Wolf Eyes
Imagine the screaming sound of bodies being sawed in half — or don’t — and then replay the soundtrack to your worst nightmare in a crackling, digital loop. Twist the knob to 11. Set off every car alarm in town. And while you’re at it, drench the cat in water and wait for…
Arts and Attainment
In the heart of the Hill District, on overworked Centre Avenue, sits the 77-year-old New Granada Theater, once a place for all of the pop and jazz greats of the past to perform and party: Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and every toast of the town, white and black. Today…
Freed Verse
At the round wooden table in his skylit North Side kitchen, Huang Xiang jumps up for two reasons: to endlessly refill his guests’ glasses with hot tea, and to fetch books — his own extensive writings along with histories attesting that he’s perhaps China’s premier dissident poet of the past half-century. Huang, 62, and…
Tax Burdensome
If you work in the City of Pittsburgh, the financial overseers want you not only to bail out the near-bankrupt government, but to give the business community a tax break, too. The save-the-city plan recommended by the fiscal oversight board would have nearly everyone who works within city limits paying $144…
Major Drums
Activists drumming on paint buckets Nov. 12 Downtown to protest the dismissal of nine union janitors who cleaned Centre City Tower on Smithfield Street could be heard at least 19 stories above the street, said workers inside during the noontime rally. If protest organizers continue to accelerate their campaign against the firings, they hope…
Papa J’s Centro
Location: 212 Boulevard of the Allies, Downtown. 412-391-7272 Hours: Mon.-Tue. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Wed.-Thu. 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat. 4-10 p.m. Prices: Appetizers and pizza $4-12; entrees $10-19 Fare: Italian Atmosphere: Olde-tyme saloon Liquor: Full bar Downtown Pittsburgh has changed a lot since there were forts instead of fountains at the Point,…
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Pittsburgh’s first Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 21, says coordinator Emilia Lombardi, was developed as much to draw attention to the lives of trans people as to their deaths. “For the most part … trans people are totally ignored,” says Lombardi. “They’re a footnote, a quick blurb in the news about a man…
Condolence Card
Mayor Tom Murphy finally got something he wanted this week. Patty Maloney, one of the most vocal opponents of the mayor’s controversial “Fifth/Forbes” redevelopment plan, is closing her card store on Wood Street. And the city didn’t even have to use eminent domain to get rid of her. “I grew up Downtown,” says Maloney.…
War Treads
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” said Eric Hulsey, marching down Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill carrying a hand-lettered sign: “Not Proud To Be An American.” Hoping to reach the man-off-the-street, Hulsey was one of more than 100 people on Nov. 11 protesting the U.S. Army’s second push into Fallujah, Iraq, to put down…
The Steelers claim record attendance at the past two games. How is that possible? There is a finite number of seats available, and we hear they always sell out.
What I’m about to say may shock and disturb you. I find it incomprehensible myself. But the fact remains: Not everyone who buys a ticket actually shows up at the game. Or as Steelers spokesman Ron Wahl puts it, “Just because it’s a sell-out doesn’t mean everyone shows up.” In the NFL, attendance is…
P.S.
Louise (Laura Linney) is 39, an admissions officer at Columbia’s graduate school of arts and maintaining a friendly relationship with her ex, physics professor Peter (Gabriel Byrne). Into her dull life comes young F. Scott (Topher Grace), an admissions candidate who more than resembles Louise’s long-dead high school sweetheart. A relationship ensues — and soon…
Squatter Homes & Gardens DO-IT-YOURSELF Urban Loft
The first step was choosing the right place. Not just any empty building would do. Luckily, Pittsburgh has many to choose from. We’d met in Oakland, my guide and I, and began hiking toward the Hill. Dropping into some second-growth urban forest, we found overgrown steps, and passed forgotten blacktop streets and whole rows of…
A Conversation with Alan Juffs
Growing up in Devon, England, University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute Director Alan Juffs played much more cricket and rugby than basketball. His first real hoops immersion came in the early ’80s — in Changsha, China, teaching English to city kids crazy for the sport. This past summer, Juffs — who is fluent in Mandarin…
Second Childhood
Except for maybe bedtime, nothing can come soon enough when you are a kid: Christmas (for many), vacations, birthdays. Childhood is just one intolerable wait after another, until the deeply anticlimactic achievement of adulthood. From then on, the anticipation is less nerve-wracking, though the joy is less pure. Happily, the newly…
National Treasure
In these days of increased security, hyper-patriotism and paranoia about the state of the union, it’s only normal that we seek release in entertainment that lets us vicariously process our anxieties. Well, God bless America, Disney and mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer: National Treasure is a film that’s unafraid to treat the foundation of Our…
Enduring Love
The deceptively simple title of the British drama Enduring Love has at least two meanings: On the one hand, it suggests that love is a glorious affair that never ends; on the other, it warns that love is something we’re forced to suffer if we want to affirm our fragile humanity. Those are…
Sideways
Alexander Payne has made himself very hard to take seriously. His first movie, Citizen Ruth, was a shrill witless farce about the abortion wars. His third, About Schmidt, was a lumbering yawner about its star, Jack Nicholson. And in between came Election, a trenchant black comedy about the perils of trying…
Bunnybrains
Here’s the brilliancy of a set like this: Take a band whose ’90s vinyl output, even its lone Matador-released 1995 LP, has been findable only on the thorniest of paths, and nonexistent on CD, dump the lot onto four discs, add a DVD of random concert footage and backstage drooling idiocy, and sell the thing…
Battles
Featuring an almost too-good-to-be-true lineup of avant-experimentalists and math rock musicians — including guitarist Ian Williams, formerly of Pittsburgh’s Don Caballero and Storm & Stress, and composer Tyondai Braxton — it’s perhaps not surprising that the music Battles make is anything other than complicated, richly layered and quite unlike anything that’s come before. Sounding something…
