Hill and Beans
Coffeehouses would be good for the Hill District, “even a Starbucks,” says Andrea Wright-Banks, executive director of the Hill District Community Development Corporation. A grocery store would be even better, though & just not Whole Foods. “I don’t know if the city can stand two Whole Foods,” she jokes. Whole Foods, the organic specialty market…
Dread and Circuses
National HIV Testing Day (June 27) in the Hill District will feature a deejay, food tents, balloons, face painting, a massage tent — and free mammograms, blood pressure tests and of course HIV tests. It’s best to put an emphasis on fair at the health fair, notes Judy Sylvester, planning director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania…
Funny Papers
When Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers invited Teresa Heinz — wife of a Democratic presidential hopeful, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry — to speak to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists here last week, she thought Rogers was kidding. “I thought it was a joke from the newspapers,” she said. “They were trying to do me…
Follow That Story
Just as five parents of West Liberty Elementary students anxiously awaited their chance to complain to the Pittsburgh Public Schools, board administrators told them their problem was solved. The parents were at the June 16 meeting to prevent next year’s second- and third-graders from being put together in a mixed-age classroom because of lower school…
A Conversation with Stump Grinder
What’s grind core?Dan: It’s a groovier style of death metal, the kind you can snap your fingers to, the kind that makes you want to dance. We’re not pure death. We’ve got grind core rhythms that will move your hips, baby. How did you come up with the name Stump Grinder? Dave: My dad used…
Keeping Current
Deep down, many of us who love Pittsburgh for its “authenticity” harbor a secret fear. The more of Pittsburgh’s unique character gets “discovered,” we suspect, the less of it we’ll have to go around. The Starbucks moves into your grittily authentic neighborhood, and suddenly you’re no longer living in a place that Starbucks forgot –…
Against the Current
Who was a bigger bastard, JFK or Nixon? Nixon, of course. But there I was a few weeks ago in the Duquesne Club, surrounded by pictures of old Republican white men, arguing with a young Republican white boy, who said JFK’s callousness toward Jackie proved Kennedy was a bigger bastard. I’d just read Anthony Summers’…
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, I remember seeing quite a few bus lines serving different parts of the city and county. Why were all these small companies, which were apparently self-supporting, replaced by the government-subsidized Port Authority?
These days, we almost take it for granted that the private sector alone functions efficiently. Whenever it’s something really important — like financing our political campaigns or our pension funds — we turn to our trustworthy, dependable friends in Wall Street. Government, meanwhile, is practically synonymous with waste and fraud. And with the Port Authority…
The Hulk
Ang Lee’s comic-book adaptation The Hulk takes toxic families literally. Bruce Banner is a latent genetic freak thanks to his obsessive scientist dad’s illicit experiments on himself. As an adult, Bruce suffers a radioactive mishap that turns him into a green-skinned superhuman creature powered by pure rage — the sort of person who’d be handy…
Bush’s Chosen One
Spend time in Downtown’s federal courthouse, and you notice something: It’s often silent. Unlike the bustling Common Pleas Court a few blocks down Grant Street, the halls of justice that run most of the length of the U. S. Post Office and Courthouse are almost churchlike. There are rarely cops here, or drug dealers, or…
Spider
No liberating comic-book transformations await Dennis “Spider” Cleg. As played by Ralph Fiennes in David Cronenberg’s Spider, he’s a shuffling, mumbling wreck, just released from an asylum into a dingy halfway house in the same East End neighborhood where he grew up. Spider, whose movie is a slow, spare, somber study of memory, madness and…
Verse Camp
Cornelius Eady, a visiting professor of poetry at City College of New York, is resting behind his desk at the tail end of class. Students are gathering their things and streaming out the door, except for one who lags behind with a hurt look on her face and a string of questions that Eady doesn’t…
28 Days Later
It’s the end of the world once again, and as usual, a few good people have survived the latest apocalypse to search for other desperate survivors like themselves. Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up naked and alone in an abandoned hospital and soon wanders onto the streets of an abandoned London. At home, he finds his…
Various Artists
Too often in music-based films, the soundtrack serves not as a supplement, an equally intriguing yet somewhat dependent byproduct of the film, but as an independent entity that stands alone as a work, but without lending anything to buffer the film’s message. As the soundtrack to a film about the music of the South African…
Together
If words no longer exist to describe Chen Kaige’s new movie, then it’s only because someone else used them all up on other movies just like it: Together is warm, tender, sentimental, uplifting, and its characters go through the wringers of loyalty, fidelity, idealism, integrity, and so forth. It’s about a child who plays music,…
LA RECETTE ON THE RIVER’S EDGE
When a local flood advisory was issued, I couldn’t resist dining at La Recette, a restaurant perched high above the Allegheny River. From my window table, I thought might spy something terribly out-of-place floating by. Thankfully that night — I must admit that weather is not for my amusement — the Allegheny River presented nothing…
VIDEO PREVIEW
Veni, Vedi, Video Video these days is as familiar to us as air. Americans seem to spend half their waking hours watching video images, and more time than ever shooting them. Yet most of what we see reflects fairly unimaginative use of an eminently accessible medium: lots of talking heads, standard documentation of performances and…
Yes, In My Back Yard
The front of Gary Pletsch’s house on Trenton Avenue in Wilkinsburg looks like so many other well-worn rentals on the street — and like so many houses in the old eastern boroughs like Swissvale, Rankin and Braddock that mark a dense, soot-stained brick path down to the Monongahela River. Though this house isn’t in the…
Hungry for Mass Transit
It’s hard to imagine now, but not too long ago the new administration of Gov. Ed Rendell seemed a ray of hope for Pennsylvania’s long-suffering mass transit systems. Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, talked the talk on public transit, and once even lent an unscheduled campaign-trail ear to advocates here. But Rendell’s subsequent budget hit…
Wolves in Lenders’ Clothing
Early last year, Tony Ellsworth was told he could get a 7.5 percent interest mortgage that he could prepay early if he wanted to, without penalties. By the time the New Sewickley Township (Beaver County) resident read the papers he’d signed in a hasty outdoor closing in the February chill, he realized he’d been duped.…
