Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
On a Massachusetts morning in 1961, Gore Vidal beat his friend John F. Kennedy at backgammon, after which the two men chatted about why nobody engages in great political discussions any more like the nation’s founders did as a matter of everyday life. “Meanwhile, dear Jack,” Vidal writes in Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams,…
MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE.
When the Master of the Flying Guillotine (who employs a martial arts weapon that must be seen to be believed) learns that his disciples have been murdered by the One-Armed Boxer, he sets out for a kung fu tournament swearing revenge. This slim back-story lets screenwriter, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu lay on the…
Ghost
For a band that’s been around since 1988, it’s a bit of a shame that we haven’t heard more about Ghost, a Krautrock-influenced psychedelic collective from Tokyo that seems to exist underneath a well-deserved cloak of Eastern mystery. In Japan, for instance, Ghost is well known for performing at improbable locales: the courtyard of…
TORN CURTAIN
Alfred Hitchock’s 1966 geo-political thriller opens with two big box-office stars canoodling in bed. At a physicists’ conference, no less! Paul Newman is Professor Armstrong, an American atomic egghead so desirable that he has won the attentions of more than just his brainy assistant and bed-mate Sarah (Julie Andrews); he’s defecting to East Berlin to…
Romanowski
When invoked “Inna Jamaican stylee,” as Romanowski’s subtitle reads, “rocksteady” has nothing to do with break dancing or No Doubt. Legend has it that in the long hot summer of ’66, the operators of the Jamaican mobile sound system deejay units couldn’t keep their audiences dancing to the jump-up R&B of ska. In Jamaica, necessity…
The Winter Guide
Betting on Thoroughbred Horses Handicap Parking Writer: ANDY NEWMAN It’s in the latest Community College of Allegheny County “Personal and Professional Development” catalog between “Assertive Communication: Dealing with People and Problems” and “Birds of Pennsylvania.” The course is called “Betting on Thoroughbred Horses,” and it promises to provide, among other things, “in depth analysis of…
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
I know what you’re thinking — does the world really need another recording of The Four Seasons? After all, in a genre brimming with enough warhorses to keep your local Taco Bell supplied for years on end, Vivaldi’s classic Baroque series of violin concertos is el grande burrito deluxe! Sure, it’s wonderful music, but after…
The Mod Squad
Whenever I’m truly constipated I like to read about the Bush administration, because the nutty neo-cons scare the crap out of me. But you know who’s really afraid of the current crop of crazed Rumsfeldian cuckoos? It’s that dying breed of misguided but nonetheless decent human beings called moderate Republicans. I had coffee…
A conversation with Vicki McCracken
In this book of photos of your company’s work, w hat’s that elaborate carved frame?This might have been one of our shining moments. This is the Frick mansion, Clayton. It’s in the dining room. We were given photographs. It’s a painting frame with high relief carving on it. It’s floor to ceiling. That’s…
Pickets and Charges
The 10 janitors who lost their jobs three weeks ago at Downtown’s Centre City Tower will begin picketing Jan. 21 with their fellow union members. As of last week, Centre City’s former janitors were still trying to jump through hoops to get their first unemployment checks. Said one cleaner, who asked not to be named,…
Numbers Blame
Like many Pittsburgh residents and commuters, City Councilor Sala Udin hates the city’s 2004 operating budget. Unlike them, he might make a federal case out of it. The budget council passed Jan. 14 included an increase in the parking tax to 50 percent that has outraged commuters and Downtown businesses alike. But Udin was…
Parking Up: The Wrong Fee?
At Pittsburgh City Council’s Jan. 13, meeting, parking lot operators paraded to the microphone, warning of disaster should the city hike its parking tax from 31 percent to 50 percent. People won’t come Downtown, they warned. Businesses will leave. Ultimately, the tax hike will result in reduced parking revenues. ALCO Parking President Merrill Stabile…
For the Benefit of Mr. Pitt
“We are definitely appealing,” says ACLU lawyer Christine Biancheria, who represents seven gay and lesbian Pitt employees dealt a legal setback last week in their effort to get the University of Pittsburgh to offer health benefits to the same-sex partners of their employees. Since 1999, Pitt has blocked the city’s Commission on Human Relations…
March March Moves Forward
“We want to show that there’s still massive opposition to this war and occupation … and that they never found any weapons of mass destruction,” says Pete Shell, who is coordinating a March 20 rally against the occupation of Iraq. Local groups met on Jan. 18 to begin organizing what they hope will rival last…
Bush League
“The U.S. Supreme Court and The Imperial Presidency: How President Bush Is Testing the Limits of His Presidential Powers.” “This may be the most imperial Presidency our history has yet seen,” writes someone who ought to know: John Dean, the former counsel to Richard M. Nixon. Now a columnist for the Web site FindLaw, Dean…
I have always wanted to know why they call the South Side Flats “the Flats,” when it’s on a large hill?
Well, that’s an easy one: They don’t. The part they call “the Flats” is, well, flat. And the part that’s on the slope of the hill is called, well, “the Slopes.” It’s on the street signs and everything. You can also tell which you are in by how the natives refer to themselves and others.…
Pyramid Schemes
“When Tom Murphy first took office in January 1994,” the city’s official Web site burbles on its “Meet Mayor Murphy” page, “Pittsburgh was suffering from one of the worst inferiority complexes in its history. After two terms in office, the Pittsburgh that Tom Murphy inherited is a dim memory. Replacing it today is a high-energy,…
Bus 174
The stark Brazilian documentary Bus 174 takes two solid hours to do what a television newsmagazine generally can accomplish in an hour with commercials, or what Errol Morris does in 90 minutes or so with more imagination. Through interviews with police, hostages, street people, family members and concerned citizens, José Padilha’s film chronicles the…
Elephant
Gus Van Sant is a filmmaker who tries one’s patience. In his splendid Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant explored drug addiction and its criminal element with nihilistic humor. But then came My Own Private Idaho, his sluggish neo-Shakespearean riff set among teen-age drifters, followed by the overrated To Die For. In Good Will Hunting, Van…
ALONG CAME POLLY
In writer/director John Hamburg’s version of the romantic comedy perennial where the uptight guy falls for the free-spirited gal, our nervous hero is Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller), who actually frets for a living: He’s a risk analyst for an insurance firm. After being brutally dumped on his honeymoon (new bride goes too deep…
Bubba Ho-Tep
Back in the ’70s, Elvis Presley secretly traded places with a low-budget impersonator who then unfortunately died in 1977. Eventually, the real E ended up in a rest home in Mud Creek, Texas, forced to live out his days as an Elvis-impersonating nobody — out of shape, abandoned, without purpose or history, whiling away the…
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN
An unabridged adaptation of a book of the Bible is a daunting prospect under any circumstances. But Philip Saville’s “faithful” rendition of the fourth gospel practically disappears in its own chapter-by-chapter, verse-by-verse fidelity. The problem isn’t the three-hour running time so much as the filmmakers’ tendency to display as little imagination as they seem to…
