MP3 Monday: Pete Bush & the Hoi Polloi
While his old band, Salena Catalina, is still around (or, rather, around again), Pete Bush has also branched out on his own: The guitarist and singer now heads up Pete Bush & the Hoi Polloi. I reviewed the band’s first record, Idaho, just after it came out a few months back. Now we’re giving you…
More on test scores at district Accelerated Learning Academies
In City Paper’s news feature this week, we took a look at how the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ highly-touted Accelerated Learning Academies have performed since they were created by former Superintendent Mark Roosevelt back in 2006. The specialized schools, which feature longer school days and years, were designed to accelerate the learning curve of struggling students.…
Moon Travel Series Writers at Waffle Shop
The East Liberty hangout’s interweb talk show gets a visit tomorrow night from two writers who approach Pittsburgh as tourists might. And they’ve got interesting guests. Dan Eldridge just released the new edition of Moon Pittsburgh, that hip publisher’s guide to the city. And Anna Dubrovsky, a Pittsburgh resident, is the author of the brand-new…
Review: Elzhi and Skyzoo, et al., at Shadow Lounge Outdoor Music Series
The weather was beautiful as Shadow Lounge prepared to host the newest chapter of its Outdoor Music Series. Fencing in the Baum Boulevard block where it meets Highland Avenue, the stage was set for a night jam-packed with performances by artists coming from Pittsburgh, New York, Philly, and Detroit. Brooklyn MC Louis Logic, who has…
Short List: Week of September 1 – 8
Thu., Sept. 1 — Film Davis Guggenheim’s controversial documentary Waiting for Superman proposed charter schools as a key fix for the nation’s troubled education system, blame for which the film laid largely with teachers’ unions. A new film begs to differ: The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman blasts Guggenheim’s film as the cinematic face…
Who Are Pittsburgh’s Real Nonprofits?
Pittsburgh’s health-care giants are, we’re often reminded, nonprofits. They’re supposed to plow earnings back into their operations, charitable care, feel-good TV ads … just so long as the money isn’t being handed back as dividends for shareholders. But what if you could buy a piece of Highmark? Just how profitable is this altruism racket? We…
Bridges of Pittsburgh
Poem by Liane Ellison Norman
Carmi’s
To walk into Carmi’s Family Restaurant is to journey through layers of time — not directly through a tunnel, as a sci-fi time-travel machine might drop you into an earlier epoch, but through eras nested one within the other, like a chronological Russian doll. Carmi’s is within the Allegheny West Historic District, a Victorian neighborhood…
Route 19 Beer & Cigar
Route 19 Beer & Cigar is hard to find, even from Route 19. The little Peters Township distributor sits behind a car wash and a muffler shop. But that’s OK, with clients dedicated enough to consider paying, say, $200 for a case of Belgian-brewed Delirium Tremens. Route 19 beer manager Chris Dayton is all for…
Savage Love
I have been in a monogamous marriage for 19 years and have two kids. At least I think we’re still monogamous. My husband is an avid reader of your column and loves to bring up the idea that it is perfectly normal to have outside sexual relationships with other people as long as you stay…
Missing the Point: Protest arrests highlight disconnect between cops, LGBT community
Some 100 demonstrators gathered in Bloomfield on Aug. 24, demanding justice after a same-sex couple was threatened with a gun the night before. So far, however, the only people arrested have been five of the demonstrators — an unfortunate symbol, some say, of the frequent disconnect between police and the LGBT community. The protest had…
Decelerating Learning Academies: Once the foundation of education reform, accelerated schools may be closed by city
William Boston says he’s aware that Pittsburgh is home to a number of quality public schools. He just doesn’t think his second-grade daughter attends one of them. Waiting to pick up his daughter outside Murray PreK-8, one of the district’s Accelerated Learning Academies, he says, “I don’t think it’s a good school.” The very fact…
Critics’ Picks: Sept 1 – 4
[INDIE ROCK] + THU., SEPT. 1 While Darren Jessee rose to prominence on drums, he’s also a pretty good songwriter: The former (and again?) Ben Folds Five drummer wrote or co-wrote some of that band’s best and most memorable (“Brick,” of course, and “Magic,” off the Reinhold Messner album). For the past several years, he’s…
CD Reviews
These LionsThese Lions(Self-released) The rock/chamber-pop four-piece’s debut is a study in being almost there. There’s not a song of the seven here that doesn’t have its good moments, but there’s also not a one that quite reaches the level of greatness. The dynamic and stylistic shifts within songs, and the awkward use of profanity in…
Watts the News in Detroit
Detroit is five hours away from Pittsburgh, but our fair town will be represented in the Motor City this weekend. Pittsburgh native Jeff “Tain” Watts is artist in residence at the 32nd Annual Detroit Jazz Festival, which runs Fri., Sept. 2 through Mon., Sept. 6. The dynamic drummer was born in the Hill District, attended…
Critic Just Says Yes to The War On Drugs
Adam Granduciel takes his time. It’s been about three years since The War on Drugs’ serendipitously released debut, Wagonwheel Blues — three years that have been spent touring like crazy and patiently germinating a follow-up. “I wanted to make something that was like a whole case [of songs], where all the songs had their own…
Owen Ashworth becomes Advance Base, comes to town with Concern
Just over a year ago, Owen Ashworth announced he was killing his one-man-and-collaborators band, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. He spent the back half of 2010 playing his last shows under that name — the band’s final appearance on Dec. 5, 2010, was the 13th anniversary of its first — and producing half of Serengeti’s…
Our Idiot Brother
After getting released from jail for selling weed to a uniformed police officer, Ned (Paul Rudd) loses his job at an organic farm and bounces between the homes of his mother and sisters. He does odd jobs while trying to retrieve his dog, Willie Nelson, from his ex. His sisters, the artsy bisexual Natalie (Zooey…
The Guard
The Irish West Country is a sea of green studded with boulders, sheep and not much else. Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), a lonely Galway Garda, knows this as he gazes out into the gray morning in The Guard’s opening scene. He then drops a tab of acid and says, “What a beautiful fucking day.”…
The Debt
Will the Nazis ever cease to be fertile fodder for filmmakers? Let’s hope not. We need compelling true stories like Schindler’s List and cogent fictions like Marathon Man, especially as long as some people still try to claim it never happened. What we don’t need is The Debt, a 2010 British thriller based on a…
A local author’s new book explores the paradoxical planned community known as Chatham Village.
[iamge-1] Chatham Village is a paradoxical place. Tucked on the backside of Mount Washington, not so far from outward-looking Grandview Avenue, it still seems unfamiliar to most locals. “Where is it?” they ask — even while some out-of-towners purposefully visit and study it. Among the latter was Angelique Bamberg, who arrived in 1997 as a…
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now that’s what I call a play. Three acts of two married couples screaming and crying into the existential void of Cold War America. It’s a testament to the popularity of Edward Albee’s 1960 play that, for a time, when people heard “George and Martha” they didn’t automatically think of…
With symbolism and exploded perspectives, painter Stephanie Armbruster explores postindustrial landscapes.
As someone who grew up in Cleveland and attended Carnegie Mellon University, Stephanie Armbruster has lived most of her life in post-industrial communities, where she’s been able to watch the transformation from heavy industry to soft technology. In her paintings for the exhibition In Search of Something More, at 709 Penn Gallery, Armbruster appropriates the…
The Carnegie’s leg of the Pittsburgh Biennial finds the art in work, and the work in art.
Pittsburgh knows all too well the effects of economic downturn. Ghosts of its robust industrial past are all around. Since much of the city’s identity is related to industry and labor, curator Dan Byers chose the theme of “work” for his segment of this year’s four-part Pittsburgh Biennial. His approach, on display at the Carnegie…
Accounts of police, protest behavior at Aug. 24 rally differ
[Editor’s note: Our print edition this week includes a dispatch on an Aug. 24 rally held to oppose acts of violence against LGBT residents. As Lauren Daley’s piece notes, activists have expressed misgivings that a series of arrests at the rally have, at least in subsequent media coverage, obscured the reasons it was held in…
MP3 Wednesday: The Story Changes
Sorry, things were really mixed up earlier this week and I didn’t get you your MP3 Monday. That means you get a special Wendesday treat, though! The track this week comes from The Story Changes, a band that’s not exactly from Pittsburgh, but close enough (Akron). They play here now and then, and work with…
