Before the March: Police and Punks
According to the people on Beelen Street in the Hill District, the March 20 march and rally against the war in Iraq went just fine. It’s what happened at their house the night before that sticks in their craw. About 10:15 p.m. on March 19, the residents of the last house on the woody…
Taking Lives
Early on, some aspects of D.J. Caruso’s film — all that moody lighting, plus super-close-ups and sulky cops — suggest that there might be an entertaining and visually interesting thriller in the making. Montreal is beset with a series of ritualized murders, and the authorities bring in an FBI profiler (Angelina Jolie). She’s got a…
Sit-In: No Objection
About 200 protesters participated in the non-permitted march from the William Pitt Student Union toward CMU, though in contrast to the non-permitted protest in Downtown Pittsburgh a year ago, they obeyed traffic signals. As each batch stood waiting for the light to change at Forbes Avenue, Tim Vining of the Thomas Merton Center informed them…
City’s GOP Overseers Take Charge
Republicans may be in the minority, but they ran rings around the Democrats at the city oversight board’s March 17 meeting. The oversight board — formally the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority — is the five-man club assigned by the state to fix the city’s financial mess. The two Republicans, Jim Roddey and Bill Lieberman, came…
Protest: Too Much?
Pittsburgh City Council chose an auspicious moment — St. Patrick’s Day — to discuss requiring the organizers of parades and political rallies to pay the city’s cost for hosting them. While large-scale events typically require police protection and other public services, the cash-strapped city has never had a procedure for assessing those costs. That’s…
Bristle Why You Work
Barbara Ehrenreich is the best-selling author of 11 books, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. The book challenges welfare reform’s premise that a steady job ensures financial independence. Spending a year working in Florida, Maine and Minnesota at such low-wage jobs as house cleaner, waitress and Wal-Mart clerk, Ehrenreich documents –…
With the upcoming arrival of the Pittsburgh Hard Hats, is there more to the history of professional basketball in Pittsburgh than the retro Rens jerseys I see around town?
It’s true: Pittsburgh is due to receive yet another non-NBA pro basketball team. Cynics, though, might suggest that Pittsburgh Hard Heads might be a better name … as in “hard-headed refusal to see reality.” For the Hard Hats will be the eighth professional basketball team to make a go of it in Pittsburgh. The…
Liars
The booklet that accompanies They Were Wrong, So We Drowned — either the second or fourth Liars album, depending on your epistemology — contains a series of broadly stroked, dull-colored pencil drawings: A horns-and-cape devil oversees a pagan fire dance; a series of brooms; a goat dancing for a pig; a horse and Winnie the…
Kylie Minogue
Forget about Britney, Christina, Jay-Z, Beyonce, American Idol, Newlyweds, the new wave of new wave, J-pop, the World Cup, the Olympics, terrorism, nationalism, anti-Americanism, imperialism, anti-globalization new-lefty protest culture, and the international space program. Kylie Minogue is the single unifying pop-culture phenomenon on the face of the Earth today. Get the numbaz on 2001’s Fever…
Modest Mouse
Not bad. Just … different. That’s probably the best way to describe the hugely anticipated new album from Modest Mouse, and if you’re a long-time disciple of Isaac Brock and his addictive, immensely talented indie-pop ministry, you can probably guess what that means. If not, though, here’s a hint: Gone from these 15 songs,…
The Battle of Algiers
In 1954 Algerians began a guerrilla war to claim their country from the French, and the French started fighting like hell to keep it. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but that was right around the time the West began to realize the Sahara’s potential to cough up oil. The latter is…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
In Being John Malkovich, which has become the postmodern cinema bible since its fin-de-millennium release, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman riffed beautifully on personality, self-image and celebrity. In Adaptation, he turned his own writer’s block into a self-indulgent mess. Now, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman throws together a bunch of ideas and concepts…
Trilogy: Après la vie
Pascal is a cop; his wife, Agnes, is a morphine addict. She works as a schoolteacher; part of his job is making sure she gets her fix. In Lucas Belvaux’s Après la vie, their marriage is further complicated when Jacquillat, the Grenoble drug boss who’s been supplying Pascal, cuts off access until Pascal takes…
Amnesty International Film Festival
The Amnesty International Film Festival returns to Pittsburgh for its second annual engagement here with 17 films — from shorts to feature length — focusing on human rights struggles across the globe. As another year finds the world still in turmoil, this program offers hope as the filmmakers document the dignity and inspiration of ongoing…
The Right Bus
David Walton is the author of two short story collections and the novel, Ride, which was first published by Carnegie Mellon University Press last year and is being published again next month by Penguin Books. For years, like the protagonist of Ride, David Walton worked to train developmentally disabled people to ride Port Authority buses…
Hukkle
In 29-year-old Hungarian director György Pálfi’s film Hukkle, as in ordinary life, the rhythms of the everyday — the trot of a pig, the whirr and whiz of a sewing machine, the rituals of a beekeeper and of (gasp!) a murderer — add up to far more than the sum of their parts. Threaded together…
Going Out with a Bangs
The results are in, the evidence is weighed, the tables have been consulted. Modern science has proved what we’ve all long suspected: Life in Pittsburgh sucks. It sucks for part-time and full-time workers alike. It sucks for white men, black women and just about everyone else. This may not come as news to some,…
Jersey Girl
I’ve never been a big fan of writer-director Kevin’s Smith in-your-face, shaggy comedies — they’re never as funny as you reckon he reckons they are. But his profane loser fan-boys and their sophomoric sexual obsessions are noticeably absent in Smith’s latest — a family feel-good comedy about a PR flack (Ben Affleck) who moves outta…
The Qualm Before the Storm
“Has the parade started?” one riot-ready city police officer asked another, lounging amid a dozen squad cars, paddy wagons and an empty Port Authority bus on Roberto Clemente Drive in Oakland. They were waiting for anti-war marchers to get out of hand during the March 20 rally, but it was 2 p.m. and the peaceful…
Never Die Alone
“This is not some rap video or a Quentin Tarantino movie. This is real life,” Nancy (Aisha Tyler) tells her foot-shorter, aspiring journalist white boyfriend Paul (David Arquette). Wrong. Paul’s obsession for drug dealer King David’s (DMX) life, a life that ends in the backseat of Paul’s car, nudges out his fetish for taller black…
