School of Hearty Knocks
“My niece left my house every day to go to school — but did she go? No.” Shirley Rucker was trying to convince the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ board to authorize funding to keep The Academy — a small alternative high school begun in partnership with the Juvenile Court of Allegheny County last fall –…
Bush League
“State of the Union Response.” Never mind the “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities”: From his rose-tinted picture of life in today’s Afghanistan (where domestic terrorism remains entrenched) to his defense of the No Child Left Behind law that his own budget left behind, George W. Bush’s Jan. 19 speech was rife with spin and…
A Conversation with Perry Arlia
How do you fix terra cotta? [After pressure-washing,] you have to prep your hole, and then you mix up what we call a slurry coat. It’s a prime coat. Put the primer on, and then you start building the repair mortar out. So you don’t use molds? No. If I’m repairing it, I just…
The Triplets of Belleville
Our most popular movies — and even some of our least popular — are, to an increasing extent, animated movies. That’s what “digital effects” means, even if people regard the photo-realistic animation underpinning films such as Lord of the Rings as something other than high-tech cartoons, in which bits of computerized information snare the jobs…
Girl with a Pearl Earring
The first time Griet, a peasant girl from the country, sees a painting by her new big-city employer, Johannes “Jan” Vermeer, she can hardly believe her big, brown, watery doe eyes. She gawks for several seconds, until Vermeer’s stealthy, steely mother-in-law catches her and says, “You’re not the first to forget your manners in front…
Monster
As a child growing up in the impoverished sticks of Florida, Aileen heard tell of silver linings and “all you need is love” from the adults in her life. Not all of those adults raped her. But at least one of them did, when she was 8, and when Aileen told her Dad what his…
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
In this directorial debut from screenwriters Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (whose previous contribution to teen cinema was the oddly titled Final Destination 2), Evan (Ashton Kutchner) discovers he can go back in time, simply by reading his childhood journals. (No money in the budget for even a magic ring? A cynic…
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
The Weathermen were a faction of the 1960s civil-rights and anti-war organization Students for a Democratic Society who broke off to pursue the violent overthrow of the United States government. The group went underground in 1970, until the movement petered out in the 1980s and many of its wanted members gave themselves up.…
MODERN TIMES
Unlike most of his earlier features, Charlie Chaplin’s 1937 film has a clear message to impart, but it’s still remarkable how seldom this classic strains for effect. The Tramp is enmeshed (sometimes literally) in the machinery of the industrial world — on an assembly line, in jail and inadvertently leading a labor march…
Today’s youth are living just enough for the city. Would their pop music heroes rather have them…ready to die?
Deondre Howard was 4 years old the first time he died. Caught outside amid gunfire between older kids in Homewood, Deondre was hit once by a bullet that entered his chest on the right and exited on the left, just missing his heart. Paramedics pronounced him dead. Three minutes later, says his mother, Deon, he…
NOW VOYAGER
Poor Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) has been browbeaten into neurotic hysteria by her domineering, joyless mother. A breakdown puts her under the care of a kind psychiatrist (Claude Rains) who coaches Charlotte to live again. She blossoms, physically and emotionally, a testament to the benefits of modern psychoanalysis — not to mention the rejuvenating powers…
Baggage Claimed
The past, British novelist L.P. Hartley once observed, is a foreign country. If so, it may soon be the only international destination Pittsburghers can reach on US Airways. If you’ve been following the airline’s travails, you might feel like you’ve seen it all before. Twenty years before, to be precise, during the collapse of…
XIU XIU: THE SENT-DOWN GIRL
As part of its Crossing Borders Film Festival, CMU’s Modern Languages Department will screen this 1998 directorial debut from actress Joan Chen. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a city teen-ager Xiu Xiu (Lu Lu) is sent to the grasslands of Tibet for “re-education.” She’s apprenticed to Lao Jin (Lopsang), a gentle horseman, but longs to return…
A Silver Mt. Zion
You know something’s up when an hour-long disc is comprised of only four songs — especially when the qualifiers “punk” and “rock” are part of the album’s title. Obviously we’ve come a long way since the days when punk meant little more than three chords in three minutes — nearly a quarter-century, actually — and…
Fantomas
Can the front man for a pop-metal band eventually become an avant-garde composer? If it were still the ’70s, I’d say no — probably the only thing those metalheads are good for are starring in a reality show or a VH1 documentary. But in the new millennium, with the worlds of music crossing over fractally…
Camera Obscura
January can be a brutal month. The uncompromising cold chills your soul, the barren ground icily taunts as you perilously make your way about, and the skies, even on the best day, are dismal overhead. Those who haven’t coupled off for the harsh winter are given double heaps of melancholy, with the impending doom of…
My boyfriend’s South Side home is near a street called Steve Seventy Way. We’ve spent the last year wondering who the hell Steve Seventy is, and why he has a tiny little back street near the Slopes named after him. Can you help?
Probably no story in American politics is more familiar than that of the young accordion player who rises up from obscurity to command a spot on the Game and Fisheries committee of the state’s House of Representatives. Such a story is that of Steve Seventy. An accomplished accordion player, if such a thing can…
Rev. Ken Love of Kerr Presbyterian Church is arrested
Rev. Ken Love of Kerr Presbyterian Church is arrested for trespassing at Downtown’s Centre City Tower, Jan. 21. Love, along with a dozen other clergy and Allegheny County Labor Council President Jack Shea, sought a meeting with building manager Linda Fryz of Independence Management Company. Nine long-time Service Employees International Union janitors lost their jobs…
