Playing pop from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Euro and 'Merica:As the group's Facebook page says,
DJ DivaCup
DJ QueenBee (welcome her back from Taiwan!)
DJ Niubi
...and special guest Tommy Yoo!
As always, DRESS UP if that's your thing! Take us to kawaii outer space ㅇㅅㅇ
BUBBLEPOP is a dance party for K-Pop, J-Pop, Mando-pop and everything else fun and cuteCattivo is located at 116 44th Street in Lawrenceville (map). The event starts at 10:00 pm and is free.
Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling. Returning to features after a prolonged absence, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien has made a martial-arts period piece like none other, keeping to the classic principles and conventions of wuxia—the storied Chinese genre of wandering warriors and codes of honor—while casting them in a mysterious light. Bold takes on popular genres generally set out to de-mystify, but Hou has accomplished the opposite. Washing away centuries of film and fiction, he envisions a tale from the Tang dynasty—about a deadly martial artist who must kill the man to whom she was once betrothed—as a window into the haunted otherworld of the mythic past.Showtimes are now available online, with Friday's showings set for 5:45 pm and 8:00 pm. The Harris Theater is located at 809 Liberty Ave. in the downtown Pittsburgh Cultural District (map).
Perhaps the most confounding thing about The Assassin is how much of a straightforward wuxia movie it is, at least in retrospect. Raised since girlhood to be a remorseless killer of corrupt lords and court officials, Nie Yinniang (Hou regular Shu Qi) spares a target on account of his young son, and is punished with an assignment that’s meant to wipe away whatever speck of compassion she has left: to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), the cousin to whom she was promised in marriage as a child, and who is now the governor of Weibo. It’s a given that Yinniang—largely silent and nearly invisible, despite her stomping gait—can strike at any moment; the question that shadows every scene is why she doesn’t. She is there behind every curtain in Tian’s palace and on every rafter, listening, hanging like smoke, materializing only to disappear again—the passive hero as threat.
When the adult Truly Lin (Joe Chen Chiau-en) feels increasingly disheartened with her unrewarding office job, memories of her high-school years – during which her teenage self had fallen into the latter of what she terms the “popular” and “not pretty” camps before a belated makeover – flood her mind.Tickets and showtimes are available at the AMC Loews Waterfront website. The theater is located at 300 West Waterfront Dr. in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead (map), across the Monongahela River from Greenfield, Squirrel Hill, and the rest of Pittsburgh.
Back in the 1990s, the young Truly (Vivian Sung Yu-hua, star of the film adaptation of another Ko novel, Café. Waiting. Love) is initially smitten with handsome schoolmate Ouyang (Dino Lee Yu-hsi), but a zany run-in with the campus hoodlum Hsu Taiyu (Darren Wang Da-lu) dramatically changes the equation.
In the excessively saccharine will-they-won’t-they affair that ensues, Taiyu and Truly go out regularly on the pretext that they’re helping each other court their respective crushes. Plot twists: Taiyu used to be a wonderful student before a traumatic incident; Truly turns out to be a hottie.
Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling. Returning to features after a prolonged absence, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien has made a martial-arts period piece like none other, keeping to the classic principles and conventions of wuxia—the storied Chinese genre of wandering warriors and codes of honor—while casting them in a mysterious light. Bold takes on popular genres generally set out to de-mystify, but Hou has accomplished the opposite. Washing away centuries of film and fiction, he envisions a tale from the Tang dynasty—about a deadly martial artist who must kill the man to whom she was once betrothed—as a window into the haunted otherworld of the mythic past.Showtimes have not yet been released. The Harris Theater is located at 809 Liberty Ave. in the downtown Pittsburgh Cultural District (map).
Perhaps the most confounding thing about The Assassin is how much of a straightforward wuxia movie it is, at least in retrospect. Raised since girlhood to be a remorseless killer of corrupt lords and court officials, Nie Yinniang (Hou regular Shu Qi) spares a target on account of his young son, and is punished with an assignment that’s meant to wipe away whatever speck of compassion she has left: to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), the cousin to whom she was promised in marriage as a child, and who is now the governor of Weibo. It’s a given that Yinniang—largely silent and nearly invisible, despite her stomping gait—can strike at any moment; the question that shadows every scene is why she doesn’t. She is there behind every curtain in Tian’s palace and on every rafter, listening, hanging like smoke, materializing only to disappear again—the passive hero as threat.
The organizers of the Northwest Chinese Popup Restaurant events will host a food-tasting event on Friday, November 13, at Leaf and Plate in Shadyside. Organizer Shanning Wan passes along information and a menu:For $10, customers can choose a baked bun, a sandwich and a salad(from the following list). Also appetizers and entreess are a la carte. It's a BYOB event.Leaf and Plate recently opened at 5884 Ellsworth Ave. in Shadyside (map). The event runs from 6:30 to 9:30 pm.
BUNS/BAOZI
Baked Lamb Bun 羊肉烤包子 $4
lamb, onions, ginger, cumin with spicy sauce
Baked Beef Bun 薄皮包子 $3.5
cumin, carrots, onion, beef with spicy sauce
Steamed Vegan Bun 素烤包子 $3
bell pepper, zucchini, potato with spicy sauce
SANDWICH
(baked or steamed bread)
Cumin Lamb Sandwich 孜然羊肉夹馍 $4.5
lamb, cumin, green pepper, onion
Peanut Beef Sandwich 花生牛肉夹馍 $4
beef, green bean, carrot, tofu, peanut
Soy Sauce Pork Sandwich 红烧肉夹馍 $3.75
pork, soy sauce, green onion, traditional Chinese spice
Vegan Sandwich 素夹馍 $3.5
potato, red pepper, spinach, tofu strings
SALAD
(with homemade dressing)
Pi La Hong Salad 皮拉红 $5
green pepper, celery, tomato, onion, chickpea
Smashed Cucumber Salad 拍黄瓜 $4.5
cucumber, crushed peanut, spicy garlic dressing
Buckwheat Salad 甘肃凉菜 $5.5
buckwheat noodle, carrot, celery, red and green pepper
Mu Er Salad 黑木耳凉菜 $6
black wood ear mushroom, carrot, yuba(layered dried tofu)
The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will present We Jung Yi and her talk "The Pleasure of Mourning: Korean War Blockbusters in Post-Cold War South Korea" as the next installment of its Asia on Screen series on November 19.WE JUNG YI is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Her book manuscript, entitled Remembering the Unfinished War: Literature, Film, and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea, engages with the cultural turn in Korean literary studies by tracing historical and aesthetic connections among diverse forms of Korean War memories. She is the author of “Between Longing and Belonging: Diasporic Return in Contemporary South Korean Cinema,” collected in Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014).And a description from the Pitt International Week website:
We Jung Yi's talk traces the ways in which the Korean War blockbuster has emerged as a form of remembering the unfinished war on the Korean peninsula, in tandem with neoliberal globalization in South Korea. She will review three Korean War blockbusters as works of mourning in transition and translation: Joint Security Area, Taegukgi, and Welcome to Dongmakgol. Her analysis focuses on how their spectacle-charged forms affectively move their audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of their nation.The talk begins at 3:00 in 4130 Posvar Hall (map), and is free and open to the public.
