddock Ave., Regent Square. 412-243-4348 Hours: Tue.-Thu. 5-10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 5-11 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $5-12 Entrees $16-25 Liquor: BYOB Musicians know that there is an intimate, often intuitive, relationship between the art of music and the discipline of mathematics. Chefs know that the same is true for cooking: Precise portioning of…
