Vampire Nation
Local electronic musician Vampire Nation — a.k.a. Fredrik von Hamilton, plus various onstage members — has been purveying his brand of eclectic, genre-straddling music for nearly a decade, quietly marketing to a national fanbase and even doing a handful of dates in England and a slot at last year’s CMJ in New York, while often…
Death Cab For Cutie
“So this is the new year,” Ben Gibbard wails at the start of Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie’s subtle and near-flawless new album. “And I don’t feel any different.” We should all be thankful for his emotional slump; Death Cab is one of the very few bands in recent memory who’ve managed to consistently release…
The Streets
Twenty-two-year-old, one-man-band Englishman Mike Skinner counts himself as a true from-The-Streets mug — not really Florence and Normandy, but not exactly Carnaby or Oxford either. With Original Pirate Material, Skinner (as The Streets) declared himself the voice of the geezer — the latest in a lineage of British pop musicians from Ray Davies to Tricky…
Hey Mercedes
Probably one of the tightest, most exciting bands to come out of the guitar-driven emo scene of the mid-’90s was Braid, a Chicago foursome who nearly perfected the venerable rock trick of building up a song slowly and quietly before a crashing, explosive chorus. (Think Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”) Braid’s infectious hooks and totally…
Probably one of the tightest, most exciting bands to come out of the guitar-driven emo scene of the mid-’90s was Braid, a Chicago foursome who nearly perfected the venerable rock trick of building up a song slowly and quietly before a crashing, explosi
Illustrator: WAYNO To firefighters union president Joe King, Pittsburgh is incomparable. If you want to figure out how many firefighters and fire stations we need by comparing Pittsburgh to anyplace else, he cautions, “you can’t use a St. Louis, Indianapolis, [or] any structure of a fire department in Ohio, because it’s flat terrain,…
Darlene, Mean Budget Machine
Elected school board members can suggest tax cuts too. Or so Pittsburgh School Board President Darlene Harris hopes. As the school district prepares its 2004 budget, Harris is pushing a homestead exemption for Pittsburgh residents in the coming year. Already implemented by the city and the county for their property taxes, the homestead exemption…
City Lumbers Toward Regulations
Pittsburgh’s increasingly rural economy was under the microscope again Oct. 14 when City Council found itself discussing the regulation of a growth industry: logging. Council held a public hearing on proposals to regulate or ban commercial lumbering operations within the city limits, 10 weeks after it approved strip mining on a 635-acre site in Hays.…
Trick or Treatment
“There is no affordable health care for the janitors Downtown,” says Tom Hoffman, spokesman for the janitors’ union, Service Employees International Union — at least not for their families. SEIU Local 3 represents 750 people who clean “all of the major office buildings” Downtown, Hoffman explains: USX, PNC, the Gateways, the PPGs, Freemarkets and…
Follow That Story
The family of Michael Kurland, the Mount Lebanon middle school special-ed student whose placement in summer Extended School Year was the subject of a state hearing in August (Levine: “Child Left Behind,” Aug. 20), has lost its appeal of the verdict and will not pursue the case further.
Mercy, Mercy Me
Faye Girsh, senior vice president of End of Life Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), spoke to Pittsburgh medical student members of the Palliative Care Interest Group (which focuses on treating symptoms without trying to prolong life or cure disease), lawyers and others in late September about living with death in America. Why the new…
What’s the history of the Alexander Calder mobile that used to be in the airside terminal of the Pittsburgh International Airport? I heard it changed colors a few times. Why isn’t it there anymore? Where did it go?
You know, I’ve heard Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey asking almost the same questions about US Airways: It’s changed colors a few times, but why doesn’t it want to be at the airport anymore? Where is it going? So let me put your mind at ease first. Alexander Calder’s mobile, called “Pittsburgh,” is unlike…
Runaway Jury
Nobody is more cynical about the justice system than the insiders. That certainly seems to be the case with lawyer-turned-novelist John Grisham, and jurisprudence has never looked so woeful as it did in his curious legal thriller The Runaway Jury. Grisham’s potboilers, in which some morally upright legal eagle battles what’s rotten within the system,…
Veronica Guerin
Veronica Guerin may well have been a fascinating woman, but we don’t learn that from Joel Schumacher’s simplistic bio-pic. Writing for the Sunday Independent newspaper, Guerin made her name in the mid-1990s investigating drug gangs and organized crime in Dublin. In 1996, she was murdered by members of those very gangs, and her brutal death…
The Exit Interview
For the past seven years, until he signed off with his last show on Oct. 17, John McIntire was the founding host of NightTalk on PCNC, the fledgling local cable news station operated by WPXI. McIntire, who for 15 years before coming to Pittsburgh was a TV news reporter and anchor in markets including Orlando,…
The Animation Show
Animator Don Hertzfeldt’s best-known characters come in two shapes. One is a fluffy, falsetto-voiced cloud with stick arms and legs and a black triangle for its merry little mouth. The other, more conventionally humanoid, has an eggplant-like body with stick arms and legs, a head like a pea, and big round eyes settled in a…
We’re Not Worthy!
All you really need to know about the latest plan to bail out Pittsburgh is where it was unveiled on Oct. 18: the Shadyside mansion of Elsie and Henry Hillman, Pittsburgh’s foremost billionaire Republican couple. The location was perfectly suitable. In the sunnier days of his administration, Mayor Tom Murphy handed out subsidies and…
Leaving Metropolis
Brad Fraser’s Leaving Metropolis is an amiable little story that revolves around two sets of intersecting characters: David, a gay painter/sculptor who spends his time with Kryla, a newspaper columnist and natural woman, and Shannon, an HIV-positive pre-operative transsexual; and Matt and Violet, the owners of Winnipeg’s homey Main Street Diner, and the two straightest…
A Conversation with Steven Noss
What exactly is a hair weave?A hair weave is just hair you add on to you own hair by bonding it or braiding it. It’s real human hair, that’s been processed and colored in China. What’s a hair entertainer? A hair entertainer is a person who takes the stage and turns hair into…
Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The 18th annual Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival continues through Sun., Oct. 26. Films and videos screen at the Harris Theater, Downtown; 103 Margaret Morrison, Carnegie Mellon University campus, Oakland; and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, East Liberty. Tickets are $7.50 for single admissions. Discount passes are available, including: the Cheap Thrills Pass ($42 for…
