Japan-America Society of Pennsylvania's Picnic with Iwate Prefecture Teenagers, August 7.

The Japan-America Society of Pennsylvania (based in Pittsburgh) has announced an August 7 picnic with a group of six teenagers from Iwate Prefecture. From the JASP event listing:

Come and join us Thursday, August 7th, 2014 at 6 p.m. for a picnic in Schenley Park. We will be picnicking with six teenagers from Iwate Prefecture who were affected by the tsunami earthquake in 2011. These children are visiting Pittsburgh courtesy of UK-based The PINE Foundation, and were selected on the basis of their stellar participation in extracurricular English-learning activities by the Children’s Empowerment Iwate Charity (http://www.epatch.jp/). This picnic is a great opportunity to help them gain more knowledge of U.S. culture and give them positive thoughts of the world after they suffered from huge trauma in the tsunami earthquake.

Meats and beverages will be provided by The PINE Foundation. Please bring a side dish to share, as well as any picnic chairs you may have.

Registration is required by July 31, and can be done so online or by calling a number provided at the link. The picnic will be held at Westinghouse Shelter (map).

Korean-style fried chicken place Chick'n Bubbly to soft-open in Oakland Monday, July 28.

Chick'n Bubbly announced today, during its free sample giveaway, that it will have a soft opening on Monday, July 28. Chick'n Bubbly is a Korean-style fried-chicken place at 117 Oakland Ave. (map), next to Oishii Bento---routinely voted the best local Korean and Japanese restaurants by Pitt News readers---with whom it shares owners. We scanned a menu below:

Free samples of Chick'n Bubbly on July 25.

Chick'n Bubbly announced on Facebook a little before noon that it would offer free samples of its Korean-style fried chicken from 12:30.



Chick'n Bubbly is under construction at 117 Oakland Ave. (map), and will be Pittsburgh's first Korean fried chicken place.

Pittsburgh-based papercutting artist Bovey Lee in the news this week.

Vase I (detail 2), via her website.

This week a couple of blogs (1, 2) have profiled Hong Kong native and Pittsburgh-based papercutting artist Bovey Lee. An excerpt from her artistic statement:

My narrative-based cut paper explores the tension between man and the environment in the context of power, sacrifice, and survival. These three “motivators,” as I call them, drive all our desires and behaviors toward one another and the environment. We live in a time when we overdo everything from technology to urbanization to consumption. My recent work is informed by our precarious relationship with nature in the twenty-first century, i.e., what we do to the environment with our super machines and technologies and what nature does back to us in reaction.

I hand cut each work on a single sheet of Chinese xuan (rice) paper backed with silk and both are renewable and eco-friendly materials.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville, from July 25.

The newly-opened Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville will show Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) from July 25 through July 31. A contemporary Chicago Tribune review of the 2000 martial arts film:

This is a film that really soars. One of the best adventure movies of the last decade, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is also gravely, eerily beautiful: poetic and moving in ways that we usually don't associate with violent genre films. The movie draws on three Chinese language cultures -- the subject is Chinese, the director (Lee) is Taiwanese-American, but the style is Hong Kong to the core. Yet where the classic Hong Kong actioners -- films such as "A Chinese Ghost Story" and "Wu-Warriors of the Magic Mountain" -- are often rambunctiously kitschy and over-the-top, this movie has richer veins of psychology and character, even though Lee, a devotee of such films since boyhood, plays with most of their conventions (one-against-a-bunch fights, treetop battles, wizards and sorcerers).

The movie stars Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, and Chow Yun-Fat. Showtimes vary at the single-screen theater, and are listed on the website. The theater is located at 4115 Butler St. (map).

Golden Pig to reopen July 31.

Golden Pig, the best Korean restaurant in the area, will reopen July 31.



It had been closed since May 28 while the owner was in Korea. Golden Pig is located in Cecil Township (map), about 20 miles southwest of Pittsburgh.

Former Penguin Jim Paek named coach of South Korea's men's national hockey team.

Via Yonhap:

South Korea has turned to a former National Hockey League (NHL) defenseman to lead its men's national hockey team, hoping his playing experience and coaching acumen could help the country qualify for the next Winter Olympics on home ice.

The Korea Ice Hockey Association (KIHA) announced Wednesday it has signed Jim Paek, the first player of Korean descent to play in the NHL, as the new head coach and executive director of the men's national team. He agreed to a four-year deal but financial terms weren't disclosed.

Korean-Canadian Paek (백지선) was the first Korean player in the NHL and played parts of four seasons with the Penguins. The second Korean player, Richard Park, also debuted with Pittsburgh. Baek has been an assistant in the American Hockey League since 2005.

Yojimbo (用心棒) at Oakland's Melwood Screening Room, July 30.

Oakland's Melwood Screening Room will present the 1961 Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo (用心棒) on July 30. An excerpt of a 2005 Roger Ebert review:

[Kurosawa] was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.

Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to "Yojimbo" that homage shades into plagiarism. Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in "Yojimbo." Asked his name, the samurai looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and replies, "Kuwabatake Sanjuro," which means "30-year-old mulberry field." He is 30, and that is a way of saying he has no name.

He also has no job. The opening titles inform us that in 1860, after the collapse of the Tokugawa Dynasty, samurai were left unemployed and wandered the countryside in search of work. We see Sanjuro at a crossroads, throwing a stick into the air and walking in the direction it points. That brings him to the town, to possible employment, and to a situation that differs from Hollywood convention in that the bad guys are not attacking the good guys because there are no good guys[.]

The show starts at 8:00, and the theater is located at 477 Melwood Ave. in Oakland (map). Part of the Essential Cinema series, tickets are $2.

Four Pitt student-athletes visit Vietnam in Coach for College program.

Campers from the 2014 program, via the Coach for College Facebook group.

An excerpt from a July 16 Pitt Athletics press release:

Brianna Kiesel of the Pitt women's basketball team, along with three member of the swimming and diving team will be representing the Panthers as they joins fellow student-athletes from around the country on a month-long trip to Vietnam with the `Coach for College' program.

"I'm so excited for this opportunity," Kiesel said. "I can't wait to go to Vietnam and immerse myself into a culture I don't know much about. It is an amazing opportunity to build relationships with the kids in Vietnam and also with my peers from the United States."

. . .

The student-athletes will serve as a member of a "coaching group" while in Vietnam, along with other student-athlete from the States and two bilingual Vietnamese college students. The program consists of three activities: sports classes, academic classes and life skills sessions. Each coach will serve as a teacher for one sport, one academic subject and as a mentor to a specific team of children.

The release this year is a bit sparse, but there is more information on the Coach for College Faceook page, the official website, and on a post here on Pitt student-athletes from last July. Coach for College is a program among ACC schools and other select universities "that brings together US student-athletes and Vietnamese university students to teach academics, sports and life skills at summer camps to children in rural Vietnam."

I Live in Fear (生きものの記録) at Melwood Screening Room, August 5.

The 1955 Akira Kurosawa film I Live in Fear (生きものの記録) will play at the Melwood Screening Room (map) in Oakland on August 5. An overview from a 2002 A.V. Club review:

One of Kurosawa's oddest works, it arrived on the heels of The Seven Samurai, one of his most immediately accessible. Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers of make-up, stars as a graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to make plans to move his large family to a farm in Brazil. Thinking his fears irrational, and expressing grave concern over the dispensation of his estate, they take him to court and, like a good judge, Kurosawa lets both sides exhaust themselves without drawing a premature judgement. Perhaps a bit too loose and leisurely to be entirely effective, Fear still offers a hugely compelling glimpse at the post-war Japanese mindset, and at the Cold War mindset in general. It's also a fine showcase for Kurosawa's nearly unparalleled visual style, and, like its companions in this set, a must-see for the director's admirers even if it's not quite among the very best entries in his formidable filmography.

The film is co-sponsored by Remembering Hiroshima, Imagining Peace as a commemoration of the 69th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the 6:00 pm screening is followed by an 8:00 pm Skype interview with Japanese students. The movie is in Japanese with English subtitles.