MP3 Monday: Mandrake Project
Greetings! This week’s MP3 Monday offering comes to us from Mandrake Project. The band, headed up by guitarist Kirk Salopek, recently released Transitions, its first LP with John Schisler of New Invisible Joy supplying vocals. It’s an excellent match, I think. Check it out for yourself by downloading “In Love.” To download MP3, right-click…
CMU overseas venture attracts criticism
Just hours before Carnegie Mellon University officials and the President of Rwanda formally announced plans to open a new branch of the university inside the East African country, roughly 40 human-rights activists gathered on campus today to denounce the move, calling President Paul Kagame a “dictator” and “war criminal.” Meanwhile, about 15 counter-protesters demonstrating nearby…
Review: Colbie Callait at Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead
Seeing Colbie Caillat this past Monday reminded me that I don’t listen to the radio nearly enough. It was not Caillat’s set that granted me this insight, but opener Andy Grammer. I had no idea who this John Mayer-ish fellow was but, it seems, most of the hyped up teens and rhythmically challenged parents who…
New Hill District grocery store won’t be home for the holidays
When city officials and community leaders broke ground on the Hill District Shop ‘n Save in April, they planned to open the neighborhood’s long-sought grocery store in time for Thanksgiving. But apparently, residents will have to hop a bus to the South Side to pick up their holiday turkey for at least one more year.…
Fall Arts Guide: Literary
Chain bookstores are dropping like flies. But from big speakers to grassroots reading series, fall looks especially promising for the written and spoken word. Many of the heavy hitters line up at Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures’ Literary Evenings Monday Night Lecture Series (formerly the Drue Heinz Lectures). Legendary reporter Seymour Hersh (Mon., Sept. 19) leads…
Fall Arts Guide: Theater
“Premiere” is the watchword on Pittsburgh stages this fall. Every other production, it seems, is new to town, including several world premieres by notable playwrights. At Point Park’s REP, in fact, you’ll search all season in vain for a play Pittsburgh’s seen before. The professional company opens with A Child’s Guide to Heresy (through Sept.…
Fall Arts Guide: Film
Normally, autumn offers a respite from the remake- and sequel-heavy summertime fare, but times are lean: Be forewarned that Hollywood is still in a recycling mode. But first the good news — fall is also festival time. The first of the ‘Burgh’s two long-running festivals to return is the Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film…
Fall Arts Guide: Music
The onset of fall means the waning days of outdoor concerts (most local outdoor venues have their final show of the year by October), but the winter-concert doldrums are still a ways off. Here’s a quick sampling of what local venues have to offer between now and the holidays. For those interested in the tried-and-true,…
Fall Arts Guide: Dance
Change is in the air this fall: A new dance season begins without Dance Alloy Theater, the city’s oldest contemporary/modern dance troupe. The Alloy recently merged with the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, and its future as a performance troupe remains uncertain. Still, fall has much to offer, from a botanical dream world to a hip-hop Pinocchio. A…
Fall Arts Guide: Visual Art
As we gear up for football season, it’s worth noting that a Swedish medical study, which tracked 10,000 people over 14 years, shows a link between longevity and participation in cultural events such as visits to museums and art exhibitions. Alas, no health benefits were found from attending sporting events. So in addition to watching…
Helmet Head
In the driveway a grasshopper hops the hood clings as an ornament while I ride the passenger seat shotgun, wild woman throwing peyote dust,turning my car into a cluster of white palomino clomping to pow-wow in the high desert. My father on the day of his funeralchanged into a white bird. A seagull. He had…
Tonight: Southeast Engine at Club Cafe
Howdy! Perhaps you’re right now thinking: It’s the end of the workday on a Wednesday. “Hump Day,” as some folks are wont to call it. (We won’t get into what we’re wont to call those folks.) What should I get into tonight? Here’s a good bet: Southeast Engine is an indie folk band that’s been…
Short List: Week of September 15 – 22
September means Giant Art Weeks, but this weekend you can almost get your fill at two venues alone, as The Andy Warhol Museum and the Miller Gallery open their sections of the Pittsburgh Biennial. On Sept. 16, the Miller offers five new collaborative installations that “imagine alternative realities and possible futures.” The exhibit, curated by…
Planet Smoothie
Arnold Schwarzenegger used to drink a pitcher of beer after his intense body-building workouts. But thanks to Shadyside’s newest health-food joint, local gym-goers can enjoy much more appropriate post-workout refreshments: smoothies. On Aug. 26, John Byrnes, owner of Walnut Street’s X Shadyside gym, opened the Pittsburgh region’s first Planet Smoothie, a national chain specializing…
Famed local photographer Duane Rieder now makes wine, too
Duane Rieder is best known for his award-winning photography. But in the cellar of Engine House #25, in Lawrenceville, is another of Rieder’s passions: wine. “I’m no fucking homebrewer,” Rieder says. Indeed, a visit into his cellar — which houses scores of wine barrels — makes it clear that “micro-vintner” would be a better description.…
Winghart’s Burger and Whiskey Bar
While it would be pointless — impossible actually — to separate Zach Winghart’s new Downtown burger restaurant from the burger boom that has swept the city in the past year, that’s not to say that Winghart’s doesn’t set itself apart. First, there is the name: Winghart’s Burger and Whiskey Bar. No mention of beer (though…
Tennis, Anyone?
For the past 10 years I’ve been promising myself a trip to the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, held annually at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, New York. This year I was determined to put it off no more, especially after my wife called and said that a friend of a friend had…
Savage Love
I am a 16-year-old female in a monogamous relationship with a boy. My first, his too. He has gone down on me three times, but I have never given him a blowjob. I’m scared he will be disappointed. We fight sometimes because he feels it’s unfair that he goes down on me and I don’t…
Reel Green: Local filmmakers bring global message in documentary
In July 2007, three friends left Pittsburgh to hear America greening. The goal was to find and videotape others who shared their deep concern about the planet’s environmental crises, and what they were doing about them. Mark Dixon, Ben Evans and Julie Evans called the year-long journey YERT: Your Environmental Road Trip. The trip yielded…
Standing on Ceremony: Same-sex couples can marry in New York, but what’s in store once they return to Pennsylvania?
Rev. Renee Waun has been uniting same-sex couples for more than a decade within the traditions of the Unitarian Universalist Church. But those unions have meant nothing legally. Although her faith supports equality, same-sex marriages aren’t allowed in the states where she practices: Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. But when New York state passed a…
Bridging the Gaps
The Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct, on Washington Boulevard, stands 75 feet over what was once Silver Lake. Built to withstand floods below and freight trains above, the massive structure boasts five arches between 80 and 100 feet wide — each made of stone blackened with soot and ash. It’s an imposing relic of a Pittsburgh that…
Critics’ Picks: Sept 15 – 20
[INDIE ROCK] + THU., SEPT. 15 In case you weren’t already confused by the number of concert venues in town with “Carnegie” in the name, enter a new one: The Carnegie Music Hall of Carnegie (the “Carnegie Carnegie,” if you will) hosts its first rock show tonight, featuring Anticon act Why? The California pop-rock-kinda-hip-hop act…
Silent No More
The fact that there are few female figures in Pittsburgh’s burgeoning hip-hop scene isn’t necessarily an anomaly; American hip hop in general has a severe dearth of women MCs. But the talented, prolific and, thus far, underrated New Castle-born rapper Britney “Ensilence” Eggleston tends to ignore the tilted gender scales. With her latest release, No…
Everything’s Under Control
Olivia Tremor Control’s Black Foliage was one of the most ambitious albums to drop in the final months of the last century. The group, part of the collective affiliated with the Elephant 6 imprint, took the buzz of home-recorded indie rock and added a strong sense of pop that evoked The Beach Boys and The…
Something for Everyone
Not many local acts can attract 5-year-old children, twenty-something hipsters and senior citizens to shows. A smiling Casey Hanner seems to understand how her local pop band, Donora, generates such appeal. “I think the whole point of our band is that we’re not — ” Before she can continue, brother Jake Hanner, hidden by thick…
The Whistleblower
In the late 1990s, Nebraska cop Kathyrn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) takes a job as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia. But she quickly learns that this shattered country — with its authority and justice systems scattered across several local and international entities — has created a vacuum for a particularly nasty criminal enterprise: the importation of…
Mozart’s Sister
“Nannarl” Mozart was a talented musician, singer and budding composer. But in 18th-century France, she had several strikes against any hope of professional fulfillment: She was a teen-age girl, and her younger brother was the more celebrated Wolfgang Amadeus. René Féret’s docudrama recounts what the film suggests is the last vibrant year of Nannerl’s life.…
Drive
Gosling has perfected the art of staring moodily into space, a skill on prime display in Nicolas Winding Refn’s film. Gosling plays an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver who works nights as a wheelman for heists. After an early car chase, the movie settles into a quiet period in which Gosling meets his neighbor Irene (Carey…
In the Land of the Free
Among the most contentious recent criminal cases in Louisiana — perhaps in all the South — is that of the Angola Three: three Black Panthers incarcerated for the brutal murder of a white corrections officer in 1972. Though evidence implicating all three men was shaky at best, they were confined for decades to McDonald’s-bathroom-sized solitary-confinement…
Contagion
In Steven Soderbergh’s sobering pandemic thriller Contagion, we hear the villain while the opening screen is still dark. An unremarkable cough — but it’s the first salvo in a war between a new rapidly spreading virus and humans without immunity or a vaccine. From one woman infected while away on business, Contagion depicts the inevitable…
The Future
Miranda July begins her delicate new work, The Future, with a pair of vignettes that succinctly define her characters and initiate us into an ethereal world that profoundly mirrors our own. First, we hear the voice of Paw Paw (July), an injured cat taken to a shelter with a promise from Jason and Sophie to…
Five Course Love
Bucket o’ charm, anyone? Then head on out to Little Lake Theatre, where they’re ladling out the charm hand over fist with Gregg Coffin’s Five Course Love. This musical, which debuted off-Broadway in 2005, consists of five vignettes about the crazy things done by people in love. Each scene is set in a different nationality-themed…
Race
At 63, David Mamet is still the naughty little boy pushing all the buttons in the metaphorical high-rise elevator: in this instance, Race, an incendiary topic even without the Mamet touch. Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre’s crisp production of his 2009 drama zips along with staccato dialogue and gushes of comedy to an entertaining –…
UPMC/Highmark: Picking the Biggest Loser
One of the problems with the UPMC/Highmark dispute, obviously, is deciding which side to detest more. It was clearly a problem for the 300 folks who showed up at Soldiers and Sailors Hall Sept. 8, where they gathered for a town hall meeting convened by state Sen. Jim Ferlo (D-Blogspot). The meeting’s “plague on both…
MOMIX visits with BOTANICA, its spectacular interpretation of nature.
They are the dance world’s version of Cirque du Soleil, blending physical theater, illusion and dance into shows with high production values and universal audience appeal. MOMIX returns to Pittsburgh on Sept. 16 and 17 to open the Pittsburgh Dance Council season with its four-seasons-themed spectacle BOTANICA (2009). The two-hour production, jam-packed with visual illusions,…
A Child’s Guide to Heresy
What new play has: a would-be murderer drowned by butterflies; a monk who died of the clap rising again, stirred by a post-mortem visit from a local whore; and Satan biting off the foot of a young man who slipped out of a pentagram? It’s Kendrew Lascelles’ A Child’s Guide to Heresy, adapted from his…
Life coach Krishna Pendyala turns personal-growth author.
Krishna Pendyala is a nontraditional life coach and co-author (with Mike Vargo) of Beyond the Pig and the Ape: Realizing Success and True Happiness. Originally from Chennai, India, the 49-year-old lecturer lives in Hampton. In the self-published book, Pendyala describes his experience with suicidal depression and the soul-searching that helped him persevere. The “pig” and “ape” are…
Seymour Hersh talks “war on terror,” Libya and Iran.
Seymour Hersh is one of journalism’s living legends. As a young reporter in Vietnam, he broke the story of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. More recently, he revealed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison. He currently covers national-security issues for The New…
Tweetin’ with Jenny Owen Youngs
Jenny Owen Youngs is a singer and songwriter and dinosaur lover who lives in Brooklyn. She’s also a pretty good tweeter. I heard she thought she was better than me, so I challenged her to a duel via direct message. @andybotpgh First question: What’s your favorite kind of bird, ever? I know you have one.…
CD Reviews
Jimmy Adler Midnight Rooster (Bonedog Records) Guitarist/singer Adler struts, lopes and lights up the night and day with catchy down-home blues, bopping boogie, swing and country stride. Adler’s earthy guitar solos take as much charge as his vocals, fingers lingering on long notes and strumming pulsing chords. With Adler vocalizing in several ranges and styles,…
