Category Archives: Arts & Culture

All the things you need to know about Pittonkatonk 2019

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A post shared by Pittonkatonk (@pittonkatonk) on Apr 21, 2019 at 2:26pm PDT

Saturday, May 11, 2019, is the annual Balkan brass band festival in Schenley Park. It is one big, bad, brass band potluck and it is all FREE.

While Pittonkatonk happens one day a year, there are a lot of great things that happen the other 364 days a year to lead up to the festival.

Here are a few of the articles about this year’s festival that are worth your time.

Pittonkatonk is more than a music festival // Downstream
Los Mirlos kicks off their first ever US tour at Pittonkatonk // Very Local Pittsburgh – psychedelic cumbia band from Pero kicks off their first ever US tour in Pittsburgh.
A guide to the Pittonkatonk Youth Showcase // Very Local Pittsburgh – learn more about how Pittonkatonk has helped to facilitate collaborations between bands and high-school students.
What separates Pittonkatonk from all the other Honks // Post-Gazette
Pittonkatonk takes a distinctly noncorporate festival approach // Trib

Here is a quick overview of Pittonkatonk…

Soup N’at: Eat Soup & Support Pittsburgh Artists

[tl;dr: $10 gets you some soup from awesome Pittsburgh chefs and the $ goes to local artists.]

Soup N’At is back! Great to see this event continue. Soup N’at is the Pittsburgh version of the Sunday Soup crowdfunding. Check out some of our past posts on Soup N’at here.

How does Soup N’at work?

Each guest donates $10 in cash at the door
Guests eat soup donated by Pittsburgh restaurants, usually accompanied by delicious bread
Local artists present their projects
Each guest casts a vote for their favorite project.
The winning project takes home all of the $ that was collected at the door.

Soup N’at – Sunday, February 25, 2018

Location: The Union Project

Time: 6-8pm

Menu:

For soup:
– Bar Marco (gluten-free)
– Black Radish Kitchen (vegan)
– Park Bruges
– Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance and the East End Food Co-op will be providing vegetables that will be made into soup
Dessert from Ace Hotel Pittsburgh‘s Whitfield
Bread from Allegro Hearth Bakery
Flowers from Trader Joes

For more information about the dinner and the artists check out the Soup N’at Facebook event here and the Soup N’at website.

Paul’s Print Store Grand Opening

I just learned about this event from a friend who were kind enough to spread the word. I love event posters. I love printed things. Screen printing, digital printing, woodcut printing. I have long been wanting to start a series of blog posts about events with beautiful posters.

Paul’s Print Store is having a grand opening in Lawrenceville on Friday. The Paul of Paul’s Print Store is Paul Roden, one half of the duo that founded Tugboat Printshop. Tugboat Printshop makes hand carved woodcut prints. You may have seen their work hanging around Pittsburgh, or some of the posters they have created for events in Pittsburgh (here is one we wrote about in 2010) or possibly Washington, DC. (The photos on the internet and Instagram do not do their work justice, their work must be seen in person).

“Homestead” Paul Roden, 2017. Available online here.

Paul is a super nice person and I am sure the Grand Opening for Paul’s Print Store will be a swell event. Art, beer, wine and some dance hall music. And I am not just saying this because I am secretly a huge fan of dance hall music.

Earlier today I was chatting with some other bloggers on Facebook. I was asking for advice on sponsored tweets and pondering the idea of posting sponsored content. I have been thinking about how to connect more Pittsburghers to local businesses. The Facebook thread has me thinking out load about how this blog has been more of a community creator than a money maker and trying to explain that the connections that have come from writing about Pittsburgh have been more valuable than ad dollars.

Paul is one of those people who I have met through a friend of a friend and through the blog. Tugboat Printshop is a great example of Pittsburgh business that has been thriving, not thriving like Uber or Google, but quietly contributing to the fabric of Pittsburgh.

If you are in Lawrenceville tomorrow, stop by and visit Paul’s Print Store to toast their grand opening. If you are a lover of posters and Pittsburgh artists and just nice people be sure to follow @Prints_paul on Instagram.

Paul’s Print Store Grand Opening
Friday, October 19, 2017
6-9pm
3534 1/2 Butler Street, Lawrenceville

Stunning artworks from Tugboat Print Shop (communicationsrecruitmentbrisbane.wordpress.com)

TUE: Free Event with Authors of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign”

The authors of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, will be in Pittsburgh for a free lecture at the Carnegie Library Lecture hall on Tuesday, October 10, 2017.

Tickets for the lecture are free and the event will be followed by a book signing with White Whale Bookstore at 8pm.

Visit the PublicSource Facebook event for more details.

Follow: @PublicSourcePA @JonAllenDC @AmieParnes

Pittsburgh Underground Film Festival Screening of Ovarian Psycos

There have been a lack of movies, especially documentary films, to see in Pittsburgh this summer. With the Regent Square theater closed for repairs (does anyone know if/when it will reopen?), there have been even fewer options.

The 1st annual Pittsburgh Underground Film Festival #reelqPUFF is happening this weekend and has a line up of several interesting documentaries.

The film festival starts on Friday with a screening of the documentary Ovarian Psycos. Ovarian Psycos is a bicycle brigade in Los Angeles that supports women of color. The brigade started in 2010 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood and the documentary premiered at SXSW in 2016.

The trailer is included below and is available online here. Sue from the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondent’s blog has posted an interview with Maryann ‘Sunhands’ who is one of the members of of the Ovarian Psycos Cycle Brigade. Maryann will be in Pittsburgh for the screening on Friday.