Au Hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson might be the greatest master filmmaker most people have never heard of. Seldom screened even at art houses, his 13 features have acquired a semi-legendary status among cinephiles. Now here’s Pittsburgh’s first big-screen chance in years to see not just a Bresson, but what some critics consider his best: Au Hasard Balthazar,…
1902 Tavern
Location: 24 Market Square, Downtown. 412-471-1902 Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m.-4 p.m.; dinner 5-10 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 5-11 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Prices: $14.95-24.95 Fare: Steak and seafood Atmosphere: Party like it’s 1899 Liquor: Full bar Is it just us, or has Pittsburgh been enjoying a restaurant boom of late? Every week seems to bring the opening of another…
The Saddest Music in the World
In the 16 years since he made the freakish Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Winnipeg-based Canadian director Guy Maddin — whose work can best be called “experimental” — has become no less strange and no more willing to make a movie that more than a small assembly of cineastes will want to see. His…
The People’s Republic of Upper St. Clair
Who would have thought that Upper St. Clair would be a haven for affirmative action? That its young people might soon receive opportunities based not on merits but on the wrongs suffered by their elders? It seems unlikely, but nothing else explains the school board’s surprising decision in late May to replace the coach…
Video Imp-eratives
It’s about puppets against imperialism. It’s about interviewing a business-suited statue on national energy policy. It’s also about sporting underwear in public, skipping rope on the Carnegie Mellon campus until the cops come, and running for president while wearing a rubber boot on your head and brandishing a 4-foot-long toothbrush. Imp Activism is the…
No Clean Ending
On April 8, the Service Employees International Union Local 3 staged a “die-in” at the lobby of Centre City Tower on Smithfield Street Downtown. They were protesting the firing of nine janitors, who lost their jobs three months earlier when the building’s manager dropped its unionized cleaning contractor for a nonunion outfit. The dismissal came…
Mass Transit
See Chris Potter’s “You Had to Ask”
Big Hack Attack
As the first National Performing Arts Convention hustles and bustles Downtown this weekend, a meet-up of a different sort will take hold of Oakland. But don’t expect to see hordes of public-relations pros swamping the college area with exclusive passes or goodie bags full of local restaurant coupons. Just as it did when first…
La Vie Promise
When we first meet Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert), she’s a beaten-down (literally) prostitute working the streets in Nice. A chance encounter with her long-estranged teen-age daughter Laurence (Maud Forget) ends badly, and the two set off on a journey north, ostensibly to locate Sylvia’s former husband. They are joined by Joshua (Pascal Greggory), another lost soul…
Pitching and Catching
After 30 years, the annual June PrideFest celebration of Pittsburgh’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community has morphed into a more-than-month-long slate of activities that includes several firsts: a visit by a bike tour promoting same-sex marriage rights, and Pride Day at a Pirates game at PNC Park. PrideFest itself, on June 19, has…
A Slipping-Down Life
In Toni Kalem’s offbeat romance adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel, Evie, an aging small-town North Carolina waif, develops a bizarre fascination with Drumstrings Casey, a local rock ‘n’ roll singer — a pretentious no-talent whom the film apparently takes at face value. Casey’s gimmick is that he “talks” (i.e. intones high school notebook ponderings) before…
Bush League
“Slashing Funds At Home.” Scanning news reports of a White House memo on domestic spending, columnist Derrick Z. Jackson rips on Bush double-dealing in The Boston Globe (June 2). The May 19 memo directs officials to brace for cuts in 2006 — including in programs for which Bush has just proposed election-year increases. Targets include…
A Conversation with Ron Baraff
Ron Baraff is the somewhat diminutive director of museum collections and archives at Rivers of Steel. The Homestead-based organization seeks to preserve the region’s industrial heritage and celebrate the legacy of the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike. You’re a historian of the steel industry, but I’m guessing your people didn’t work much in the mills. No,…
These Boots Weren’t Made for Running
The behavior of Mr. Sewer Boots stinks to high heaven. Jim Motznik is the city councilor who, last December, sanctimoniously and cartoonishly put his stinky ol’ sewer boots on city council’s table, just to demonstrate how he was knee-deep in the fiscal bullshit he said the mayor was spewing during the city’s never-ending fiscal crisis.…
My office looks out over I-376 to the hill next to Bates Street. During the winter, I noticed wooden crosses and a white sculpture that looked like the Virgin Mary on the hillside. What is it?
You are not the first to have a vision of the Virgin Mary on that spot, though in its long history of religious visionaries, you may be among the few to identify a two-foot-tall statue from across a six-lane highway. Readers with inferior vision can see the site for themselves by following these directions…
Getting With the Program
In convincing Community College of Allegheny County to form the new Africana and Ethnic Studies department, Dr. Ralph Proctor didn’t have to do anything as dramatic as sabotage the school’s computer lab. That’s what happened in 1969 after he provided counsel to students and community activists who wanted to institute a School of Black Studies…
Aveo
Being tagged as a Smiths rip-off — as Aveo was after dropping its debut album in 2001 — does not bode well for any band desperate to carve out its own niche in an already packed-to-overflowing pop scene. So it’s helpful that on Battery, produced by the almost-legendary Phil Ek (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse),…
Henry Flint and the Insurrections
Thanks to the generosity of Locust Music, Ampersand and Recorded, we’ve got a flood of releases by a musician who couldn’t buy label interest in the ’60s and ’70s, when the bulk of his recordings were made. Known as the hillbilly minimalist who decided to take the essence of country and western and hoedown fiddling,…
The Legendary George Sibanda/Zambia Roadside
The endless stream of archival African recordings Utrecht-based imprint SWP has recently seen fit to release gives further proof that, at the dawn of the 21st century, we are indeed able to own recordings of just about everything. Yet, The Legendary George Sibanda — only the 18th in what promises to be a nearly endless…
Oblivion: Stories By David Foster Wallace
Reviewer: JOHN FREEMAN If an artist’s job is to criticize culture, then David Foster Wallace is American literature’s high priest of carp. In books like Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace revs up his pet peeves and sends them soaring on gusts of linguistic bloviation. Oblivion continues this tradition with eight…
Young Adam
Before he became the young Obi-Wan Kenobi, the charming Scottish actor Ewan McGregor gave a series of commando performances in edgy films like Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine and The Pillow Book. Back then his only light saber was the one God gave him. But soon he began to make middling thrillers (Nightwatch), imaginative spoofs (Moulin Rouge)…
