Pittsburgh City Paper back issues from July 2004:
PCTV Raises Its Volume; Cable-access station to get more accessible
Jul 07, 2004; ... FOR YEARS, IT'S been an irony as well as a logistical problem: Pittsburgh Community Television, designed to give regular people a chance to make and show TV programming, has been headquartered in a building many of its users have a hard time getting to. Located since 1986 in a nondescript, ...
Battle Hymns of Homestead; Three new Pump House exhibits for 112th strike anniversary
Jul 07, 2004; ... LOCAL LABOR HISTORIAN Charles McCollester has a radical solution for the city's economic problems: "If Pittsburgh could deal with the issues of [the] Homestead [Strike], this area could be turned around. But the people who run the city don't want to deal with it." McCollester says we ...
Been There, Madonna That; Why Madonna makes real Kabbalists want to plotz
Jul 07, 2004; ... You should have seen Madonna back in Hebrew School. Like a virgin? We loved one, thank you very much. She almost got the rabbi in trouble decades before clergy sex scandals became trendy. And even then, she knew the answer to more than four questions, if you know what I mean ... OK, it's ...
Feminism Rewound
Jul 07, 2004; ... Why TV on DVD? Don't TV Land and Nickelodeon take care of the nostalgia addicts? In the middle of summer -- glorious porch-sitting weather, strolling-with-ice-cream-cone weather -- am I really going to sit down with I Love Lucy on DVD just to relive my childhood? Apparently, I am. Plus a ...
RAINBOW CONNECTIONS; EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE COUNTY'S COLORED BELTWAY SYSTEM (BUT WERE AFRAID TO GET OFF THE PARKWAY TO ASK)
Jul 07, 2004; ... PEPPERED ALONG ROADWAYS BOTH BIG and small in Allegheny County are signs with colored circles: "Green Belt" or "Orange Belt" (or Blue, Yellow, Red) with a circle of the corresponding shade. If you've driven on a belt -- and most likely you have -- you've probably noticed the signs. You ...
Spider-Man 2; ARMS AND THE MAN
Jul 07, 2004; ... The hero whose nemesis is a mirror image of himself is something super-dude movies seemingly can't pass up. Tim Burton's first Batman has his doppelganger, a revenge-twisted freak, face likewise frozen in a single expression. Bryan Singer's good-mutant X-Men lock mind-waves with bad-mutant Y-Not ...
Carandiru
Jul 07, 2004; ... America feeds our prison industrial complex to the tune of two million inmates served daily -- half of whom are black like me. Or black like most of the 7,500 prisoners scrunched into the 4,000-capacity Carandiru "detention center" in Sao Paulo, Brazil, up through the early '90s. In ...
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
Jul 07, 2004; ... Alfred Lubrano's Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams is engrossing, disarming and even entertaining, but I had to read it slowly. The book tapped so much unexamined emotional ambivalence -- I'm also one of those blue-collar kids with a nice college degree -- that I could handle only ...
We Ragazzi; Ch-Ch Changes
Jul 07, 2004; ... Consider the rock-star metamorphosis: One day you're Art Garfunkel, on top of the world. And the next you're, ummm, who? Exactly. Talk about your terrifying transformations. David Bowie probably said it best: "Time may change me / But I can't trace time." Brooklyn's We Ragazzi, of ...
The Wilders; SETTIN' THE WOODS ON FIRE
Jul 07, 2004; ... Listening to The Wilders' album Spring A Leak, you'd think these Kansas City hillbillies learned their old-time fiddle licks and Roy Acuff songbook from their grandpas, sippin' brown on the front porch, and a childhood next to the radio for the Opry. Or at least from the well-worn vinyl grooves ...
Beastie Boys; To the 5 Boroughs
Jul 07, 2004; ... For a while there, things looked grim: six years, two towers, one Lower Manhattan, Jam Master Jay, W., so much to spit about, so many sharp darts to throw, no new Beastie Boys. Shit, I thought the terrorists had won. And then, after six years of nothing and six months of hype, "Ch-Check It Out"? ...
LOCAL VOCALS; A Conversation with David R. Shumway
Jul 07, 2004; ... In the movies, people fall in love, just as in the real world. But figuring out what cinematic life has to do with the everyday kind is a job for people like Carnegie Mellon University English Prof. David R. Shumway. His recent book Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (New ...
What's the Big Idea? Collective binds together for bookstore
Jul 07, 2004; ... THE BIG IDEA bookstore, says clerk Kevin Finn, is "an epicenter [for] a certain sense of consciousness." The Bloomfield store is dedicated to rare, radical publications on everything from alternative religion to organizing social movements and anarchist philosophy -- texts not usually available ...
Stack the Deck; Smokes gets in the eyes of federal prosecutors
Jul 07, 2004; ... In an average day, the Hatfield's Ferry power plant in Greene County emits nearly 500 tons of smog-causing pollution. It belches out 27,000 tons of carbon dioxide, contributing to greenhouse gases which may someday result in severe global climate change. And each day it adds another pound or so ...
LOCAL VOCALS; A Conversation with Erin Connolly
Jul 14, 2004; ... When Erin Connolly learned that the original founder of the local Gatherings singles club was selling the business, she made her move. Like Victor Kiam and his Remington Shavers, "I liked it so much, I bought the company!" In 18 months, Connolly has energetically expanded the club from dinner ...
Danny, Get Your Gun; County exec's fire sale may include firearms bidding
Jul 14, 2004; ... FIRST COUNTY EXECUTIVE Dan Onorato axed some 500 positions through early retirements, attrition and layoffs. Now he's got his sights set on the county's guns. Onorato has submitted to county council a bill that would allow him to sell off surplus weapons from the county police academy ...
Bunkbed Bedlam; In prison, it's way beyond crowded
Jul 14, 2004 ... For a while I have been planning to write about how, with the expected influx of corporate criminals, the Bureau of Prisons is going to have to rethink its priorities concerning recreational facilities. Among other things, I was going to suggest that they take out the horseshoe pit and maybe get ...
Past Away
Jul 14, 2004; ... For the past several years, artist Mary Mazziotti has worked to make audiences think about death. Whether prompting people to ponder the existence of an afterlife or to contemplate the misery of dying alone and anonymous, Mazziotti's multifaceted installation The Dead, now at Future Tenant, is a ...
Highlight Real; SUMMING UP DECADES OF SPORTS MEDIOCRITY
Jul 14, 2004; ... I've always considered it one of life's great cruelties that the greatest moments in Pittsburgh sports history happened before I developed consciousness. It's the curse of the Gen-Xer in Pittsburgh: We're inundated with nostalgia and have little to call our own. No Maz homer. No ...
All Men are Whores: An Inquiry / Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Lucky Stiff; Proof
Jul 14, 2004; ... Miners worry about black lung, politicians fear assassination, and unleashed dogs must give letter-carriers the heebie-jeebies. So if the worst thing that can happen to theater critics is Sam Shepard and David Mamet ... well, life's no picnic for anybody. Even though I hate both fellas, ...
Before Sunset; WALKING AND TALKING
Jul 14, 2004; ... Austin-based indie director Richard Linklater made an early splash with films that for all their goofy and slightly self-aware charms nonetheless proved to be insightful forays into the experiences of young adults. Slackers shed light on Austin's perpetually moody Gen-Xers; the various strata of ...
Breaking the Date; Tragedies take place every day
Jul 07, 2004; ... So I'm sitting in PNC Park a couple of Sundays ago and right before we sing "Take Me Out To the Ball Game" the PA announcer says some guy's going to sing "God Bless America." Fine. But the other stuff he says annoys me. It's something like, "Please join us in honoring the victims of the ...
Museum of Dart; MASTERING AN ANCIENT WEAPON
Jul 07, 2004; ... You can have your muscle-bound warriors of antiquity, your heroes and legendary men of strength: Civilization would be nowhere without underdeveloped geeks. If it weren't for our need to compensate for pathetic upper-body strength, humanity would never have developed such tools as the lever, the ...
Cheating Cheaters
Jul 07, 2004; ... We've got only one show this week, and the review won't take up too much space, so let's take a stroll down memory lane for a few paragraphs. This week I am celebrating (if that's the right word) the start of my 18th year as a theater critic. I don't know how surprised you are, but my ...
King Arthur; A KNIGHT TO REMEMBER
Jul 07, 2004; ... In this reputedly "more historical" version of the fabled King Arthur's story, don't expect to see any sorcerers or magical swords commonly associated with the medieval Arthurian legends. King Arthur is set in the year 475 or so, and it's a messy, bleak time. The Romans are leaving ...
Strayed; HE LIVES BY NIGHT
Jul 07, 2004; ... Andre Techine's beautifully nuanced, immutably sad drama Strayed begins and ends at war. In a prologue, he introduces us to Odile (Emmanuelle Beart), a French war widow already (it's only 1940) who joins a long line of others in an exodus from Paris with her two children, the plucky 13-year-old ...
Mexi-Casa
Jul 07, 2004; ... No offense, but Dormont is usually a place we drive through on the way to somewhere else. But on one of those trips, we happened to glance out the car window and into a place that seemed to invite us to stop and stay a while: a warmly lit, friendly-looking restaurant named Mexi-Casa. Through the ...
BROTHER-LY LOVE
Jul 07, 2004; ... IT'S 1968, and Nirvana's on the radio. Not, of course, any fame-murdered grunge kings -- Cobain has barely been born. Nor, necessarily, the late-'60s psychedelic pop group of the same name, although technically it's their track from Story of Simon Simopath -- complete with timpanis and swooshing ...
King Django; SKA MOB
Jul 07, 2004; ... "Can't follow this if your attention too short / 'Cause Jah Jah is my shield, and Jah Jah is my fort." New York City ska, reggae and punk veteran King Django sings about attention on the title track from his 2001 solo album Reason, and it's a mantra to his own dedication -- and an ...
Cottonbelly; X Amounts of Niceness
Jul 07, 2004; ... Multi-instrumentalist and deep-dub specialist Stewart Matthewman spends his spare time as Cottonbelly, making music, and remixing that of others. That is, when he's not laboring over one of the many day jobs he strings together to try to pay the bills and put some kind of food on the table ....
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; NEWS YOU CAN LOSE
Jul 14, 2004; ... San Diego, the mid-'70s, and Ron Burgundy is the star of Channel 4's local news team. Burgundy (Will Ferrell) presides over hee-hawing sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), dim-bulb weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) and sleazy field reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd). It's a boozy, ...
Chaya Japanese Cuisine
Jul 14, 2004; ... The dog days of summer are upon us, and we can't take the heat, so we've been getting out of our un-air-conditioned kitchen. But even outdoor grilling involves a sweltering flame, and there are only so many salads a couple can eat. And so our thoughts turn to sushi. We've heard Chaya is ...
Mum; SUMMER MADE GOOD
Jul 14, 2004; ... While more than a decade has passed since Icelandic artists the Sugarcubes and Bjork began receiving international acclaim for their music, a new movement of young artists has taken root. Crafting beautiful and haunting orchestrations that blur the lines between post-rock, pop and glitch, Sigur ...
Gravy Train!!! TONGUE ON CHEEKS
Jul 14, 2004; ... These days there's medicine for what Gravy Train!!!'s got. There are psychological evaluations, camps to stay at, priests to talk to in darkened rooms. The fun-to-be-had Casio-tone drum pops and flagrant violation of Footloose-esque anti-dancing laws can be avoided, given enough exposure to ...
Oakley Hall
Jul 14, 2004; ... Despite the pills and the West Virginian back seats, regardless of a thousand alt-country historical revisionists' views of the big guy and his rebel honky-tonk soul, no matter what the Dead fan down the street tells you about the primacy of marijuana in American music (Willie aside), I think we ...
Information Underload; Knowledge -- another human right, says activist
Jul 14, 2004; ... Aisha White went to the all-female State Correctional Institution-Muncy to talk to inmates about books. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Science, White decided to investigate so-called information poverty in prisons for her dissertation. At the ...
It's The End of The World as We Knew It -- Briefly; Music venues come, music venues go, now all-too-quickly
Jul 14, 2004; ... IT'S THAT TIME of the month again, the time when Pittsburghers start wondering where they'll go to see live rock and pop shows next month. Ahh, for the optimism and hope of the blissful pre-Act 47 days of April, 2004, when one local music journalist went so far as to say, " ... Pittsburgh in ...
NO Girls ALLOWED
Jul 14, 2004; ... When Linda Babcock, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz School of Public Policy, learned how easily Pittsburgh women could be denied an opportunity, it wasn't thanks to a sexist, knuckle-dragging male. And the victims weren't shrinking violets; they were grad students, ...
Soul of a New Cafe
Jul 14, 2004; ... It's said that 10 o'clock Sunday morning is the hour when cultural or racial diversity is least likely. The reference is to churches, but the same could be said of most newsrooms in every other hour on every day of the week. Since 1973, the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation has worked to reverse ...
Volume Discount; CMU'S NEW BUILDING SHORTCHANGES THE IDEAS ENSHRINED WITHIN IT
Jul 14, 2004; ... In the new Posner Center at Carnegie Mellon University, three remarkable and rare scientific editions share one display case. A 16th-century printing of Ptolemy's second-century work Magnae Constructionis, a first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium of 1543 and a ...
Love in a Dangerous Time
Jul 14, 2004; ... Marci Woodruff just didn't have it in her. A frequent collaborator, Unseam'd Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Laura Smiley, was on the phone asking whether Woodruff had a small comedy she might want to direct for the troupe's summer season. But Woodruff wasn't feeling comedic. She ...
The Clearing; ALIEN ABDUCTION
Jul 14, 2004; ... On a beautiful summer's morning in Pittsburgh's South Hills, two men begin their day. Arnold (Willem Dafoe) leaves his slightly shabby rowhouse, and executes a puzzling series of maneuvers with his car. In the more verdant hills, Wayne (Robert Redford) pads about his well-cushioned estate ...
One Last Look
Jul 14, 2004; ... When the young Stan Brakhage threw away his glasses, it was for aesthetic reasons, but not the ones Brakhage mythologists later claimed. Though he was beginning a career as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, Brakhage wasn't trying to see more purely, unencumbered by corrective lenses. He ...
Think Pink; PERHAPS A BOTTLE OF ROSE INSTEAD?
Jul 14, 2004; ... Rose is the new rage in wine circles. OK, let's be clear -- dry rose. Parisians love the stuff during hot summers because it's served chilled, drinks well on its own, and stands up to food. Good enough for Parisians, good enough for Pennsylvanians, we thought. So we decided to sample the rose ...
Erick Sermon; Chilltown, New York
Jul 14, 2004; ... Hip hop is about 25 years old now. Erick Sermon's been around for about 15 of them, and you can see them in three phases: the EPMD years, the Def Squad years and the post-Wig Split years. He's probably most widely recognized for the first, as EPMD was hip hop's first major duo, having influenced ...
PLATINUM ANNIVERSARY
Jul 14, 2004; ... Earlier this month, the music business and American pop-culture media celebrated the 50th anniversary of rock 'n' roll -- based on the date of Elvis Presley's first recording sessions -- with self-congratulation, nostalgia and a healthy dose of historical argument. Unheralded, however, ...
Summer of Love Short in Courthouse; County exec talks unity, but city-county cooperation sparks spat
Jul 21, 2004; ... BIPARTISANSHIP REIGNED, cooperation was the buzzword, and Dan Onorato was the uncontested leader of Allegheny County on July 13 - for about three hours. At 2 p.m. that day, County Executive Onorato gathered county councilors, state legislators and Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy in the ...
Along Came Marry; A conversation with Evan Wolfson
Jul 21, 2004; ... EVAN WOLFSON, a Taylor Allderdice High School graduate, is now executive director of Freedom to Marry, one of the national groups promoting marriage equality for gays and lesbians. He has been arguing in the courts against anti-gay discrimination for many years, including a dozen spent at Lambda ...
Home Economics; You know what they say: Teach a man to buy a house...
Jul 21, 2004; ... WHEN JEFFREY DORSEY walks along Penn Avenue, he doesn't see an area in decline. As arts district manager for the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative, he imagines how area artists could buy and renovate each abandoned or derelict building. "Most artists that I have met are very passionate ...
Any Takers? Local 'freecyclers' can give it away
Jul 21, 2004; ... Looking for a complete (if non-working) antique player piano? Toddler's shoes? Oak flooring planks, an old color TV, patio stones, drywall, 12 ounces of powdered milk-substitute for kittens? The kittens themselves? In need of a kiddie slide, 50 cans of food that never made it to a food ...
POLITICAL FOOTBALLS; Chips are Down
Jul 21, 2004; ... Starting Line-up Council President Gene Ricciardi looks to sack an overseer with a yen for slots. The Play-by-Play On May 18, six City Council members voted to condemn Mayor Tom Murphy's deficit-ridden budgets and call on him to seek "a working relationship" with the ...
ONE WOMAN'S PFA
Jul 21, 2004; ... Ann's story of domestic abuse is documented in court papers filed this June: "He has mentally, sexually, physically abused me along with many scary threats, stalking, harassment, phone calls over and over again, ripped my clothes, put bumps, bruises, marks, scratches, on my body, damaged my ...
War Dance
Jul 21, 2004; ... When I first heard of male dancing, even setting the Chippendales aside, I thought it was for punks. But a friend told me about capoeira -- a serious martial art and sport whose performers produce spectacular dances paralleling the supernatural acrobatics of the Shaolin monks. To gain an ...
De-Lovely; ALL THAT DE-JAZZ
Jul 21, 2004; ... If clothes make the man, then Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely, a biopic about the life of Cole Porter, is a very well-dressed mannequin. Filled with Porter's highly entertaining music, and lusciously costumed on old-style Hollywood sets, it makes a somewhat effete effort to parse Porter's odd ...
Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times
Jul 21, 2004; ... Summer reading is by definition light and enjoyable, but that doesn't preclude processing a few deeper thoughts. And in the same summer that saw the runaway success of a book about misplaced punctuation (Eats, Shoots & Leaves), the public will surely enjoy an entertaining poke or two through ...
Gilded Cage; SOMETIMES THE FORMULA FOR A BAR'S SUCCESS IS NO FORMULA AT ALL
Jul 21, 2004; ... For years, the office workers who changed or waited for buses at the intersection of Forbes and Murray avenues the sauce-obsessed graduate students, newlyweds, oldie-weds, and itinerant locals who all favored ancient neighborhood bar the Squirrel Cage were inundated with rumor: The owner was ...
Two If By Sea / Sparks Fly From A Kiss; COMFORTABLY NUMB
Jul 21, 2004; ... "Why must you put on / records that I know all the words to / it's so easy for you to be comfortable," sings Cris Cowan on "One Hundred Days," and I know exactly what he means. It seems so easy for so many people: being comfortable, in their clothes and shoes, their homes and lives, their social ...
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons; KINGS OF POP?
Jul 21, 2004; ... When you stop to think about it, Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi was the Michael Jackson of his day. Sure, maybe it's too much music theory combined with "E! Entertainment News" talking here, but you've got to admit there are an awful lot of similarities between the two musicians. No, ...
Various Artists; Simply Good Music Volume One
Jul 21, 2004; ... Simply Good Music is a misleading tide for the new collection compiled and concocted by New York City's long-time multi-function source for soulful and funky, modernist dance music, Giant Step. For one thing, while the dance-worthy rhythms on Simply Good are immediate and largely accessible, ...
Starving for Attention; Protestor to fast for faster end to Iraq War prisoner abuses
Jul 21, 2004; ... AS A FORMER MEMBER of the U.S. Army Reserves during the Vietnam War, Jonathan Robison of Oakland doesn't believe a few reservists are solely responsible for torturing the Abu Ghraib prisoners. Robison served in the National Guard in New York and Connecticut, and was later assigned to the ...
LOCAL VOCALS; A Conversation with Francine Porter
Jul 21, 2004; ... A resident of "Suburbia, PA" in the North Hills, dietician and mother of two Francine Porter, 47, has recently joined the peace movement. She now finds herself on the front lines of dissent working for the Pittsburgh branch of Code Pink, a women-initiated movement that seeks social change ...
Men in Back; Women's gathering hopes more success comes with groupthink
Jul 21, 2004; ... GOOD WORK IS not its own reward: The recent study by Ralph Bangs and Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research documents that Pittsburgh women have among the highest percentages of college degrees but still suffer one of the nation's largest gender pay gaps (see City Paper's July 14 ...
Blast from the Past; Stone Age politics dredge up cultural dinosaurs
Jul 21, 2004; ... How absurd is it that Rick Santorum holds a rally to promote a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage and he has Pat Boone beside him? And the press release promoting the rally says that Boone was "the second most popular singer in the United States in the 1950s." Could there possibly ...
Off Target; Even a shopping trip can turn ugly for local Muslims
Jul 21, 2004; ... In many respects, Dalia Mogahed couldn't have looked more American on that Tuesday afternoon in late June. She was shopping at Target with her 4-year-old son, who needed a new pair of shoes. But while Mogahed was engaged in this most patriotic of acts -- one endorsed after 9/11 by President Bush ...
OUT-GUN-NED
Jul 21, 2004; ... Everybody liked a state proposal that would better protect women from abusers. Except the part about taking away the men's guns In her first term as a Pennsylvania House member, Melissa Murphy Weber got to lead the charge on an issue dear to her heart: She became the prime sponsor of a ...