Pitching an anti-bullying effort to the Pirates
The anti-gay bullying “It Gets Better” Project has attracted the help of some big names: Lady Gaga, President Barack Obama even Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl. Could the Pittsburgh Pirates be next? Local LGBT activists hope so, and one of them, Sue Kerr, has started an online petition directed to the ball club’s president, Frank Coonelly,…
For school budget math to add up, new seating charts needed
Small class sizes might be good for students and teachers, but they’re bad for a school district struggling to solve a multimillion-dollar deficit. And if the Pittsburgh Public Schools is going to balance its budget, administrators say, all the district’s classrooms must be filled to capacity. During a community presentation last night, city school officials…
Review: White Wives release show
A brisk evening in the middle of summer is refreshing — especially when escaping the stuffy heat of a packed rock concert. 222 Ormsby, the DIY performance space in Mt. Oliver, hosted over one hundred and fifty folks for a fine show last Friday. It was the tour kickoff and album release for White Wives…
MP3 Monday: Chet Vincent & the Big Bend
Howdy! Welcome to MP3 Monday. This week, we’re serving up a track from the new album from Chet Vincent & the Big Bend, For Everyone. The band celebrated the album’s release this past Friday at Brillobox; now they’re celebrating its three-day birthday by giving you all a free download of the first track from the…
Belated review: Summer of Love rave
Raves are typically lauded as an underground never-neverland. Teenagers, twentysomethings, and the thirysomething set of lost boys and girls come together in the name of electronic dance music. The sounds have changed since the birth of the word ‘rave,’ but the core concept has remained the same – dancing to rhythms around a proverbial fire.…
A dispatch from Furry Nation
Since 2006, tail and fur-costumed folks have converged on the David L. Lawrence Convention Center for Anthrocon, a gathering of fans of anthropomorphic (human-like) animals. Anthrocon 2011 has garnered the largest registration so far, says Dr. Samuel Conway, chairman and CEO of Anthrocon: Some 4,000 people registered in advance, with an estimated 500 additional attendees…
Pitt researchers continue study of AIDS-fighting gel for pregnant women
As we noted earlier this year, Pittsburgh has been the hub of research into microbicides — topical substances that prevent the sexual transmission of HIV when applied vaginally or rectally. And in a recently launched clinical trial, researchers are foraying into another area that’s relatively new: determining if such substances are safe for women who…
The Laramie Project
On Oct. 6, 1998, a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was taken to the prairie of Laramie, Wyo., by two men and beaten, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die. Eighteen hours later he was found, still alive, and flown to a Colorado hospital. He died five days later. Following his death,…
Green House: Net-zero renovation takes green living to the next level
When it was built a century ago, the house at 710 N. St. Clair St. didn’t have much, if any, insulation. Nor did most American buildings constructed throughout the 20th century: Why insulate when coal and gas were so cheap? But thanks to a cutting-edge effort by a local renovator, 710 North St. Clair, in…
On the Record with Dr. Mindy Fullilove
Dr. Mindy Fullilove, professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University, is the author of Root Shock (1998), which examined urban renewal’s effects on Pittsburgh’s Hill District and other similar neighborhoods around the country. She has recently been revisiting the Hill for her next book, Elements of Urban Restoration, to find out how…
Stress Test : Budget woes testing school district’s relationship with union
Last June marked a high point in the relationship between the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers. But one year after the district inked an historic contract with the teachers’ union, it appears that healthy relationship could be threatened by the budget woes facing the district. “I feel that Pittsburgh and other…
Film File: FBI gives public a peek at Warhol ‘obscenity’ file
If you’re looking for smut in the Andy Warhol film Lonesome Cowboys — as the FBI was when it investigated the film’s production in 1968 — you’ll find more explicit sex in the agency’s report than ever made it onto screen. The report was suddenly made available on the FBI’s website for the first time on May 19,…
L’Amour Fou
Pierre Bergé, the business and romantic partner of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, narrates this account of their five decades together. But this film, directed by Pierre Thoretton, is less a bio-doc than an elegiac reflection upon Saint Laurent — his influential career, his triumphs and torments, and the objet d’art-filled life he shared…
Green Lantern
A cocky Earth pilot (Ryan Reynolds) is bequeathed a ring by a dying alien that makes him a member of an intergalactic fighting squadron. Just in time to fight a really mean dark cloud that’s swallowing up the universe. Martin Campbell’s adaptation of the DC Comics series is reminiscent of … well, reading a comic…
Cars 2
In this Disney Pixar animated comedy directed by John Lasseter and Brad Lewis, the vehicular buddies from the American Southwest journey overseas for a race. But one car is mistaken for a spy. While every child in the theater loved this sequel to the 2006 mega-hit, for the grown-ups who have to drive them there,…
Short List: June 23 – 30
Thu., June 23 — Convention Downtown alert: It’s not a mascot convention. It’s just those plush devotees of Anthrocon, the annual gathering for people fascinated with humanlike animal characters, or anthropomorphics. You’ll see furries all over today through Sunday — more than 3,000 are expected. But if you want to join these costumed folk in…
Savage Love
I’m a single 24-year-old gay actor/singer/comedian who’s going to be a doctor in a few years — I have varied interests — and I think being in a porn flick would be really hot. I don’t know what the ramifications of ramming on cam could be with regard to my future career. The field I…
Motion Sickness
Elected officials will do just about anything in the name of government efficiency: consolidate fire departments, divvy up road-salt purchasing, privatize services. Oddly, though, no one ever proposes shorter meetings. As reporters, government watchdogs and other masochists know, local government meetings often featuring a lengthy presentation of proclamations — generally non-controversial resolutions honoring local people…
Sharon rockers Old Accusers feel at home in Pittsburgh
Small-town life is supposed to be pretty predictable: One’s business is widely known by everyone, and the life path of high school, parenthood, and blue-collar career (without passing Go or collecting $200) seems difficult to avoid. Despite the looming threat of being a product of their hometown, though, the five members of Sharon-based band Old…
The Queen of Herbs Visits Pittsburgh
Britain’s “Queen of Herbs” Jekka McVicar visits Pittsburgh this week; she’ll be speaking at The Herb Society of America’s conference on the medicinal use of herbs, as well as promoting her new book, Jekka’s Herb Cookbook. (Lecture is 1:15-2:15 p.m. Fri., June 24. Wyndham Grand, Downtown. $15. 412-256-0514 or herbsociety.org.) McVicar entertained some of City…
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams
Despite my deep affection for sweets, I balk at paying $10 for a pint — a pint — of ice cream. That’s what I told my Ohio friends who insisted I give Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams a chance. Jeni Britton Bauer is the darling of Columbus foodies, having almost 10 years ago launched a line…
NOLA on the Square
If — like us — you’ve been singing “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” under your breath for years, but with little real hope of visiting the Crescent City, never fear. NOLA on the Square is here. At NOLA — an acronym for New Orleans, Louisiana — there are no floats, and within its storefront in the…
Mia and the Magoo
Jacques-Rémy Girerd’s animated film is the tale of a plucky girl on an odyssey to reunite with her widower father. He took a job far away at a site owned by Mr. Jekhide, a malevolent developer who’s turning a paradise into a tourist trap. All of the elements are here for a feature-length Saturday-morning cartoon…
The Tree of Life
Not sure what to do with your philosophy degree? It took almost half a century for Terrence Malick (Harvard ’65) to figure it out, and The Tree of Life is his solution. The enigmatic writer/director has never made a better film than his first one, Badlands (with Sissy Spacek). It was a slice of life,…
On the Record With Jeremiah Clark
Local singer-songwriter Jeremiah Clark spent this month touring from southern Mississippi to Washington state. Though he plans to move to New York in the fall, he returns to Pittsburgh for a show next week. Where are you playing on this tour? I was really trying to go for a lot of house concerts, indoor and…
Critics’ Picks: June 23 – 28
Chet Vincent and the Big Bend release a record, WYEP holds its summer music festival, and local shows from Sloan and Rubblebucket.
Members of ’90s Pittsburgh bands ride again in Le Cachot
There’s something familiar about Le Cachot — and it’s not just the name, cribbed from the herky-jerky old Kennywood dark ride. The four-piece, releasing its self-titled first album this weekend, is made up of folks who have been in a number of well-known local bands and, in fact, played together once, in the late ’90s,…
Mercer County native gets bass-heavy as Kastle
Some call the bass-centric paradigm in which dance music currently finds itself “post-dubstep.” Others speak in terms of its components and influences in a messy mashed-up description that involves “U.K. garage,” “140 bpm,” “half-step,” “house-tech” and a slew of other confusing terms for a new and different sound. Kastle (a.k.a. B.Rich, a.k.a. Barrett Richards) simply…
White Wives marry the personal and political
“It’s a little more ambiguous. It’s not just ‘My heart got broken,’ or, ‘Fuck that.'”
Jekyll & Hyde
The dramatic possibilities of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have long been exploited. But a musical? The 1997 Broadway version, opening Pittsburgh CLO’s 61st season, offers predictably pleasant if derivative tunes, punctuated by the odd tri- or semitone to portend Something Bad Coming. What Jekyll &…
PICT takes on Alan Ayckbourn’s uniquely interlocking farces House and Garden.
One challenge of staging Alan Ayckbourn’s unique duet of plays House and Garden is obvious: The esteemed British dramatist wrote these 1999 comedies to be performed simultaneously, by the same cast, in adjoining theaters, so that each play’s on-stage action is the other’s offstage. Such logistics alone are a cheerful challenge to Pittsburgh Irish &…
An exhibit of half-century-old news photos tantalizes with the mystery of the photographer who shot them.
While the photographs in Forgotten Witness: The Long Lost Photographs of Pittsburgh Press Photographer Alan F. Reiland are forceful, this Shaw Galleries exhibition has an especially haunting feature: its nearly anonymous photographer. Unlike the Pittsburgh Courier’s Teenie Harris, about whom a great deal is recorded, Alan F. Reiland is almost unknown. The two dozen gelatin…
A first-time local author offers a painstakingly researched account of perhaps the region’s most notorious crime spree.
In 1969, a Tarentum man named Stanley Hoss transformed himself from small-time thug to the target of a federal manhunt. Jailed for rape, Hoss had escaped and shot and killed Verona police officer Joe Zanella. Hoss, 26, then abducted a young Maryland woman and her 2-year-old daughter and fled west; he was captured in Iowa,…
WQED Airs Locally Shot Film on AIDS in the Black Community
Students from Westinghouse High School are key interviewers — not just interview subjects — in Why Us? Left Behind and Dying, the 2010 documentary by acclaimed director and producer Claudia Pryor Malis. The 90-minute film airs at 8 p.m. tonight on WQED-TV. Malis, a longtime and award-winning network-television producer, wanted to make a film about…
Police accountability bill put off again
City Council today once again postponed a preliminary vote on a much-debated police-accountability bill — but not until after police union officials drew sharp criticism for warning that the bill would increase crime by taking officers off city streets. Born out of the controversial arrest of Jordan Miles in January 2010, the legislation would, among…
