What Trinh Sees
“What I see is life looking at me,” narrates Trinh T. Minh-ha in her first film, 1982’s “Reassemblage.” “I am looking through a circle into a circle of looks.” “Reassemblage” announced an important new voice in experimental cinema. The film, shot in a Senegalese village, transcended documentary by questioning the very genre: Intent to…
DEAD AND BREAKFAST
In this horror-spoof from Matthew Leutwyler, an RV of twentysomethings is forced to bunk down in a remote Texas town at a creepy old bed-and-breakfast (if a shambling David Carradine is your proprietor, you should keep moving). No soon does somebody say, “What’s that strange little box?” than the bloodletting begins. The burg is overrun…
Mitchell’s Grill
Location: 4632 Centre Ave., North Oakland. 412-681-8450. Hours: Mon.-Thu. 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-1:30 a.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Prices: Salads $6-7; cheesesteaks $5-11; other sandwiches $4-6 Fare: Cheesesteaks, burgers and sandwiches Atmosphere: 1970 time capsule Liquor: Full bar attached In the beginning, there was G’s, a funky cheesesteak shop behind a bar called…
Clown Jewels
Salman Rushdie’s ninth and latest novel is, at first glance, nothing if not political. Sprawling across the 20th century as well as from Los Angeles to Europe and the Indian subcontinent, Shalimar the Clown nonetheless focuses on once-pacific, now strife-filled Kashmir, an isolated land contested for decades by India and Pakistan, Hindus and…
Bushwhacking Privacy
OVER THE NEXT few months, the U.S. government plans to roll out a series of initiatives to enhance the nation’s security, each carrying the potential to strip away more and more of your privacy in the name of protecting your liberty. In theory, all these projects should have been planned, designed and launched with input…
DJ O-Ab
The typical way rap music is digested in 2005 involves a small chaste white mechanism, engraved with an Apple logo, connected to the listener via inconspicuous earplugs, muting its noise from any surrounding individuals, purchased by a customer who naively paid somewhere between $.99 and $4.95 for a radio-clean, single-serving song. Back in the…
Kayne West
I must agree with Kanye West when he says, just as Bob Marley would, “sometimes I feel like music is the only medicine.” That’s from West’s song “Crack Music” off his new album Late Registration, where he argues people have been kept impoverished and oppressed so long that it’s created an insatiable demand for escape…
A Conversation with David Scott
David Scott is an author and Catholic scholar who writes frequently about the Catholic Church and matters of faith. His latest book, The Catholic Passion: Rediscovering the Power and Beauty of the Faith, discusses the lives and accomplishments of Catholics ranging from saints and martyrs to artists and social reformers. He lives in McCandless ……
Submerged
New Orleans is gone. I left it behind me on Saturday, with my two kids in the backseat, the soundtrack to Shrek on the CD player. My wife, a pediatrician, was on call for the weekend and stayed behind. She joined us in a town just outside Lafayette, La., Sunday evening after a harrowing…
Jerry Jam Finally Fades Away
“I don’t mean to sound crazy or anything, but the Grateful Dead are like a religion,” says Stephen “pUNK” Cunningham of ’80’s jam-band Sandoz and Grateful Dead tribute band Fungus — two bands who, over the years, have played a lot of shows at Thirsty’s bar in North Oakland. For the past 17 years,…
A Conversation with Documentary Maker Paul Goodman
Carnegie Mellon University professor Paul Goodman’s documentary Escola de Samba follows the creation of the annual Brazilian Carnival, and a samba school group called Camisa Verde e Branco, an organization of nearly 4,000 Brazilians that puts together a costume, song and dance presentation at the festival. Most unfathomable is that these thousands have worked…
Watching the World
The Amnesty International Film Festival returns to Pittsburgh for its third annual engagement, presenting 15 films — from shorts to feature length — focusing on human-rights struggles around the globe. Whether the result of wars, systemic poverty or global economies that disproportionately affect workers in developing countries, the fight for people to live in peace,…
A Sound of Thunder
In the near future, well-heeled adventurers, escorted by a team from Time Safari, can simply pop back to a pre-set time and place and safely shoot an ailing dinosaur. The real risk: Should anything in the past be altered — even a bug — the future, to which they must return, can be irrevocably re-arranged.…
