Culture Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Let Us Now Heal Wounded Men Read More »

One thing, as men, that we rarely talk about, are the experiences we have suffered in the form of sexual abuse or trauma. The National Institute of Health found that 30.7 percent of men report having been the victims of sexual violence . . . and more than half of those before the age of …

The Bridge to Brunot Island Read More »

The Bridge to Brunot Island

by Ziggy Edwards

The Bridge to Brunot Island Caged in its lattice of trusses,a worker crossing on footcan witness the last orange flashbefore bare winter conjures Ohio’s vengeance.For now, giants in their opaque depthsbreathe evenly; the bridge’s underbellyjiggles the surface. The hammerhead siren is only sunbathing. A guy on second shiftswears he saw the shadow of Dr. Brunothaunting …

Work Confession Read More »

Work Confession

by Todd Davis

Work Confession I dug a room that sits empty beneath the earth. I ate the last of the potatoes and didn’t get around to canning before the tomatoes and peppers rotted. Like rain on pursed lips, tomorrow will be a feast day with nothing. We don’t drag the river for our dead anymore. The cemetery’s …

Books Culture History Profiles

Pittsburgh’s Mal Goode: Television’s First Black Broadcaster

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

On Oct. 28, 1962, the three major television networks interrupted their scheduled programs to broadcast a special report on what would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a critical moment not only in American history, but also in the integration of American broadcasting. Just a few months earlier, ABC, at the urging …

Pittsburgh’s Mal Goode: Television’s First Black Broadcaster Read More »

Arts Culture

Pittsburgh Opera’s “Armida” Sings in a Language Beyond Words

Pittsburgh Opera’s “Armida” Sings in a Language Beyond Words Read More »

The French New Wave director Francois Truffaut once remarked of Alfred Hitchcock that he was the only director who did not require sound for his films to be understood; in other words, the effect of his visual narrative was so strong that dialogue was not really necessary. In much the same way, I found in …

My Modest, Idiosyncratic Love of City Living Read More »

My Modest, Idiosyncratic Love of City Living

by Pete Geissler

AN ENTREPRENEUR FINDS HIS NICHEI was lunching with my accountant while examining my assets when he suggested that I buy an office instead of renting. I was living and working at the time in a Downtown high-rise apartment and, as he said, “enriching the landlord, not you.” Soon after, I accidentally noticed an ad for …

Saturday Morning Flannel Sheets Read More »

Saturday Morning Flannel Sheets

by Amy Lee Heinlen

Saturday Morning Flannel Sheets Because I say the exact wrong thingmy daughter sobs: I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want youto die. I don’t want to die. She’s five.Her tongue jimmies her first tooth loose from its warmbottom gum. This necessary severing can’t come withouta little wriggle and push, a little blood. I …

Prelude

by Gary Fincke

Prelude One night, when you are to readYour poems after a womanWho performs in a beretJauntily angled and a scarfTrailing fringe to her knees, you’reEmbarrassed enough to ponderFeigning illness, every wordYou are about to read becomeAs pretentious as her voiceLifted at the close of each lineAlready dense with inflections. As the half-filled room, formerlyA small …

Prelude Read More »

Arts

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Finds Poetry in Dance

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Finds Poetry in Dance Read More »

I should have known something special was happening Downtown on a windy, wet, early-April evening when I saw a 10-year-old girl literally yanking her mother into the box office of the Benedum Center. I hadn’t seen a child this excited to attend a performance since I witnessed a little boy twirling his red matador cape …

American Spirit Opinion

Nashville, Pennsylvania

by Sandee Gertz

After an 11-year exile to Nashville, Tennessee, I finally woke up smelling Pittsburgh. I woke from dreams of flying through the Conemaugh Gap, inhaling the untouched scent of the Laurel and Cresson mountains surrounding my hometown of Johnstown, and continued across Route 22 to the musky smells of the Monongahela and into the mist of bridges …

Nashville, Pennsylvania Read More »

Fiddling as Pittsburgh Burns Read More »

Fiddling as Pittsburgh Burns

by Douglas Heuck

Today’s newsletter was going to be a round-up of all the noteworthy Pittsburgh citizens who passed away last year. Instead, it’s about trying to forestall a much more historic and devastating obituary – the death of US Steel in Pittsburgh. For the past six months, Pittsburgh’s “leaders” – civic, corporate, and governmental — have …

Dissatisfied but Grateful Read More »

Dissatisfied but Grateful

by Samuel Hazo

To satisfy and to gratify are often used interchangeably, but they have totally different meanings. To satisfy, or to be satisfied, refers to a variety of human needs that periodically demand to be met and satiated in order to be eased. The need for food, water, sleep, space, companionship, alleviation of pain, or protection from …

Arts

Kinetic Theatre’s “A Sherlock Carol”

Kinetic Theatre’s “A Sherlock Carol” Read More »

Earlier this month I happened to rewatch the 1976 film, “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” which I had not seen for many years, and was amazed by the interiority actor Nicol Williamson discovered in the character of Sherlock Holmes. In this story, Holmes teams up with Sigmund Freud – talk about an intellectual buddy adventure – to solve …

Pittsburgh Tomorrow: The Voyage of a Year Read More »

Pittsburgh Tomorrow: The Voyage of a Year

by Douglas Heuck

At 3 a.m. Sunday, October 20, I bolted out of bed with a thought. Weeks earlier, I’d tried unsuccessfully to attend a Kamala Harris rally to spread the word about the Pittsburgh Tomorrow project. On this Sunday, Elon Musk was coming for a rally — and if I could get in, I wanted to be …

Books

Dilworth Explores Coming-of-Age Themes in To Be Marquette

by Fred Shaw

Set mainly in the 1970s, Sharon Dilworth’s recent book, To Be Marquette, sometimes makes small moments feel symbolic by utilizing music from the era — think Bob Dylan and Peter Frampton — to help establish tone. However, it’s a song not included that might best summarize the origins of conflict in this well-paced book: Led …

Dilworth Explores Coming-of-Age Themes in To Be Marquette Read More »

Books

Walter Turns to AI Fiction with Doppelganger

by Fred Shaw

Noted sci-fi novelist and pioneering computer scientist Vernor Vinge wrote in a 1993 paper for NASA that “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” If so, this tipping point, which he called a “technological singularity,” is upon mankind, one in which …

Walter Turns to AI Fiction with Doppelganger Read More »

Arts

Quantum’s Sleepy “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

Quantum’s Sleepy “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” Read More »

In drama, interiority always triumphs over exteriority. Just look at Shakespeare (even his history plays), Beckett, or Sophocles. And mystery is always stronger than explication. Who wants to be told what to think? But with Quantum Theatre’s new production of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” we find an inversion of these principals, in that the …

Beer Money for Almost Nothing Read More »

Beer Money for Almost Nothing

by Gary Ciocco

Beer Money for Almost Nothing “Holdin’ on to sixteen as long as you can Change is coming ’round real soon Make us women and men.” John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane” The Rolling Rock Brewery, red brick behemoth, stood just down the street. I’d had some of the palest ale already, but in nineteen-eighty-two I stepped inside. …

Books

Demystifying Creative Nonfiction

by Fred Shaw

For some, Pittsburgh is french fries on salads, rabid Steelers fans and Iron City beer. For others, it’s Andy Warhol, steel mills and pierogies. For Lee Gutkind, it’s the city where creative nonfiction, that nebulous, energetic literary genre he continues to champion, grew into prominence. In his latest book, aptly titled The Fine Art of …

Demystifying Creative Nonfiction Read More »

Arts Culture

Learning to Fly, Again: Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Peter Pan” Makes Children of Us All

Learning to Fly, Again: Pittsburgh Ballet’s “Peter Pan” Makes Children of Us All Read More »

Marcel Proust may have needed a sip of lime-flower tea imbued with madeleine crumbs to trigger the memory of his idyllic childhood, but I found myself just as deliciously transported back to my six-year-old psyche as I watched Pittsburgh Ballet Theater’s magical production of “Peter Pan” in the Benedum Center last week. Had this performance …