A lot of people say that fall is a nostalgic season, and I wholeheartedly agree. In my hometown of Harvard, Mass., fall is an important time because it is the season for apples, the ubiquitous fruit around town. Phil’s, Carlon’s, Doe, Westward, and Mountain View Orchards all offer their own ciders, pies, doughnuts, and various other apple-inspired products, along with the standard “U-Pick” options. We used to have the Three Apples Storytelling Festival in the center of town. We’d gather in the basement of our church, peeling and cutting apples for apple pies that the church would sell to raise funds. Because of this, October has always been a nostalgic month for me.

I recently read an article on Slate.com about Creed. The ’90s band is apparently back together, recording and touring. This brought back my memories of the music of the late ’90s and the early 2000s, back when I was moving through elementary and middle school. There was Smash Mouth, with “All-Star;” Creed, with the grunge-like guitars and vocals, singing with a vaguely Christian message; and, of course, there were the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees, et al., of which every girl in my grade had a favorite member that they would one day marry. But my favorite back then was the Goo Goo Dolls. In fact, my first kiss was with a girl named Loren in seventh grade, and happened to the strains of “Iris.” All the seventh and eighth graders were in our school cafeteria, dressed up for our “Snowflake” semi-formal. As everyone paired up — many awkwardly — for the slow dance, I didn’t realize how prescient the words “sooner or later it’s over” would be.

The Three Apples Storytelling Festival moved out of town a few years ago. The apples are still there, though I’m 10 hours away throughout peak season. There have been more dances, more girls to dance with, and at least a few more kisses since then. But I’m past that stage. I have a girlfriend now, and we’re going on three years together. Yet, I still think back to the cafeteria, back to seventh grade, Loren, and John Rzeznik’s voice saying “everything’s meant to be broken.” It was the closest to heaven that I’d ever been. And maybe it still is.

-Tyler Alderson

A couple weeks back, I was hyping Eugene Onegin, a performance that showed at the Pittsburgh Opera House through Oct. 4.

I was lucky enough to catch it last Tuesday (no small feat considering my schedule nowadays), and watching it, I realized just how far Pittsburgh has come. Pittsburgh was — and still is — thought of as a working-class, hard-times town, complete with bad air, broken factories, and the like; not necessarily the place you’d expect to find great opera, dance, classical music, or other “high culture” things.

But with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Pittsburgh Opera, and other world-class cultural institutions, it’s a great time for the arts in Pittsburgh.

With the economic rebound comes a greater rebound in culture, and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, along with smaller arts institutions, has been a major part of this rebound.

Not only do we get the popular musicians of the day, but we have a wide variety of international artists coming through. Just this past March, Portuguese superstar Mariza was at the Benedum Center, part of a line of artists brought to the Byham Theater.

Starring in Onegin was Anna Samuil, a rising Russian opera star, along with Dwayne Croft and Suzanne Mentzer, both mainstays at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

The Pittsburgh Symphony has a world-renowned conductor in Austrian Manfred Honeck, and its Pops wing has the great Marvin Hamlisch, one of only two people to have won an Emmy, an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, a Golden Globe Award, and a Pulitzer Prize.

Broadway musicals routinely come through Pittsburgh on tour, with performances of Rent and Fiddler on the Roof featuring original cast members headlining shows in recent months.

Pittsburgh has also been the host of a dancing explosion, with many new experimental and modern dance troupes springing up.

So go out, see a show, catch a concert, or watch a dance performance, and remind yourself how lucky you are to be going to school in a city that is blossoming culturally.

Tyler Alderson

You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel like writing about music today. It’s a cold and rainy Saturday morning, about the usual I would expect from a Pittsburgh fall, but in light of the past few days’ events, I can’t help but feel uneasy. Sure, there’s been that overwhelming sense of doom since all the helicopters, barricades, and “less lethal” weaponry started arriving, but now it’s that calm period, that waiting to see when it’s all going to be over and we can have our city back. A little while ago, I was reading David Foster Wallace’s essay published in the early ’90s about the then-new David Lynch film Lost Highway. As he discusses various reasons why this film is (going to be) awesome, he mentions an aspect of why Lynch’s films are also really unpleasant to watch. “We need to believe,” he writes, “that our own hideousness and darknesses are secret.”

We’ve all had that experience reading a book or watching a movie and suddenly it’s over and you feel absolutely miserable and hopeless about this whole “being a human” business. I had this reaction most strongly while watching the latest Batman installment, The Dark Knight. I saw this movie three times in the theater, and unlike other movies where once you know how it ends you become less responsive, I became increasingly more upset each time I saw it. Part of what was frustrating about this experience was not being able to put my finger on what exactly it was that troubled me so much. A good friend of mine went with me every time to see the movie and had a similar reaction. For months, neither of us could figure out what it was about The Dark Knight that was so upsetting. At different points along the way, we made small progresses — something about the capacity and affinity in all of us to be violent and destructive, the mirror between Batman and the role of the United States, the idea of there being nowhere safe and no one to trust — but for the most part, the only thing we were ever really certain of was that the movie seemed to pull something together for us, even though we weren’t sure what that thing was.

So all week I’ve been thinking about The Dark Knight, and I have that same feeling I did each time I left the theater, taking the long road home, lying in bed and thinking about how quickly everything can be turned on its head. We know that something big has happened; that something has been set into motion that cannot be taken back. And maybe I’m being melodramatic about this; maybe by the time you are reading this Monday morning, Pittsburgh will have returned to its regularly scheduled programming. But my guess is that something’s changed, even if, like The Dark Knight, it’s going to take me a while to realize what exactly that means.

-M. Callen