Fond of Hookahs
“It really is an art,” says Amera Andrawes, co-owner of the Sphinx Café, as she sets a three-foot hookah on the carpet. “This is part of our culture. This isn’t new to us.” After a near-solid year of puffing in the South Side, hookahs aren’t new to Pittsburghers, either. When the Sphinx opened up…
Yule Be Sorry
Just in time for the holidays, it seems, everyone is joining together to aid Pittsburgh in its time of need. Under a new state-approved plan to bail out the city, about 300 city employees will lose their jobs; anyone working in the city will see a $42 increase in their annual occupational privilege tax. Even…
After Math
Increasing the youth vote, city councilor Sala Udin told a gathering at the University of Pittsburgh on Nov. 30, “is a marathon, not a sprint.” Udin, among a panel of political activists, organizers and elected officials dissecting the 2004 election, may or may not have reassured the few dozen gathered for a post-mortem led by…
My father once told me that West Penn Hospital got its start in the Strip District. Is that true?
It’s true, all right, though that was so long ago that its physicians couldn’t even go to the Voodoo Lounge to unwind. The drive to build the Western Pennsylvania Hospital started in the 1840s, when Pittsburgh was still something of a frontier town, and when we called institutions by their full names. In…
The Vote? Get Out!
On Dec. 8, Allegheny County’s Board of Elections will certify the results of the Nov. 2 contests. But more than a month after Election Day, some city voters have reason to doubt the results before they’re announced. Mina Jain, a 34-year-old part-time grad student at Chatham College, had never voted before this year. “I’m…
‘Bucked Over
I have become a stereotype, and it’s all the fault of evil corporate America. I have been sucked in, hypnotized, transformed, transmogrified. Damn that Howard Schultz. Damn him straight to hell. He’s the CEO of Starbucks. And thanks to Howie, I have become a latte liberal. I’ve always been liberal. But the lattes are…
2004 Gift Guide
New stadiums, cultural attraction, crushing debts and erratic public officials … what do you get the city that has everything? That question has been on everyone’s lips this holiday season. With its symphonies and sporting events, Pittsburgh has given so much over the years, and it’s asked for so little. But now that the cash-strapped…
Closer
If beauty were truth, and vice versa, there would be nothing else we’d need to know about the comely quartet of lovers who mix it up for a few hours in Closer, Mike Nichols’ screen adaptation of a drama by the British playwright Patrick Marber. The four are portrayed by Julia Roberts, Jude…
Bright Leaves
On a jaunt back to his ancestral North Carolina, filmmaker Ross McElwee discovers an unlikely hook for his new film diary-cum-essay, Bright Leaves. A family member screens Michael Curtiz’s 1950 historical melodrama Bright Leaf, and in its tale of a upstart tobacco farmer squashed by a more ruthless rival, McElwee hears echoes of his…
Almost Peaceful
Inside the little French tailor shop that’s at the heart of Almost Peaceful, most of the employees have no problem with the occasional Holocaust joke. “Maurice Abramauschwitz,” one employee says, punning on the name of a fellow they’ve just met. This shocks and upsets Andrée, who scolds her insensitive colleagues. “The French may not know,”…
Cinemanagement
Like so many motion-picture enthusiasts, Charlie Cline grew up running around with his parents’ video camera, making backyard versions of George Romero’s zombie films. “I sort of went through a gore phase,” says Cline, who grew up in central West Virginia. “It seems like a common story for Appalachian filmmakers to start at…
THE BIG ANIMAL
Directed by Jerzy Stuhr from a socked-away 1970s script by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red, White, Blue), this fable-like tale finds a middle-aged couple in a rural Polish village the unlikely caretakers of a camel left behind by a circus. The pair easily bonds with the creature, adapting their lives for its comforts, but the…
BLADE: TRINITY
Veteran vampire assassin and Marvel superhero Blade (Wesley Snipes) — a vamp hybrid with a bad haircut — finds himself captured by the FBI after mistakenly killing a human in the raging war against the recently resurrected Dracula (Dominic Purcell), until a splinter cell of young vampire hunters called the “Nightstalkers” led by a funnyman…
DIG!
For seven years, Ondi Timoner documented the drug abuse, touring, slow rise to fame, and eventual downward spiral of two promising rock bands: the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. A cautionary tale for any musician hoping to brave the Machiavellian recording industry, Dig! tells the story of BJM leader Anton Newcombe, a possibly…
ZELARY
Ondraj Trojan (Divided We Fall) directs this period drama set during World War II in which a Czech medical student (Anna Geislerová), working for the resistance, is forced to relocate to the hinterlands with one of her patients, a rough-hewn yet gentle mountain man (György Cserhalmi). Zelary is less a story about warfare (at least…
A Conversation with Seth Madej
This is a wonderful idea. How did it all come about?It was a fluke. I came up with the idea and then I was like, “All right, I’m gonna do this right now so I can’t talk myself out of it.” I’d always enjoyed crafting ethical arguments to myself, and trying to figure…
Kinder’s Gardens
To Chuck Kinder, the line between fiction and non- has never been a pencil-drawn affair. No, it’s more like the arbitrary, slack-string border between West Virginia and its eastern mother — the craggy nuance of the Big Sandy and the Tug Fork, the Ohio and the Potomac — that carves out the Mountain…
Free Radicalization
Drunk with power, two dozen high school kids stormed the principal’s office and demanded their Constitutional rights!In their dreams. The Underground Action Alliance, a sort-of side project of the leftist, Pittsburgh-based punk band Anti-Flag, held a workshop for these young activist-hopefuls (as well as some college students) at Carnegie Mellon University on Dec.…
