Pittsburgh City Paper back issues from January 2006:
Group Hopes for Leverage on Lever-Machine Successors
Jan 04, 2006; ... Unhappy with Westmoreland County Commissioners, who selected the county's new electronic touch-screen voting machine on Dec. 29 without offering public demonstrations of any possible choices, voting activists have formed the watchdog 10-County Citizens' Coalition For Voter Verified Paper ...
He's Not That Sort of Doctor, But He Plays One on TV
Jan 04, 2006; ... Quick quiz: For which 2005 statement will televangelist Pat Robertson be best remembered? a. "If [Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it." b. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover ...
POTTER'S FIELD; End of Term; A Murphy administration refresher course
Jan 04, 2006; ... " ... Mayor Murphy also announced that he will teach an undergraduate course at Chatham College focusing on environmental policy and urban redevelopment. ... 'I am delighted to have the opportunity to give back to Chatham and to help educate the leaders of tomorrow ...'" -- Dec. 27 press ...
LOCAL VOCAL; A Conversation with Jerry Grcevich
Jan 04, 2006; ... JERRY GRCEVICH is a master of Croatian string music, or tamburitza, his skills celebrated both in the U.S. and Croatia. The Pittsburgh-area native and longtime resident of North Huntington performs regularly with The Jerry Grcevich Orchestra, and every Tuesday night with his Gypsy Strings at the ...
SUGGESTION #1; Pittsburgh Needs a Car Share
Jan 04, 2006; ... WE DO IT with airplanes. We do it with fancy restaurants, condos at vacation getaways, and movie theaters. With pretty much any expensive amenity, we forego personal ownership and pay only when we use it. Any amenity, that is, except for owner-occupied automobiles. Most households that ...
SUGGESTION #3; Help Out Bus Riders in Cold Weather
Jan 04, 2006; ... AS AN ALMOST-DAILY bus rider, I've noticed that in recent months, the Port Authority has launched a wide-ranging PR campaign. Buses are now graced with little pro-transit jingles, for example. I've even seen Port Authority ads at Steelers games. I don't begrudge these efforts -- much ....
SUGGESTION #5; Roller Derby Could Turn Pittsburgh Around
Jan 04, 2006; ... EVERY CITY CAN benefit from hot chicks in fishnets beating the snot out of each other, and Pittsburgh is no different. Following the lead of cutting-edge cities including New York, Austin, Texas, Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn., Pittsburgh is ripe for its own roller-derby league. The ...
RIFFS; The Upstage Reopens
Jan 04, 2006; ... It was just after last call at the Upstage Lounge, says DJ "EZ Lou" Ortega. "I was playing my final song -- it was Porky Pig singing 'Blue Christmas' -- and the lights were already up," says Ortega, veteran spinner at the Oakland alterna-dance bastion. "The managers rushed over to the booth and ...
tapes 'n tapes; Mix masters
Jan 04, 2006; ... TAPES 'N TAPES is a tonal pastiche of sounds heard, reassembled and bled together to mine the nether regions of pop and rock. A slick ball of energy builds and shape-shifts through every song on the band's debut, The Loon, channeling rhythms into multidimensional detours in the wink of an ...
Bantu featuring Adewale Ayuba; Fuji Satisfaction
Jan 04, 2006; ... LEGEND HAS IT that Fuji -- the Arab-music-inflected sounds of Nigeria's dance clubs -- was named for Japan's Mount Fujiyama not because of any spiritual association with Japan, but simply for the mysterious grandeur and braggadocio that Fuji music's founders saw in photos of the mountain. Which ...
Art That Counts
Jan 04, 2006; ... You can get lost in the work of Sarah Walko. Her sculptures are composed of miniature objects, whether captured in test tubes or pinned to microscope slides: Each piece is like a tiny world, or a resonant sound. A viewer can focus on each miniature sculpture, enjoying the intricate (and ...
Cafe Roma
Jan 04, 2006; ... The menu is an inexpensive list of sandwiches, salads and mostly pasta-based entrees, with servings that are anything but small. The lasagna -- the "must try!" house specialty -- was easily half a dozen layers of velvety homemade pasta, sweet tomato sauce, finely ground beef and cheese that ...
Casanova; Love Canals
Jan 04, 2006; ... WHEN YOU SEDUCE as many women as Giacomo Casanova did, and when you publish a 12-volume memoir in French about your antics, you sort of have to expect they're going to make movies about you. In the delightful La Nuit de Varennes, set during the French revolution, Marcello Mastroianni ...
Top 10 film experiences of 2005:
Jan 04, 2006; ... Gordon Nelson Filmmaker, curator and educator 1. Robert Breer at the Carnegie Lecture Hall (part of the Carnegie International artist lecture series). Breer's films are the best examples of painterly techniques extended into film animation. 2. "Valentin de las Sierras" ...
He's the Rapper, I'm the Thief
Jan 04, 2006; ... In rapper-turned-Oscar-nominated-actor Will Smith's first movie, 1993's Six Degrees of Separation, he played Paul, a con man faking the identity of actor Sidney Poitier's son to gain access to the uppercrust Manhattan gentry -- and make a few bucks. Fewer than 10 years of separation later, ...
Preventing More from Saying 'Hit Me Again'
Jan 04, 2006; ... Bill Kearney hates gambling and the destruction he says it brings to families. So it's a little strange that the recovering self-described "degenerate gambler" was glad when the state gaming board finished accepting applications for the state's five proposed standalone ...
THIS JUST IN
Jan 04, 2006; ... ALL THINGS ORACULAR 2005. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In other words, the cantankerous Mayor Tom Murphy was replaced by a new guy with more hair. So: new mayor, new year and, as always (or at least once or twice before), my new predictions for the 2006 year of ...
Suggestions for 2006; Think Small
Jan 04, 2006 ... PERHAPS IT'S A TRIBUTE to former Mayor Tom Murphy: Pittsburgh may lack a lot of things these days, but big ideas aren't among them. For better and worse, during his 12-year administration Murphy was a big-picture guy. He was frequently criticized, of course, because the pictures were ...
Eviction Campaign Pressuring Lawrenceville Landlords
Jan 11, 2006; ... An aborted Jan. 5 hearing in a Lawrenceville harassment case saw one woman arrested in the street and a state Senator trying to pay for her eviction from the neighborhood. It was just the latest skirmish in what has been a year-long effort by community group Lawrenceville United to get ...
Voting For Voting Machines a Must, Suit Says
Jan 11, 2006; ... A lawsuit filed Jan. 6 in Westmoreland County claims the state needs to let voters vote on which new voting machines they'll get to use in this spring's primary and beyond. The 11 plaintiffs, who include state Sen. Jim Ferio and long-time voters' rights activist Marybeth Kuznik of Penn ...
POTTER'S FIELD; Scoring Points; An empty campaign for an empty political system
Jan 11, 2006; ... IT SHOULD GO WITHOUT SAYING that Lynn Swann's campaign kickoff, held Jan. 4 at the Heinz History Center, celebrated his football career to the near-exclusion of everything else. Almost everything about Swann's campaign goes without saying, in fact. It's goes without saying much about his ...
EX-CONTEXT; Raising the Bar; Why rural Pennsylvanians love having a prison next door
Jan 11, 2006; ... EVEN AS I WAS RAILING against HB 1318, labeled by some as the "Anti-Voting Rights Act," in my Dec. 14 column ["No Ballot Initiative"], the state Senate was amending it. A provision barring felons from voting until they completed their terms of parole was stricken, as were some provisions that ...
LOCAL VOCAL; A Conversation with Paulette Poullet
Jan 11, 2006; ... Twenty-six-year-old Puerto Rican PAULETTE POULLET moved here in 1997. She's using her time off "between careers" to work on her self-published comics, with an eye on her dream project: a full-length comic about her experiences in Puerto Rico, a place she says Americans don't know much ...
Amy Rigby: Q&A
Jan 11, 2006; ... AFTER SOAKING UP New York's legendary CBGB's scene in the late '70s, Amy Rigby began playing music herself, first in '80s Americana band The Last Roundup and later in the girl group The Shams. Her acclaimed 1996 solo debut, Diary of a Mod Housewife, set the parameters for the most significant ...
Wooden Wand; Wobbly Fencepost Rhythms
Jan 11, 2006; ... THE ONLY THING remotely freaky about "freak folk" is that it ain't one bit folksy. Same goes for "psych folk." While the young musicians involved in these offshoots do pay homage to avant-folk legends such as Phil Ochs and John Fahey, they still came of age when mass culture was passing off ...
Color Bars
Jan 11, 2006; ... "So the history of commodities begins with a slave trader or master's imagined or retold rape of an enslaved woman; the history of slavery is the history of humans commodified and fetishized, charged by their buyers and sellers with a number of passionate meanings." -- Edward E. Baptist, ...
The Art He Left Behind
Jan 11, 2006; ... REACHED BY PHONE some 10 days after the death of her friend James Church, Karen Chapin says she has spent the past half hour immersed in his work -- most of it the dreamlike assemblages of well-worn found objects that had become so closely identified with his name. Church, 46, died Dec ....
Autumn House Springs Forward
Jan 11, 2006; ... AT AGE 8, Autumn House Press is growing up. A key rite of passage was completed in October, when the small, Pittsburgh-based publisher of books of poetry by single authors unveiled The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. The ambitious text is aimed at a collegiate market long ...
Six Penn
Jan 11, 2006; ... THE CULTURAL DISTRICT may be Downtown's crown jewel, but in our experience, the restaurants in this gleaming, twinkling part of Pittsburgh have largely not lived up to the world-class caliber of its performance venues. We've had some enjoyable meals within walking distance of the theaters, but ...
The Matador; Beautiful Bull
Jan 11, 2006; ... I HAVE NEVER ONCE SEEN the television show Remington Steele or any recent James Bond feature -- two roles that defined Pierce Brosnan's career in the '80s and '90s, respectively. But I've enjoyed his string of supporting roles, where he excels at playing charming but shifty ...
RANT! #272; Casinos Will Bring Ruin to Us All
Jan 11, 2006; ... IN REGARD TO THE LATEST controversy concerning a slot-machine casino in Pittsburgh, I say, "Not in my backyard, you prick." I ask the reader: Do you really want Pittsburgh to be lumped in with such cities as Detroit and St. Louis? How does it feel to be on the verge of becoming another ...
MLK at CMU Still Not A-OK, Says Activist
Jan 11, 2006; ... Carnegie Mellon University will once again face the peace-mongering wrath of North Side activist Vincent Eirene on Martin Luther King Day, Mon., Jan. 16. Eirene contends that taking off half a day, as CMU has done for a number of years now, is hardly in the holiday spirit. He also ...
THIS JUST IN
Jan 11, 2006; ... HOLD THAT BENGAL! SUMMARY: Fans on the "Steelers-Bengals rivalry." STATION: WPGH Channel 53 REPORTER: Kym Gable WHEN IT AIRED: Jan. 8 RUNNING TIME: 24 seconds VISUALS: The low-lit interior of a drinking establishment. HIGHLIGHTS: >> When Gable reports, "We caught up with some ...
YOU HAD TO ASK; Near Allegheny Center Mall there is a scary-looking building with Three Mile Island-like cooling towers and brightly painted pipes inside. What goes on inside there?
Jan 11, 2006; ... "SCARY-LOOKING"? Well, I know people who get uneasy around Chia Pets -- and by "people" I mean, well, me -- so I guess I'm in no position to judge your phobia. But brace yourself: If you are disturbed by this North Side facility, be aware that there are two others like it in Pittsburgh ....
LEFT FIELD; On the Rebound; Should Pitt basketball take more chances?
Jan 11, 2006; ... WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON around here? Bill Murray said it best in Ghostbusters: "Up is down, black is white, cats and dogs sleeping together -- it's total anarchy out there." The sports world has flip-flopped. Cursed Sox franchises (both Red and White) have won back-to-back World Series, and ...
STREETWISE
Jan 11, 2006; ... Pittsburgh experiments with a more humanitarian approach to curtailing prostitution IT'S EARLY, BEFORE 9 ON A MONDAY MORNING. The thin woman in the elevator at the Allegheny County Courthouse looks ageless. And that's not a compliment. The drawn, ashen look of her skin and the ...
Supersystem; Singles Going Steady
Jan 11, 2006; ... THE IPOD-ING OF Western music culture has both defenders and detractors. On one side are anti-major-label crusaders and mere indie-music enthusiasts -- who see digital downloading as the great leveler -- and artists such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, whose careers are built on MP3 samples. On the ...
Ion Petre Stoican; Boris Kovac & La Campanella; Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars
Jan 11, 2006; ... THERE WAS A time not that long ago when what is now sometimes referred to as "New Europe" meant babushkas and balalaikas, boiled meats and graying vegetables, the punch lines of the Pollock and the Yugo. The very thought of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the gypsy trail, being "cool" was ...
Morning Becomes Eclectic
Jan 11, 2006; ... "WE HUMANS SOCIALIZE with robots all the time," observes local artist Damien Miller. Eh? He goes on to describes the all-too-familiar scenario when the phone rings around dinner and election times: "You pick up the phone, hear it's a robot because it sounds different, and hang ...
First-Draft Choices
Jan 11, 2006; ... ARCHITECTURAL RENDERINGS ARE deceptive. Invariably unveiled for the press with great hoopla, they convincingly substitute for a promised real article. Really, though, they represent only a few general intentions at the start of a long and often change-filled process. The final structure ...
CHAPTER & VERSE
Jan 11, 2006; ... Blue Pitcher Fat and receptive, deep blue, antique bubbles locked inside. A pulled handle, slow stretch of molten glass. Convincing heft, a blue to feel rich having. How can a thing bring so much joy? I've bought a thing I don't need, I ...
Brokeback Mountain; Speaking Its Name
Jan 11, 2006; ... BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN IS BASED on Annie Proulx's 1997 short story about two cowboys in love, and it's not an easy work to translate. Literature never is, especially a story that deals with an American icon -- and with one of its most homoerotic subtexts, as the literary critic Leslie Fiedler ...
Breakfast on Pluto; Pretty Vacant
Jan 11, 2006; ... THE POORLY ANIMATED robins with subtitled cheeps that open Neil Jordan's off-kilter period comedy Breakfast on Pluto are harbingers indeed. Their gossip about the goings-on at the rectory are meant to kick-start the story of Patrick "Kitten" Braden, a wandering Irish cross-dresser, but the ...
VOX POP; Tom Marches On; The end of an era for a local gadfly
Jan 04, 2006; ... THERE'S NOTHING MORE entertaining than a loudmouth populist rabble-rouser, and Tom Flaherty specialized in rousing the rabble. Politicians and pundits regularly derided his bombast: Former County Executive Jim Roddey thought Flaherty was so unpopular he used Flaherty's image in campaign ...
SUGGESTION #4; Make Pittsburgh Police More Accountable
Jan 04, 2006; ... LET'S FACE IT: When it comes to solving mysteries, the five staff members of Pittsburgh's Citizen Police Review Board earn about as much respect as Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. Perhaps that's because the mysteries they are dealing with are so difficult to unravel that they may as ...
SUGGESTION #2; Bring Back Our Hostel
Jan 04, 2006; ... DESPITE THEIR IMAGE as a haven for backpack-toting free spirits traveling on the cheap, hostels still live or die as a business. Pittsburgh's hostel, which opened in 1997 on Arlington Street in the Allentown neighborhood, got rave reviews from patrons who signed the guest book. "Brilliant," ...
SUGGESTION #6; Convert the Parking Lot at Fourth and Grant into a Speakers' Corner
Jan 04, 2006; ... TIRED OF SITE-SPECIFIC protesting with lousy audience potential? Of hollering your opinion over the grind of a Port Authority bus pulling away? Of being hassled by The Man -- when you're trying to take it to The Man? What Pittsburgh needs is a dedicated speakers' corner, such as London ...
Spinto Band; Young Guns
Jan 04, 2006; ... IF YOU FOLLOW the P.J. O'Rourke line that "age and guile beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut," at first glance, the six members of Spinto Band (ages 19 to 22) have had it on all counts. Those are some bad haircuts. Digging a little deeper reveals a group caught in a unique ...
Page France; Junkyards and Jesus
Jan 04, 2006; ... HERALDING PAGE FRANCE as prophets is tempting, if musically and spiritually heretical. A voice crying in the wilderness (OK, Maryland!), singer Michael Nau & Co. combine religious images with fanciful aristocratic themes and everyday events, set to a multigrain hodgepodge of experimental ...
Twink; A Broken Record
Jan 04, 2006; ... IT'S GOOD THAT Bostonian mad scientist Mike Langlie, under the typically lulling moniker Twink, has chosen to make avant-garde children's records rather than pursue any of the other options available to someone with his mindset -- such as death-ray invention, secret-island-lair plotting, or ...
Finders and Keepers
Jan 04, 2006; ... BIENNIAL EXHIBITIONS often feel staged, as biennial curators typically dare to risk little and tend to stick to the safest, hippest artists of the moment. It's much like the too-safe output of the bloated Hollywood studios -- after all, much is at stake for the institutions running biennials ....
Firehouse Lounge
Jan 04, 2006; ... AS PARENTS OF AN ALMOST-2-YEAR-OLD, allow us to confirm something you may have long suspected about small children: They're bad business for nightclubs. Their parents, former possessors of flattering wardrobes and up-to-the-minute musical knowledge, shift their focus from nightlife to ...
Best of 2005
Jan 04, 2006; ... CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? You're all a year older, and another year at the movies has grown old with you. The older you get, the more selective you become about the movies you see. Been there, done that -- you know the drill. Hollywood, foreign, indie, digital video: Movies come from more ...
Archaeological Doug
Jan 04, 2006; ... IT SOUNDS LIKE A WRESTLING MOVE, or an outre sex act. But the local underground-art mini-phenomenon known as Negative Douglas began with relative innocence: As a banal circa-1970s grade-school class photo, swiped off the Internet and e-mailed to a friend. The sender, Lloyd Canada, ...
15222
Jan 18, 2006; ... RENT CHECKS - AND BALANCES Re: "Eviction Campaign Pressuring Lawrenceville Landlords" [Jan. 11], thanks for covering the story. I wish you could have added that we follow a similar procedure regarding non-subsidized housing but I can live with that. What we do here is very important and ...
Dating for College Students
Jan 18, 2006; ... CITY POLITICS For activists seeking to improve turnout among young voters, giving college students the right to vote in an upcoming City Council election turned out to be easy. Getting students to actually use that right, however, may not be. Groups like the League of Young ...
Ranking High - Unfortunately
Jan 18, 2006; ... HOMELESSNESS For the homeless, the streets of Pittsburgh are truly mean, according to a report released last week by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. The report singled out the top 20 "meanest cities," ranking Pittsburgh No ....
No Need to Stick Fork in Food Store
Jan 18, 2006; ... BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS In a city trying to get any grocery store into certain black neighborhoods, the only black-owned and -operated Giant Eagle in the city is still struggling after four years in the East Hills - so much so that some patrons have recently raised false alarms about its ...
Does Impeachment Grow on a Bush?
Jan 18, 2006; ... NATIONAL POLITICS State Sen. Jim Ferlo is calling for the censure and impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He's hoping to spark the ire of Pittsburghers honked off over the continued war in Iraq and administration-authorized domestic snooping with a ...
Still Doggedly Trying to Prevent Gay Marriage
Jan 18, 2006; ... GLBT RIGHTS The issue of same-sex marriage is headed back to the state legislature, as opponents prepare to introduce legislation on Jan. 24 for a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples. Foes of same-sex marriage, such as Michael Geer, president ...
Minors' Vote Could Be Major
Jan 18, 2006; ... VOTING When state Rep. Rich Grucela proposed to allow 17-year-olds to vote in spring primaries if they'll turn 18 by the fall's general election, he wasn't thinking about the effect his measure would have on Pittsburgh. "The entire thought behind this was to get kids involved in ...
HTTP://PiTTSBURGH N'@
Jan 18, 2006; ... Yinz blog. We notice. From http://www.livejournal.com/users/hopita/ Tonight I went to the Giant Eagle to pick up my film from New Years. The envelope seemed a little thin. ... I pulled out ... some sort of form letter, addressed to me, personally, which basically said "we don't ...
THIS JUST IN
Jan 18, 2006; ... IT'S ALL BAD SUMMARY: Some local kids think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. STATION: KDKA Channel 2 REPORTER: Dave Crawley WHEN IT AIRED: Jan. 11 RUNNING TIME: 1 minute, 45 seconds VISUALS: Inside a classroom where children in uniforms are seated around a table. HIGHLIGHTS: * ...
Morningwood
Jan 18, 2006; ... Morningwood Morningwood CAPITOL EVER WAKE UP with Morningwood? You know - the rock unit that roused a little excitement while you were sleeping. On its self-titled debut, the band wants to get sexy with every man, woman and hipster in a game of musical grab-ass. Sweaty ...
The Brave and The Bold
Jan 18, 2006; ... Tortoise & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy The Brave and The Bold OVERCOAT RECORDINGS EERIE, SATURATED synth lines start the song, straight off an '80s horror-flick soundtrack. The band settles into a pulsing, sinister shuffle. You've heard these words before, but never with ...