Lartigue’s ‘Fast Cars and Femmes Fatales’ at The Frick; CAPA Band Plays Home and Garden Show (Sun., 3/6/16)

Sky boys: young Gérard Willemetz and Lartigue’s son Dani, 1926.

1) If you’ve ever found it fascinating to leaf through albums of old photographs, try the exhibit now on the walls at the Frick Art Museum. Fast Cars and Femmes Fatales is a rare major showing of photos by Jacques Henri Lartigue, the late French artist whose high-flying lifestyle featured those two pursuits, among others. Lartigue was an early master of candid on-the-scene photography, and not only are his pictures artistically striking, they tell intriguing stories. The photos displayed here span the opening decades of the 1900s—times of rapid change like our own—so that strolling the exhibit is like a trip through version 1.0 of the modern world emerging. There are pix of young folks thrilling to the hot new sport of “motoring.” Aviation was a very risky extreme sport, as other scenes attest. And Lartigue’s photos of women, taken at times from the corsets-and-frills era through the Roaring Twenties and beyond, show more than how fashions were changing. They show how women were starting to change. Admission to the Frick Art Museum is free. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Through May 15 at 7227 Reynolds Ave., Point Breeze. (MV)

2) The Duquesne Light Home & Garden Show continues today through Sunday. Billed as the “largest home event in Pennsylvania,” the show is held every year at the David Lawrence Convention Center. The Home and Garden show features over 1,600 exhibitors and twice daily, jazz performances by the CAPA High School House Band (1 and 3 p.m.). 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. Continues through next Sunday.1000 Fort Duquesne Blvd., Downtown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-LDW7tWwAI

3) Escape From New York – Come along with me to 1981 where we’ll visit a futuristic 1997. Confused? Then you’ve never seen the John Carpenter action film Escape from New York. Following on the success of the first Halloween, in 1981 Carpenter was given the green light to film this sci-fi story set in the dystopian future (is there any of kind?) of 1997. The country is so overrun with crime that the island of Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison. One fateful night Air Force One crashes and the island prisoners capture the president. Enter Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, an ex-soldier given 22 hours to find and extract the president.

A physically grueling shoot, the movie was filmed in the burned-out city of East St. Louis Illinois with a (at the time) minuscule budget. But it was a huge success and cemented Russell’s Hollywood cred. In addition to Russell, you’ll catch some outrageous scenery chewing by Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau, and Pittsburgh’s own, the great Tom Atkins. Fun facts: Though Carpenter wrote the screenplay, he brought in Nick Castle to punch up the script with some jokes. Castle has just played Mike Myers in Halloween. And the matte paintings of the background landscapes were created by none other than James “I’m king of the world!” Cameron. 7:30 p.m. Screenings through March 10. Row House Cinema, 4115 Butler St., Lawrenceville.

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