Culture Archives - Page 22 of 36 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Nietzsche famously castigated Euripides for killing the tradition of the chorus in Greek tragedy, because the audience no longer had music to inform its comprehension. He even felt that Euripides caused the death of tragedy itself by trying to make it too Socratic, too rational. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” might …

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Arts

Exploring the Work of Damianos and Mulcahy at the Westmoreland

by Vicky A Clark

To paraphrase a new friend, director general of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts Jamal Shah: in celebrating life, art follows the inquisitive human mind in its desire to delve deeper as it challenges the established reality and surprises us with new realities. It challenges us to deepen our quest to explore the overwhelming …

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PQ Poem

Miraculous

by Brandon Fury

I found the miraculous in the dim lamp that hung above your head, swinging. I found the miraculous in the hospital lobby— a bag of candy hearts left by a child whose mother ached in a blue chair. The voices of sick and well mingled across the linoleum floor. I found the miraculous in the …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

The Unconventional Pays Off

by Charles Rosenblum

Sometimes a building aims to look as if it has always been there. Frequently, architects match the brick of the surrounding neighborhood and use slightly modernized versions of traditional details to make a structure appear that it’s been there longer than it has. This is not such a bad thing. Buildings end up being agreeable …

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Opinion

Passing the Torch

by PQ Staff

Earlier this fall, a group of about 250 civic and cultural leaders gathered to pay tribute to Teresa Heinz Kerry on the occasion of her handing over the chairmanship of The Heinz Endowments to her sons. From creating Riverlife, to championing causes from the environment to social equity to the Cultural District among many others, …

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Books

Six Books for Your Winter Reading List

by John Allison

This issue, we take up half-a-dozen new books in three groupings: literary works from two creative writing teachers, Pittsburgh sports history from two prominent national writers, and the latest from two great local legal minds. Don’t be surprised if that next national media story about the resurgent charms of Pittsburgh works in a reference to …

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History

Christmas in Utopia

by Tom Imerito

It’s early morning on Christmas Eve in the town of Economy, Pennsylvania. The year is 1828. Twenty-seven-year-old Catharina Langenbacher awakens to the five o’clock gong of the grandfather clock in the sitting room downstairs. By the time she clambers down the crude staircase, her widowed mother is preparing breakfast. Catharina’s 35-year-old brother, Romelius, is milking …

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Opinion

On a Lonely Stretch of Road

by Douglas Heuck

I had occasion recently to pet a wild animal for the first time. For 55 straight summers, I’ve visited Michigan’s eastern Upper Peninsula, but I’d never driven to its rugged, western side, which borders Lake Superior and Canada. Pittsburgh friends were celebrating the relaunch of an old family boat they’d restored, at the top of …

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History

Thanksgiving in Greensburg

by Dan Reynolds

Childhood expands and does not measure. Adulthood counts and contracts. To me, as an eight-year-old boy considering the width of Pennsylvania—from my home in York to my grandmother’s house in Greensburg—geography was impressionistic. Somerset County held cold, incalculable risks. The rest of the landscape was relatively flat, passive and non-threatening. As a Thanksgiving trip to …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

Strip Stake

by John Beale

Pittsburgh’s Strip District is the place where everyone comes for everything. With redevelopment occurring on every edge of this one-half square mile tract, city planners, business owners and residents are looking to strike the right balance. Bring in the new developments and luxury condominiums, but keep the character—the boutiques and bars, ethnic restaurants and groceries, …

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PQ Poem

Homewood Cemetery

by Valerie Bacharach

My husband and I walk its paths at dusk in the lessening light when heat and humidity ease. There is much life among these graves— deer browse, wild turkeys run and flirt, groundhogs and chipmunks hide in shadows. Red-winged blackbirds flash across the pond, land on reeds that surround it. Water lilies bloom, a thick …

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PQ Poem

Walking

by Philip Terman

My first walk is also my first memory— On the purple carpet, in the living room Of that bungalow in the suburbs built For the soldiers who returned from the war. One parent directed me towards the other, Who waited with open arms, Both of them smiling, encouraging, My brothers on the stairway cheering. No, …

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Arts

Quantum’s Surreal “The River” Transfixes

by Stuart Sheppard

In Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel, Trout Fishing In America, the narrator visits a store selling trout streams by the foot. They are stacked in piles like pieces of lumber, each length corresponding to a different price. In Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River, produced by Quantum Theatre, it’s as if they picked out a …

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Books

Drue Heinz winner brings humanity to adversity

by Fred Shaw

When Melissa Yancy describes aspects of facial reconstructions, fetal surgery and kidney transplants in her short-story collection Dog Years (University of Pittsburgh Press), she writes knowingly, not gratuitously. The 2016 Drue Heinz Award winner and Phoenix native, comes honestly to this perspective as a fundraiser advocating for health-care causes. And while several of her stories …

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PQ Poem

For James Wright

by John Stupp

You write about shyness the shyness of daylight along the Ohio River like a girl brushing her hair in a boarding house looking for privacy— in one of your poems morning arrives naked uncomfortable shivering in the valley offering only a glimpse of herself to ironworkers electricians millwrights carpenters for the first time like a …

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PQ Poem

Avalon Creek

by Tess Barry

Slung over one sturdy branch hung low but high enough Swing that rode June skies for months that flung us up and out Above cool awnings shaded trees swing that bent the back of oaks Thick rope wound tight knotted twine stolen from Clarence Weingartner’s barn Strung by brothers sworn enemies awful boys Frayed ends …

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Books

The Challenge of Fighting Back

by John Allison

Reading the latest novel by Stewart O’Nan, the Pittsburgh-born writer who boomeranged home several years ago, is like watching the performance of an experienced athlete who makes it all look so easy. “City of Secrets” is his 16th novel since 1994, and the first to take place entirely outside of the USA. Like 2015’s “West …

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Books

Short Takes: “Whiskey, Etc.” “Death by Cyanide”

by John Allison

Sherrie Flick’s latest collection is described as “short (short) stories”—that parenthetical “short” preparing you for one page tales, even one-paragraph blasts. Scholars of marketing might see this as evidence that fiction creators are getting with the short-attention span condition of the modern consumer, offering an efficient product that can be noshed like a meal replacement …

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History

Molded Tooth Staggered Gear and Worker, 1913

by Jennifer McNulty

The Mesta Machine Company churned and smoked on more than 20 acres of land along the Monongahela River. Though its central product was steelmaking equipment—supplying some 500 mills around the globe—Americans had Mesta’s 3,000 employees to thank for their working cars and refrigerators, ship hulls and power plant turbines. During the Depression, then-president Lorenz Iversen …

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Opinion

Smart City

by PQ Staff

Certainly, it’s not great news that Pittsburgh didn’t win a $50 million federal Smart City Challenge grant to redesign its transportation system. The grant would have helped “plan, design and build the next Pittsburgh,” Mayor Bill Peduto said. Pittsburgh’s proposal envisioned a combination of big data working with electricity microgrids to create an “electric avenue” …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

A Monument Then and Now

by Charles Rosenblum

Did the demolition of the greenfield (really the Beechwood Boulevard) Bridge feel like the passing of an era? The urbane, concrete arch span of 1923 was crumbling far too ominously above the speeding traffic of the Parkway East to be able to stay in place, so it was ceremoniously demolished. A replacement will be completed …

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Arts

A Long Romance

by Margaret J. Krauss

At first, the performance was delayed because ballerina Carlotta Grisi was recovering from an injury. Then the conductor was battling a tumor. And then safety concerns slowed the set construction. But finally, on June 28, 1841—a Monday night—“Giselle” premiered at the Paris Opéra. After its Paris premiere, the two-act Romantic ballet entered almost immediately into …

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