harm
What is Casio-love music? I’m not sure I can answer the question, but the phrase comes to mind when I listen to harm. Made up of well-known local musicians Cindy Yogmas, Andrew Beckerman and Kyle Bittinger, harm began in 1997 while all were students at the University of Pittsburgh, prompted by Beckerman receiving…
Critical Stage
Which Plays Clean, Which Plays Dirty?A Conversation with Vernell LillieBeneath the Benedum Center’s 90-plus crystal chandeliers last year, Pittsburgh audiences saw those classic theater characters we’ve grown to love: Jean Valjean of Hugo’s Les Miserables, Max and Leo from Brooks’ The Producers, Oliver Twist in Dickens’ Oliver! … and T-Bone and Pookie wit’ Marvelous Entertainment’s…
The New World
The history of America is short. But for a nation whose taproot in the first British settlements is so thoroughly documented, it’s still a history overgrown with copious mythologizing. Terrence Malick unearths that mythology, and cultivates it fresh, in his beautiful The New World. It’s set mostly in 1607 on the…
Underworld: Evolution
Vampires versus werewolves. The 2004 hit Underworld married this basic B-movie premise to big-budget action, suitably hammy actors, groovy sets and even a dash of subtext about racial purity, for an entertaining popcorn flick. In monster movies, keeping it simple works — and Len Wiseman’s sequel Underworld: Evolution blows it by becoming unnecessarily…
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
When will it be time to start finding humor in Sept. 11 and its myriad tragic cilia? For the comic writer/director Albert Brooks, the time came a few years ago, when he dreamed up Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, his story of an eponymous comedian (portrayed by Brooks) who’s…
SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC
Watching Liam Lynch’s film featuring comedienne Sarah Silverman just as the tributes poured in for the late Richard Pryor, I couldn’t help but note: It takes more than dirty talk and shock-value button-pushing to transcend funny into insightful. The film combines a standup performance by Silverman with a handful of musical skits. Her shtick is…
TRANSAMERICA
Felicity Huffman is generating well-deserved buzz for her gender-bending role as a man on the brink of his sexual-reassignment surgery. In all but the groin area, he, who goes by Bree, is a she, and Huffman does a bang-up job of capturing the inherent awkwardness of a woman who is still physically burdened by being…
Sheriff Sells Sheriff’s Sales to Lowest Circulator
The withdrawal of more than $1 million worth of advertising from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by the Allegheny County sheriff’s office is just good business, says Sgt. Richard Fersch. But if this were a crime, several pieces of evidence might impute a motive to the sheriff for awarding the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review exclusive — and lucrative –…
Southern Discomfort at Duquesne
Jason Lesonick thought it was a great idea: When a Hurricane Katrina benefit at Duquesne University called for artwork with Deep South themes, the second-year senior created a three-panel piece lampooning antebellum life. “The Southern Belles,” satirizing slave-holders and Old South gender politics, hung in the student-union ballroom for one night in November. Other students…
Priscilla Dining in Art
Location: 2557 E. Carson St., South Side; 412-488-8000. Hours: Breakfast 7-11 a.m.; lunch 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; dinner 4-11 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $10-12, entrees $11-25 Fare: Continental, Filipino and Fusion Atmosphere: Southeast Asian elegance Liquor: BYOB; full bar pending Over the past few years, we have watched with fascination as the South Side Works has transformed…
Environment: Image Still Soots City
Pittsburgh may be shedding its image as a smoky crucible of industry, but according to a new study, it’s still tops in the nation for soot in the air. “Soot pollution is the nation’s worst pollutant,” says Stephen Rogness, legislative associate for PennEnvironment, the group that presented the study locally. The study was executed…
Behind the Eight Ball
Two cops from a small town in Westmoreland County got popped last week. They are accused of selling an eight ball of coke to another cop. If the charges are true, my guess is they took the coke from someone instead of busting him, a good deal for everyone involved. On the chance that they…
Iraq War: Movement of Two vs. Army of One
A new group in darkest Greensburg will bring the first anti-war protest of the 21st century to Westmoreland County’s courthouse steps on Sat., Jan. 28. “There’s really me and Ryan” officially in the two-month-old group so far, says Lindsey Praksti, 21, of Delmont. She and Ryan Williams, 22, of Murrysville, formed Suburban Awakening after…
Who Referees NFL Refs?
Like everyone else in Pittsburgh, I was ready to round up a posse and go in search of head referee Peter Morelli after he robbed Troy Polamalu of his potentially game-changing interception against Indianapolis. To be fair, Morelli — a high school principal during the week — is not corrupt. Merely incompetent. But what if…
An End to Steelers False Starts?
It wasn’t until I was standing on Eighth Avenue, screaming at oncoming traffic, that I realized how badly I want to believe in the Pittsburgh Steelers. Until now, I’ve been numbed by years of hearing the “Pittsburgh’s Going to the Super Bowl” song, and by the over-the-top Steelers coverage on the TV news. I actually…
Of Two Minds
The Creative Arts Center at West Virginia University, in Morgantown, is a broad, low-rise cylinder whose sober white exterior does not look at all like Paul Rosenblatt of Springboard Design. Yet the institutional structure offers a precise view into this architect’s mind. He did not design the building, though. Rather, two galleries within…
Consider The Lobster and Other Essays
Consider the slacker, or at least his caricature: shielded from the world by a carapace as ill-fitting as the smirk on a 7-year-old’s face … scavenging whatever dross the cultural tides wash over him. Then consider, by contrast, David Foster Wallace, footnote-dropping essayist and author of the novel Infinite Jest. A guy who…
The Pigs
It was a long, paranoid middle-school summer when I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm for the first time and realized that we people and those pigs were — gulp — one and the same. From the look and sound of his most recent musical undertaking, it seems that Geoff Westen has reached the…
