Culture

Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves?

Imagine if before the performance of a play, the director stepped on stage and told the audience what it was supposed to think about it. Viewers would be insulted. Or perhaps laugh. Some might even walk out. Yet this kind of didactic inculcation is quite normal in museums today. In fact, because the exhibitive experience …

Is it Time to Stop Wearing Our Art on Our Sleeves? Read More »

Living Grief

How am I supposed to do this? Your rough hands cup my shouldersyou hold me a step away then kiss me.I know every assaultworking steel made to your body.Pockmarks on the top of your hands from scalds of wet metalFlesh underyour right forearm puckered by a slice ofsheet metalInner left thigh a leathery map of …

Living Grief Read More »

A Turning Point

It’s rare to be able to witness first-hand the alchemy of change that launches a city onto a new trajectory. Yet in Pittsburgh that change — a series of man-made lightning strikes — is underway. Since May 20, not even three months from this writing, events have turned in favor of those working to create a …

A Turning Point Read More »

Nightrain

Nightrain after Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days We missed the sunsetand now we are lying in this bedthe lights offeverything closed in darknessmarking the death of dayof wakefulness, obscuringthe colors of the world. I notice the rain tendering the leaves—dropping sometimes in needleslight and slender, sometimeslike paint splotching a tarp, rotund,worldly. Drops fall in disheveled timetaps …

Nightrain Read More »

Gilded Not Golden

By noon, the sky should have been bright. Instead, smoke turned it the color of tarnished brass. The smoke pressed into brick, clung to the damp wool of work shirts, and settled deeply into the lungs of the men leaving the mills. Many were immigrants, drawn by the promise of steady wages. Instead, they found …

Gilded Not Golden Read More »

True Courage

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.””  –Eleanor Roosevelt I have lived through my own private horror. I have looked fear …

True Courage Read More »

Reimaging a Home

Steep and narrow Rialto Street, once known as Pig Hill and the route from the Allegheny River to the slaughterhouse, is a piece of Pittsburgh history. At the top of the hill is a new addition to local experience, the art houses of Troy Hill. As contemporary interpretations of historic house museums — Henry Clay …

Reimaging a Home Read More »

Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov

Gender-flipping classic roles in theater has become so commonplace that it’s now almost de rigueur.  What director wants to go to a hipster cocktail party these days and confess that he or she is casting a white cis male as Hamlet?  I’ve seen so many female Julius Caesars that I now expect the play to …

Quantum’s “Seagull” Reinvigorates Chekhov Read More »

Rebuilding Pittsburgh — the Story of RIDC

The first time I visited Pittsburgh for more than a couple of days was Christmas week about 20 years ago. I stayed at the Omni William Penn and the only vivid memory I have is walking around Downtown on a cold Saturday afternoon, not being able to find anyplace good to have lunch. It seems …

Rebuilding Pittsburgh — the Story of RIDC Read More »

Gorson Bio and an Exhibit at The Westmoreland

The first two decades of the 20th century were an extraordinary time for Pittsburgh and for the whole world that bought the steel produced in western Pennsylvania’s mills. The Pittsburgh region dominated the world in the production of steel, and that new alloy utterly changed civilization as the new century advanced. The cars, trucks, rails, bridges, skyscrapers and airplanes that heralded a …

Gorson Bio and an Exhibit at The Westmoreland Read More »

75 Years Ago the Renaissance Began

The official start to Pittsburgh’s long-cherished ambition to become a Most Livable City took place on the grey-skied afternoon of May 18, 1950, and it was noisy. At a shouted signal from Pennsylvania Gov. James Duff, an 1,800-pound wrecking ball slammed into a 103-year-old vacant brick warehouse on Exchange Way between Liberty and Penn avenues …

75 Years Ago the Renaissance Began Read More »

The Time It Takes Between the Takes

In his celebrated writing workshop of the early 1990s, editor and literary guru Gordon Lish taught that one of the best ways to create an effective agon is to place divergent characters in a confined space – and let them act on their own volition, without smothering them in authorial intent.  And that’s exactly what …

The Time It Takes Between the Takes Read More »

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. IX

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our best efforts, we know we’ll leave out key contributors. I think you’ll find that this small city at the confluence of …

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. IX Read More »

An Opportunity for Each of Us

It’s been 23 years since the saga of the discarded toilet. I lived in Squirrel Hill then, and each day as I drove Downtown to work at the Post-Gazette, I followed the same path as thousands of other motorists, coming through Oakland, exiting the Boulevard of the Allies down and to the right via a …

An Opportunity for Each of Us Read More »

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VIII

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our best efforts, we know we’ll leave out key contributors. I think you’ll find that this small city at the confluence of …

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VIII Read More »

Kinetic Theatre’s “Embers” Tells All

That Kinetic Theatre Company’s “Embers” is such a moving play should be counterintuitive: it violates one of the most basic rules of art, “show don’t tell.”  This is a work that shows nothing and tells everything, which is doubly ironic, as its principal character, who does most of the telling, does not trust language.  Based …

Kinetic Theatre’s “Embers” Tells All Read More »

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VII

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our best efforts, we know we’ll leave out key contributors. I think you’ll find that this small city at the confluence of …

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VII Read More »

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VI

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our best efforts, we know we’ll leave out key contributors. I think you’ll find that this small city at the confluence of …

Pittsburgh’s Contributions to the World, Pt. VI Read More »

More Than Meets the Eye

It’s frequently assumed that looking and seeing have the same meaning. In fact, the difference between them is crucial. To look means essentially to perceive in three dimensions and to confirm and name what confronts our vision. Its ultimate benefit is to permit us to identify by name the world around us. It focuses on …

More Than Meets the Eye Read More »

 My PTSD (“Post Traumatic Suit Disorder”)

Reading Clayton Touter’s recent story in Pittsburgh Quarterly — “Buying A Suit. A Primer” — took me back to being traumatized by Brooks Brothers at 13 in the mid-sixties…  Per his quote of Michael Bastian of Brooks Brothers which invented the “off the rack” suit: “If you don’t know your proper size, the first thing …

 My PTSD (“Post Traumatic Suit Disorder”) Read More »

The First Years

The First Years Locals call it the gates of hell, craterin the Turkmenistan desert burning forty years. The longest-burning fire begansix thousand years ago—an Australian coal seam in New South Wales ignited by lightning,smiting the biome into barren trails. But I always come back to the coal seamblazing under Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a trash fire …

The First Years Read More »

Briefly Noted

I was fortunate to attend another remarkable boundary-blurring performance recently: the world premiere of the long-lost “Markus Passion” by Bach.  A joint-effort by Chatham Baroque, Renaissance Baroque, The Sebastians, and Joseph Marcell — based on archival interpretations and recreations of a vanished manuscript from the Bach corpus — the performance of this fusion of libretto, …

Briefly Noted Read More »

Top
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...
Responsive Menu
Add more content here...