Culture Archives - Page 22 of 37 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Pittsburgh’s greatest but still relatively unknown sports hero is about to get a curtain call of a different kind. This spring, Pittsburgh Opera unveils “The Summer King,” the world premiere of Daniel Sonenberg’s tale of the remarkable, short life of baseball legend Josh Gibson. The opera weaves a young black man’s heartbreaking personal tribulations with …

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Opinion

Confession: Cops and Kids

by Tim Menees

I done got busted for breaking-and-entering (cue the blues harp and slide guitar). This is a sad tale but I must spare all young people the same sordid fate. One sunny Saturday morning six decades ago in Seattle’s Ballard district, two kids blew open the door of a playground field house, and the rest of …

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PQ Poem

When I Am Empty

by Anne Rashid

When I am empty I think about you staring back at me in the pouring rain— the family picnic in the Upper Peninsula, my grape pop spilling down the sides of the table, an empty bottle, your lips turned into a smirk, your eyes glinting, you in that moment loving me. I’m empty on the …

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Books

Setting the Steelers Standards

by Fred Shaw

Growing up in a local mill town in the late 1970’s, Steelers’ Super Bowl victories seemed like a birthright. For my generation, it takes little to rattle-off the roster from the ‘79 season, the last of that era’s championship teams. And while the exploits of future Hall-of-Famers Lynn Swann and Jack Lambert live on in …

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Arts

Painting? Have Some Fun!

by Tim Menees

I spent three decades at a job that wasn’t a job, one at which few have actually earned a living. But cartoons disappear when the newspapers are bundled up for recycling. Heck, newspapers disappear. After leaving the newspaper, I began painting… and soon remembered it is darn hard. I venture to say this in spite …

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PQ Poem

Blending Image and Word

by Aaron Fischer

Ekphrasis first began as a rhetorical form used by the ancient Greeks. Defined by Webster’s as “a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art,” it remains one of the oldest forms of artistic analysis, dating back to Homer’s description of Achilles’ blacksmith god-created shield in The Illiad. This form of writing …

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Arts

Hath Not a Jew

by Sarina Gruver Moore

Of Shakespeare’s major comedies, The Merchant of Venice is my least favorite because it’s the least funny. In a post-Holocaust world it’s difficult to stage the play’s anti-semitic jokes, and directors often make the understandable choice to shift the tone contour of the play toward the political and tragic. At first glance, a recent production …

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Arts

The Art of Lazar Ran

by Jennifer Faines

From origins at the Vitebsk Fine Arts School in Belarus (founded by Mark Chagall in 1918), to safe-keeping in an Ohio home for decades, the art of Lazar Ran and his contemporaries has taken a circuitous path to appear on the walls of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. The collection conveys a lesser-known story of …

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Arts

Seeing the World Through Music

by Stuart Sheppard

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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