Culture Archives - Page 6 of 35 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Capturing a Giant

There’s never been anything quite like it. In its heyday, the Homestead Works sprawled across 420 acres, much of it hugging both sides of the Monongahela River. Roughly 15,000 people worked there, in 450 buildings, dominating the landscape with more than 100 miles of railroad tracks and becoming so intertwined with the town that when Big …

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Arts Culture

Art and Intention

by Nicole Renee Ryan

Growing up on a farm in Mercer County, surrounded by expansive fields and wooded hills, I spent much of my childhood either outdoors exploring or inside reading. I was (and still am) particularly fond of stories that explore hidden worlds, like the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.” …

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Culture PQ Poem

Freight: Passing Through

by Dora Odarenko

I resonate over banks of the Ohio cense with soot the river straitjacketed between walls built for restraint. I cast my voice out over Neville Island intertwine with suspect air. In haste and power I slice with authority the boredom of the highway, its hum a faucet left unchecked. A presence inescapable, I penetrate the …

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Culture History

Defying the Odds

by Jason Vrabel

On opening night a century ago, velour drapes accentuated the auditorium doors and Juliet balconies. A newfangled ventilation system filtered smoke from a cigar lounge. And beneath an ornate plaster ceiling, Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce president Marcus Rauh dedicated the Manor Theater before a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 1,500. Bookended by pandemics, the “photoplay” theater …

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Arts Culture

Quantum’s “The Cherry Orchard” is Brilliantly Inscrutable

by Stuart Sheppard

Often in theater, the more mundane the plot, the more iconoclastic the drama. Thus, if “Hamlet” is essentially about a man who cannot make up his mind, and in “Waiting For Godot” we watch nothing happen, twice, then “The Cherry Orchard” offers us four acts about the refinancing of a mortgage in arrears. What could …

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Arts Culture

Now and Then: Artemesia Genteleschi and Kehinde Wiley at the Frick

by Vicky A Clark

The Frick has gifted us with a rare treat: the opportunity to view an iconic work from the 17th century paired with a major work of our century. The two paintings of the Judith and Holofernes story, created four centuries apart, comprise “Slay” which is on exhibit through Sunday. Artemesia Gentileschi’s version depicts the classic …

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Culture PQ Poem

A Parent’s Shame

by Jessica Whipple

She grips a chunk of chalk in her fistscratches onto black construction paperfamiliar fury of scribbles:a moon todayyesterday, an egg someone’s headside by side, two are apples. Sometimesthe picture isn’t the pointit’s powder on palmswows and ooohs and beautifulsfingers and focus and finishingit’s preschool prideit’s fine-motor joy neither of us realizingshe’s tall enough nowto see into …

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Arts Culture

Kinetic Theatre’s World Premiere of “The Illustrious Invalid”

by Stuart Sheppard

There is a saying in the world of martial arts that “Control is the mother of speed,” and it could be said that in the world of theater, control – in the form of precise writing, acting, and directing – is the mother of farce. In both cases, when speed is the sole objective, things …

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Culture History

Pittsburgher’s Report

by Bill Zlatos

The sun burned brightly on june 17, 1876, promising a hot day in southwestern Montana. Gen. George Crook’s column of about 1,300 soldiers, friendly Indians and civilians relaxed while their horses chomped prairie grass and quenched their thirst in Rosebud Creek. At about 8:30 a.m., as Crook played whist with fellow officers, Crow and Shoshone …

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Culture

On a Pedestal, Summer 2022

by PQ Staff

When Harris Ferris became executive director, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre had lost its orchestra and faced a mountain of debt and a dubious future. Nearly 17 years later, he leaves the PBT stronger than ever. A former principal dancer, armed with a Rutgers MBA and a winning personality, Ferris expanded the company’s national and international …

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Books

Taking Flight With the Ordinary

by Fred Shaw

“Speaking from the gut” was known in ancient Greece as gastromancy. It also became known as an early form of ventriloquism. According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “the noises produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the unliving, who took up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist. The ventriloquist would then interpret …

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Arts Culture

The Tamburitzans, Pittsburgh’s Oldest Stage Act, Holds Fundraising Gala

by PQ Staff

“The Tamburitzans share the world’s cultures through folk song and dance, as well as through authentic ethnic dress, with audiences across the United States,” said Alyssa Bushunow, Tamburitzans Executive Director. “By coming together to celebrate the folk culture of diverse nations — most traditionally those in Central and Eastern Europe —The Tamburitzans transcend politics to …

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Arts Culture

PICT Theatre’s “Endgame”

by Stuart Sheppard

“Endgame” is an enormous play set in a small room occupied by four persons who speak absurdly, recounting stories or delivering monologues apropos of nothing — as nursing home residents often do — prompted by memories that float into their minds from the effects of old age, disease, or boredom. Written by Samuel Beckett as …

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History

The $3,000 Hippopotamus

by John G. Hennon

“Lucy is dead” was the headline of the March 17, 1902 Pittsburgh Press article that announced the passing of Lucy Juba-Nile, the popular hippopotamus that had been dwelling at the Highland Park Zoological Garden (now called the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium) for the previous three years. Lucy had been ill for about a week. …

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Books

Reflections on Masculinity

by Fred Shaw

In his award-winning recent memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome lovingly describes the antechamber of the now-defunct Hills Department store in his hometown of Warren, Ohio as smelling “like the emotions of a child. Pre-adolescent bacchanalia. It was dizzying. It was a roasted peanut, soft pretzel factory wrapped inside a chocolate-covered everything. …

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Books Culture

Dressick Packs 63 Quick-hit Tales into Fables of the Deconstruction

by Fred Shaw

Flash fiction wasn’t invented by Hemingway but his classic six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” stands as a well-known exemplar of compressed emotion. With a word count that runs anywhere from five to 1,500, Writer’s Digest further defines the genre as not “focusing on plot or character development, the writer instead focuses on …

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Opinion

No More Love Letters

by Samuel Hazo

I have always been amused by Hollywood’s vision of writers at work. The writer is presented seated at a desk on which sits a typewriter or a computer. Suddenly the writer seems inspired and begins typing feverishly. The camera stays on him as he continues to type, and his manuscript grows page by page into …

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Culture Opinion

Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

by David Macpherson

In a rare show of unity, Congress seems poised to declare daylight savings time to be permanent. No longer in March will we drive distracted as we futilely fiddle with the buttons on our old car’s dashboard in a sleep deprived commute to work. The slight increase in automobile accidents in the week after the …

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PQ Poem

Fern Hollow Bridge

by Arlene Weiner

The high bridge carries a roadway out of town,an earlier generation’s pride and wonder,emblem of man’s ambition. From belowon the park path, it’s an iron rainbow, a sky that booms with ungiving thunder above a shallow stream that gave no graceto the promising son who did himself to deathchoosing to break himself on the dusty path. …

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Culture History

Remembering Our Ethnic Heritage

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

I was born in Pittsburgh in April 1939, less than five months before Hitler began World War II by invading Poland. I entered first grade in September 1945, a month after the end of the war. I was a member of the war-babies generation, the pre-baby boomers, who would grow up searching for an identity …

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Arts Culture

Pittsburgh Opera’s “In a Grove” – a Revelation of Sound and Sight

by Stuart Sheppard

In speaking of opera, French composer Claude Debussy praised what he termed “music that’s lit from within,” and this might be the best way to describe Pittsburgh Opera’s world premiere of “In a Grove,” a phantasmagoric reinterpretation of the eponymous story by Japan’s great modernist writer, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The original narrative, published in 1922 — …

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Culture PQ Poem

Full Moon, Occ Health

by Katy Giebenhain

By the time he reaches Occupational Health the security officer tips his head, says Full moon. You can tell. In the bright sting of winter and vaccine pod fender-bendersglass doors on this edge of hospital campus part and shut, part and shut. Last week a diamond earing went missing.With a distraught patient Iduck-walked the foyer, examined elevator tracks, feltbehind parked wheelchairs and the …

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