Weird War
Spinning a new Ian Svenonius album these days is a bit like stopping at a Starbucks in a strange city: You may not have actually tried a latte at that particular shop before, but you already know what it’s going to taste like. And for many old Svenonius followers, this sort of predictability is a…
Cash and Wary
Illustration: WAYNO Outside of the Advance America storefront on the South Side, it’s alternately snowing and sleeting. Inside, the chart on the wall offers short-term loans at annual percentage rates of 443 percent. Neither the weather nor the rates deter a steady trickle of customers from walking by the image of Advance America…
The Public Storm
With clubs closing all over town, Garfield coffeehouse The Quiet Storm is trying a novel approach to staying in business: selling itself to the neighborhood. The move by founder Ian Lipsky and partners Jill MacDowell, Sheryl Johnston and Rob Park is not exactly a dot-com-worthy Initial Public Offering. They’re forming a corporation and hoping…
Family Feud
“I could sit here and ramble off things at a young age that I did,” says 33-year-old Ed Gainey, who is challenging State Rep. Joseph Preston Jr. for the 24th Legislative District seat (covering Wilkinsburg, East Liberty, Highland Park, Larimer, Lincoln-Lemington, Homewood and parts of Aspinwall and Point Breeze). They include the New Pennley Place…
Longer Labor
Though the nine union cleaners fired from Centre City Tower just before New Year’s Eve last year are still fighting to get their jobs back, someone else is now taking out the trash. One of the new cleaning crew, speaking anonymously, says that when he took the job, he had no idea he was…
Memory Still Alive
Melanie Schall worked across the street from Jamie Lynn Stickle and saw her every day when Stickle tended bar for several Liberty Avenue gay establishments Downtown. On Feb. 8, Schall and Stickle’s other friends and co-workers will hold a candlelight vigil and a fund-raising party to mark two years since Stickle was found dead from…
Tommy the Turtle Sez …
Hey kids! You’ve probably heard the biblical story of Lazarus, the dead guy who got up and walked out of his cave with gross bandages stuck to him. I’ve got a story for you about another Lazarus. This one is a dead store that is getting up and walking out of Downtown with millions of…
Follow That Story
The blame game regarding rising parking rates (Parking Up: The Wrong Fee, Jan. 22) continued Jan. 27, as politicians jockeyed for position like Christmas Eve shoppers in the Kaufmann’s garage. Pittsburgh City Councilor Bill Peduto said the Pittsburgh Parking Authority’s decision to raise rates by more than 25 percent at most garages — and by…
Academy: Still in Attendance
Despite a critical evaluation earlier this month, the board of Pittsburgh Public Schools approved funding to continue the city schools’ contract with The Academy for the second half of the school year (see News: “School of Hearty Knocks,” Jan. 28). The Academy’s day school, a private nonprofit school operated at least partially under the auspices…
Tangled Up In Blues
Everything we think we know about the blues is wrong. Well, not wrong so much as misguided, says Elijah Wald. Wald, a somewhat nomadic author and musician currently calling the North Side home, understands the enduring myth of blues iconography: Robert Johnson standing at the crossroads, selling his soul to the devil; the great forgotten…
The Monongahela River flows from south to north. How many other rivers do?
We Pittsburghers are always looking for something that sets us apart, some peculiar idiosyncrasy, however strange or vexing, that we can take pride in. Our freakish driving habits, the way we put French fries on foods that others are surprised to find them on, Sophie Masloff — anything that could only happen here automatically inspires…
Notes From Underground
Groundhog Day 2004: a charmingly offbeat tradition, or a ritualized form of animal cruelty? You be the judge. Consider it from Punxsutawney Phil’s point of view. Each year for much of the night of Feb. 1, his otherwise quiet lair is bombarded with the sound of rock music and fireworks. It’s as if he…
Miracle
For as simple as it seems, Disney’s Miracle is really two movies. One is about an ice-hockey coach who persuades a bunch of overachieving young players to see things his way. The other is about a coach who’s persuaded to see things America’s way. Or at least Disney’s. The first movie is agreeable…
Last Call for Miller Time
What the hell happened to Dennis Miller? The Castle Shannon native used to be an acerbic insightful humorist/commentator with a scraggly visage and a lefty point of view. Now he tells us he’s convinced Dubya is much smarter than people think. I just finished watching the premiere of Miller’s new 9 p.m. CNBC show.…
My Architect
In his 72 years, the architect Louis I. Kahn created two types of things: buildings and families. The former category includes the Salk Institute, the Yale Art Gallery and the Capital Complex in Bangladesh. (“He has given us democracy,” says a Bangladeshi man, fighting back tears.) These enduring monuments, principled and vigorous, are timeless…
A Conversation with LaKeisha Wolf and Anika Tyson
A lot of “healthy” and “natural” products and services nowadays can be pretty expensive, yet your workshops are relatively inexpensive. How do you pull that off? Wolf: They just make it expensive to be able to feel good. Most people can’t afford to go to a day spa. Our goal is to keep it as…
The Big Bounce
Elmore Leonard books are pretty much made for movies, and though you’d have to classify them as crime novels, the reason why is no mystery. Leonard creates funny, believable characters, writes them snappy movie-friendly dialogue — practically a script’s worth — and he’s completely at ease in the cinematically compatible world of the small-time crook.…
The Price of Loyalty
Ron Suskind’s book about the short, unhappy tenure of Paul O’Neill as President Bush’s first Treasury Secretary is subtitled “George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.” But Suskind, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, makes clear that O’Neill didn’t have much to learn when he took office in 2001: He…
THE PERFECT SCORE
The concept is so wacky, at first I thought this film from Brian Robbins (Ready to Rumble) might be a welcome parody: Two affluent white teen-age guys think the SAT test is so unfair — to them — that they decide to steal the answers. It seems that the frantic achievement-culture of today’s kids (and…
Earley Warning
Tony Earley prefaces his story collection Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True with an epigraph from Ernest Hemingway. The choice might seem odd: Earley’s subject matter is typically far from Hemingway’s larger-than-life romances and two-fisted adventures. But in some ways, it fits perfectly: Writing with short sentences and a deceptively simple style,…
SOLAS
This 1998 Spanish film from director/screenwriter Benito Zambrano. Solas (“alone”) invites us into the dreary lonely lives of Maria (Ana Fernandez), her old-fashioned mother, Rosa (Maria Galiana), and Maria’s widowed neighbor, Vecino (Carlos Alvarez-Novoa). The bitter, brittle Maria has long left her rural village behind for the big city, and now grudgingly she hosts her…
Lambchop
Nostalgia is one of the more misunderstood concepts — emotions? — making the rounds these days. I am, regrettably, of the generation currently under the nostalgia-market microscope: the music, television, movies, even ad campaigns of our childhood and youth are being raided by those in the money-making know. None of it was necessarily good in…
