Masti Boys
The soft red pall the Firehouse Lounge neon casts on Sheel Mohnot underscores his recollection of a torrent of finger-wagging — his mother’s reaction to Masti Magazine, the new men’s humor and lifestyle Web site he runs with some longtime friends. “Well, my mom was looking at the site,” says the 22-year-old Murrysville native,…
Legislators to Disabled: Hating You Should Be No Crime
Advocates for the disabled are just beginning to realize that an effort to take gays out of Pennsylvania’s hate crimes statute affects those with mental or physical challenges, too. Pennsylvania’s “ethnic intimidation” statute has long provided increased penalties for crimes committed “with malicious intention” toward the victim’s race, color, religion or national origin.…
Team Poetry
One of the poems painted on the front of Huang Xiang’s North Side house reads (in English translation), “Usually there is no audience, the man recites alone. / Within the four walls, language gushes up. He takes his own / covered head and face and completely submerges them.” But on March 18…
A Conversation with Louis “Hop” Kendrick
Louis “Hop” Kendrick, 73, is trying to become Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. A long-time political organizer in the East End, Kendrick has served as interim County Councilor in District 10, director of Allegheny County’s Minority Business Enterprise office, and most recently as a consultant to County Executive Dan Onorato. After running a family trucking…
What’s inside the dome on top of the Keenan Building located on the corner of Seventh and Liberty Downtown? It looks like a prime spot for a loft apartment, or a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Oddly enough, that’s almost exactly what the building’s creator thought it looked like too. But today, the dome is one of the few parts of the building that isn’t being used for apartments. Now known as “Midtown Towers,” the building serves as moderate-income housing, but as the building manager somewhat curtly informed me,…
O’Connor Missed the Bus as Lone 2003 Vote Against Transit Funds
As relieved bus riders now know, the Port Authority’s precarious budget was temporarily rescued last week with the infusion of $25.3 million in money taken from state highway funds. Statewide, transit got $412 million from the move. It was the second such reprieve in three years. Locally, the fix depended on a…
CP Fashion 2005
Fashion To Not Die ForGoodbye Hello KittyThe New Rhinestone Cowboys The modus operandi of Attack Theatre co-directors (and husband/wife team) Michele de la Reza and Peter Kope is collaboration with artists of varied disciplines to create site-specific, dance-based performances that exude passion, physicality and humor. Attack’s production of “The Fitting Room” (January, 2005) melds dance…
Ennui
Nowadays, you can’t turn on Leno or Conan without a weekly emotive dosage from some piano-playing, songwriting prodigy, and any self-respecting, twentysomething, khaki-wearing office manager owns several Radiohead, Coldplay and Sigur Ros CDs to prove his erudition to his after-work drinking buddies. So it was inevitable that this trend would find its way to Pittsburgh,…
A Conversation with Dan Rugh
After losing his job as a Web designer during the dot-com era, Dan Rugh and his wife, Shannon, decided to launch their own T-shirt screen-printing business, Commonwealth Press, out of the basement of their South Side home. Last month they moved the company into a loft space above a beer distributor on the…
Biirdie
Biirdie — Jared Flamm, Richard Gowen and Kala Savage — points out repeatedly that Morning Kills the Dark was conceived when Flamm was housesitting for producer supreme Daniel Lanois. What the band doesn’t tell you is that it was recorded while Flamm, Gowen and Savage were dangerously addicted to Van Morrison and Sebadoh records, joints…
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Rachid Taha Tékitoi Wrasse Records Listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson, the prime minister of dub-reggae poetry, ride waves of adoration from his audience, it’s tempting to think of Johnson as a victor. And to hear Rachid Taha, the shaggy-maned lion of Parisian North Africans, on his joyful, downright radio-ready version of “Rock…
Inside Deep Throat
In the three decades both before and since the release of Deep Throat — the zenith of all low-budget, high-profit skinflicks that came with the rise of the sexual revolution — pretty much nothing has changed in the world of fellatio: You take it out, you get it hard, someone sucks on it (although…
Callas Forever
Callas Forever is the nexus of the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli’s two loves: the world of opera, and the tendency to create polished middlebrow entertainment. This story about his old friend, Maria Callas, is entirely fictional, a sort of biographical fantasy-homage that leaves you with an impression in place of a true understanding. Still, it’s…
The Green Butchers
Attend the tale of Bjarne and Svend: two insignificant Danes who live in a small town and work for the butcher Holger, a bloated troll with a cackling voice who makes venison sausage for some deer to die for. He’s famous for it, and he rubs his success into every pore of his…
Near Here
Vale and Year Civil A messy, melancholy pop collage with one foot in alt-country territory and the other in a surrealist landscape entirely its own, Vale and Year’s soon-to-be-released Civil is much more than a collection of found-sound surprises. It’s an odd and often off-key showcase of a truly inspired folk band…
Gunner Palace
“I don’t feel like I’m defending our country, and that kinda sucks,” shrugs a member of the U.S. Army 2/3 Field Artillery, a.k.a. Gunners, from his post in Baghdad last winter, while also acknowledging he’s committed to his job. That mixture of pride, confusion and ambivalence runs deep through Gunner Palace, Michael Tucker…
EDVARD MUNCH
This epic cinematic journey — at nearly three hours — is not content to simply recount the life of Edvard Munch, but seeks instead to probe the mind of the famed Norwegian painter. Originally made for Norwegian television in 1971, the film by director Peter Watkins recreates the Oslo of Munch’s youth — from the…
HOSTAGE
John Talley (Bruce Willis) is a shaggy-faced crisis negotiator who’s grown so smug that he allows a “situation to get away from him,” and a child is murdered. Talley then relocates and takes a police-chief job in Bristo Camino, a small California community where the Haves live in mountain estates and the Have-nots are unmentionable.…
Point Brugge Café
Location: 401 Hastings St., Point Breeze. 412-441-3334. Hours: Tue.-Sat. 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., noon-9 p.m. Prices: Small plates, soups and salads $4-13; sandwiches $7.50; entrees $12-21 Fare: European Atmosphere: Neighborhood bistro Liquor: Full bar Let’s talk about downtown Point Breeze: This is something we’ve never been able to do with a straight face, since to…
ICE PRINCESS
As the title suggests, it’s a modern fairy tale about a high school physics geek, Casey (Michelle Trachtenberg), who discovers her latent talent for figure skating. But in Tim Fywell’s family film, there’s a darker thread too about brittle single mothers who lean on their daughters to pursue opportunities they themselves have lost. For ice-skating…
Risk Assessment
It’s an old story: A clever politician offers a package of tax cuts he claims will benefit everyone — from the wealthiest households to the poorest. But on closer inspection, it seems the poor will get only crumbs, while the rich will enjoy a huge windfall. Is this President George W. Bush, misleading us…
WHEN ZACHARY BEAVER CAME TO TOWN
In this light but faintly bittersweet coming-of-age drama from John Schultz, a sideshow fat boy, Zachary Beaver (Sasha Joseph Neulinger), is temporarily abandoned in the small Texas town of Granger. Zachary’s arrival coincides with numerous upheavals in the life of Toby, a bespectacled, easy-going kid. Toby (Jonathan Lipnicki) and his pal befriend the New Jersey-bred,…
Depart-mental Illness
I saw a buddy of mine in a coffee shop and asked him if he could believe all the hysteria over Kaufmann’s department stores being purchased by another corporation. He was in a hurry, but took the time to sit down in one of those giant brown comfy Starbucks chairs and give me…
Going More Directly to Jail
During his 90-minute sentencing hearing Downtown in federal court on Feb. 25, convicted bank robber Alexis McIntyre thought he might catch a break. His attorney, Michael Healey, presented 25 letters of support from friends, family and members of McIntyre’s church. McIntyre’s bishop flew in from New York that morning to speak on his…
