LOCAL NEWS

I. Oh, so that's how they're going to handle it.

Today's Post-Gazette carried this discussion with the director of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Rawson Marshall Thurber. The interview and Thurber's expressed affection for Pittsburgh provides a well-timed and welcome diversion from the recent local media feeding frenzy concerning one of his cast members. He also discusses acquiring the story and writing the screenplay, while mentioning that his screenplay eliminates Arthur Lecomte. Huh. Well, that changes things a bit.

Sure, it takes out the extra romantic angle, and rounds the story back into the familiar triangle (Thurber refers to the novel as a "[love] rhombus." Just last week I'd seen it referred to as a love trapezoid.) Apart from the additional relationship entanglement, though, the elimination of Lecomte seems to me to remove a really strong and influential (and hilarious) voice from the chorus of influences pushing in on Art. I haven't lost any faith in the project-- if Michael Chabon can be convinced the idea works, who cares what a meatball like me thinks?-- but I've got to think that subtracting Arthur Lecomte from the screenplay means that there's no guarantee the film couldn't, by some means, slide toward the mean of studio-indie coming-of-age films that arrive and depart quietly each season.

II. Yeah, Malkin.

If you're a huge Pittsburgh Penguin fan (as I am) and you went to five or so home games a year from the mid-nineties to the present (as I did), then chances are that you got to see at least two Mario Lemieux comeback games and at least two Mario farewell games. I know I did. I think I even got tickets a couple of times to coincide with comeback/farewell games. I went to the last home game in the '97 playoff loss to the Flyers where Mario said goodbye by scoring a last-minute breakaway on Islander-GM-in-the-making Garth Snow. These days, sadly, I seem to coincide my Penguin ticket-buying with the occasions where I'm most likely to be given a machine-painted resin figurine with an oversized skull. But sometimes I still get lucky. Like tomorrow, when I'll be able to see Evgeni Malkin's debut game. Yay, me. Of the four games they've played thus far, I've caught parts of three of them, and I like what I've seen. They're alternating great efforts with ungreat efforts, though, but are due for a positive showing tomorrow.