Saint Etienne
“The dog and the dish,” Iain Sinclair wrote in his seminal psychogeographic tour of London, Lights Out For the Territory, “they hang out together chummy as a pub sign.” The Pit Bull and Satellite Dish: Add to this lexicon The Crane and Housing Project; The Banksy Tag. That’s the territory explored musically and visually…
Restaurant Alexander
Location: 5840 Forward Ave., Squirrel Hill. 412-421-3370 Hours: Tue.-Wed. 6-10 p.m.; Thu. 6-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 7 p.m.-1 a.m.; Sun. 5 p.m.-midnight. Prices: Appetizers $3.50-8; main courses $4-27 Fare: Russian, Ukrainian, Eastern European Atmosphere: Hotel ballroom Liquor: BYOB As professional (ahem) eater-outers, we’ve lucked upon a surprising number of dining gems in out-of-the-way places. But what’s…
Black Dice
Call its music “stream of subconsciousness.” Or don’t call it music at all, because it’s actually much more than that: A multi-layered and oddly textured experiment in sound that probably owes a larger debt to contemporary and conceptual art than it does to even noise or punk rock. Based in New York City after…
Memorial Daze
On television, I just watched another corpse float by somewhere in New Orleans. But I knew I was not allowed to be particularly sad about it. Because I’ve learned that some corpses are more important than others. People traveled thousands of miles to stare at the dead Pope corpse. But believe…
CHAOS
Even barring the scenes of graphic violence, David DeFalco’s slasher film is worthless. Its minimal plot featuring two teen-age girls being chased through the woods by cartoonish hillbillies has been depicted ad nauseum, and certainly with more flair than in this ham-fisted, artistically bereft version. But let’s not discount Chaos’ “money” scenes, in which the…
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family
Your 6-year-old is blasting Black Sabbath on the car stereo while traffic is clogged like a men’s room at half time. Getting to the church on time will require a feat of derring-do on par with O.J. Simpson’s Hertz-sponsored airport sprint. You’re bound for Canada with all its promise of marital freedom and you have…
CRONICAS
Now that Western journalism has become all but synonymous with moral frailty and deceit, the time couldn’t be riper for Sebastián Cordero’s psychological whodunit in which John Leguizamo portrays Manolo Bonilla, a Miami-based tabloid TV reporter of dubious morality. When Bonilla first learns of a small Ecuadorian village being terrorized by a serial killer, he…
Who was the first African American on Pittsburgh City Council?
Just how backward has Pittsburgh been? So backward that it was easier for an African American to get elected to a post in the state legislature … which ain’t exactly the Rainbow Coalition. Yet that’s how it was for Paul F. Jones. Born in Kentucky in 1909, Jones moved here at…
AN UNFINISHED LIFE
It’s a mash-up of Million Dollar Baby and The Horse Whisperer! Battered widow Jean (Jennifer Lopez), with 9-year-old daughter in tow, returns to stay with her grumpy father-in-law, Einar (Robert Redford), on his scraggly Wyoming ranch. Einar’s grown cold since the death of his son a decade ago, and his remaining bit of humanity is…
Votes Illustrated
Lynn Swann hits the top of the steps, his shoulders rising and falling with a final cleansing breath before he approaches the three reporters waiting for him on the other side of the hallway. It’s game time. He strides toward them with every ounce of grace that carried him through nine NFL seasons, ready for…
A conversation with Peter Coppin
It’s a big time at Peter Coppin’s Carnegie Mellon University-based Remote Experience and Learning Lab: For the past three weeks, eight guest scientists have joined the lab’s staff to direct a robot rover named Zoí«, who hails from CMU’s Robotics Institute. On Sept. 3, Zoí« began ranging about the vast, barren Atacama Desert in northern…
Is City Force Up to Slots Task?
To study where and how 3,000 slot machines will fit in Pittsburgh’s single slots parlor, the Pittsburgh Gaming Task Force has one consultant and no staff. The Philadelphia Gaming Advisory Task Force, prepping for two slots parlors, has eight full-time staff members on the city payroll — a mix of existing city employees,…
Anti-War Movement Strikes on Several Fronts
“If there was ever a time to say the emperor has no clothes, by God it’s now,” says Celeste Zappala. Zappala is part of one of three traveling groups calling themselves the Bring Them Home Now bus tour, which stopped in Pittsburgh Sept. 11 to create a temporary Pittsburgh version of the protest…
Recruitment Objectors Recruit More of Their Own
Anger over police use of weapons against protesters on Aug. 20 continues to draw new faces to pickets in front of the military recruitment center on Forbes Avenue in Oakland. On Sept. 10, Allison Campbell, 18, of Oakdale was among 40 people standing with anti-recruitment signs for the seventh picket conducted by the Pittsburgh…
Lord of War
At the end of Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, the story of an affable American who sells weapons to anyone who wants them, Niccol’s immutable protagonist tells the G-man who’s been dogging him for almost 20 years that “the President of the United States” is the real mastermind behind his sanguinary profession. Soon after that…
Junebug
Filmmakers can’t resist the South, which seems ready-made for dramatic outings with its perceived “otherness,” as if the land below the Mason-Dixon line were some exotic outpost of the regular United States ruled by heavily accented Bible-thumpers and quirky just-folks. Phil Morrison’s small gem of a comedy-drama Junebug, set in North Carolina, manages to slyly…
Saraband
Can there possibly be too many Ingmar Bergman films in the world? Some 20 years after Fanny and Alexander, his “retirement” film as a director, and almost half a century after his masterpiece The Seventh Seal, Bergman has now written and directed Saraband, a drama that moves with the stately rhythm of the dance for…
Amnesty International Film Festival
The third annual Amnesty International Film Festival concludes its program of film and video focusing on human-rights struggles around the globe. The festival runs through Sun., Sept. 17, and includes free screenings Saturday and Sunday. All films are to be screened via video projection. For more information see www.amnestyusa.org/filmfest or call 412-291-9233. 8 p.m.…
Foreign Exchange
Your typical young filmmaker started with his parents’ home-video camera no later than high school, then trundled off to a film program somewhere and whatever career possibililties might await. Jeremy Braverman always appreciated film. But to discover his avocation, he had to spend a few years after college in Budapest — not only making…
Anonymity For All, and For All a Good Fright
Andy Mulkerin is fully aware of the irony: Pittsburgh’s Indymedia Web site (pittsburgh.indymedia.org/), established to foster the free flow of information, may be a catalyst for kicking information off the Web elsewhere. Mulkerin helps run the site but isn’t in charge. No one is; that’s part of the point, as with similar sites…
