Civil Liberties: the turn of the tide
Two hundred and seventy people convicted of no crime languish in Guantanamo, and the British parliament has just voted to extend detention without trial to 42 days. In both the United States and Britain, governments that attack civil liberties in the name of security still rule. But in the past week the tide has turned…
On the Street
Letters (to the Penthouse Suite) #1 & #2 More Reasons Why In a further reverberation from the Why We Ride article came this illustration from Nice Guy Jack. (con permiso) Then came a related letter from OTS Friend Carlos with a mention to the award winning NYC fashion/foto blog called The Sartorialist… for style….but this…
Civil Liberties: the turn of the tide
Two hundred and seventy people convicted of no crime languish in Guantanamo, and the British parliament has just voted to extend detention without trial to 42 days. In both the United States and Britain, governments that attack civil liberties in the name of security still rule. But in the past week the tide has turned…
On the Street
Letters (to the Penthouse Suite) #1 & #2 More Reasons Why In a further reverberation from the Why We Ride article came this illustration from Nice Guy Jack. (con permiso) Then came a related letter from OTS Friend Carlos with a mention to the award winning NYC fashion/foto blog called The Sartorialist… for style….but this…
Greening Alamo City
It’s just a “B” session for crying out loud. Still they come crowding in as San Anto Mayor Phil Hardberger lays the foundation for this afternoon’s presentation on “COSA Mission Verde” — the city’s amped up efficiency and renewable energy adventure. First dribbled in his State of the City speech back in January, plans for…
Greening Alamo City
It’s just a “B” session for crying out loud. Still they come crowding in as San Anto Mayor Phil Hardberger lays the foundation for this afternoon’s presentation on “COSA Mission Verde” — the city’s amped up efficiency and renewable energy adventure. First dribbled in his State of the City speech back in January, plans for…
Red Yellow & Blue
Red Yellow & Blue Composer: BORN Ruffians Conductor: BORN Ruffians Label: Warp Records Release Date: 2008-06-11 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Indie Rock Evolving from last fall’s Hummingbird seven-inch, Toronto-based indie-pop-rock trio BORN Ruffians emerge with Red Yellow & Blue, a disc that should earn them an honest pat on the…
Tony Zamora & Tremoloco
Release Date: 2008-06-11 Los Angeles musician Tony Zamora teams up with long-time friends and cohorts Tremoloco in support of his new album Dulcinea. Blending Tony’s East LA roots with Texan musicians and their original sounds, the debut album is a successful mix of roots rock and traditional Mexican originals. Co-produced by Los Lobos great, Cougar…
Roosters
Release Date: 2008-06-11 The celebrated Chicano play, Roosters, returns to the Guadalupe after 20 years, and OLLU’s 24th St. Players show what’s made this iconic drama timeless. After seven years in jail for manslaughter, a Hispanic father returns home and enters into conflict with his son. The boy has inherited a prize fighting rooster and…
Cult to Follow w. The Heroine & Structure
Release Date: 2008-06-11 Cult to Follow rocks the new Scout stage Friday, a must-see show on most weekend to do lists. They’ve played San Antonio once since their live debut at the White Rabbit in December, but regional touring in the last few months has proven successful, and a debut release is forthcoming. Fans and…
The Future of Media: Will Your Voice Be Heard?
Release Date: 2008-06-11 Three corporations own all 15 commercial FM radio stations in San Antonio, we have zero Black stations, and there’s only one major daily newspaper. These issues and others will be covered at A Forum on Media, featuring media activist and editor of the Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon. Learn how you can…
PrideFest 2008
Release Date: 2008-06-11 Embrace diversity with San Antonio’s 27th annual PrideFest, an event that’s grown to over 6,000 participants. The celebration includes a pet parade, the ever-colorful “Queens of San Antonio” show, the parade of icons, live music, carnival games, vendors, and more. Pride Idol finalists also will compete along with a performance from last…
Transmography, Hydra Melody, When Good Friends Become Strangers, & Zavala
Release Date: 2008-06-11 It’s Attack of the Keyboards night as four bands rock Limelight with a blend of rock and synth. Local prog-rockers Hydra Melody uniquely blend keyboards with drum and Latin conga beats, adding to the maniacal yet melodic sound of Austin’s experimental rock duo Transmography. When Good Friends Become Strangers and Zavala are…
Sam’s Swing Night w. The Swing Commanders from the UK
Release Date: 2008-06-11 While Texas is the home of country music, there’s no shortage of talent in the UK. This vibrant British sextet continually impresses American audiences with their unique take on country-and-western swing, known for their energetic live shows featuring five voices, 13 instruments, superb vocal harmonies, and their trademark steel guitar-driven sound. $6,…
Corey Smith, Sam Thacker, Merykid, & We Leave at Midnight
Release Date: 2008-06-11 Corey Smith has to be the most sentimental, weepy troublemaker ever to run afoul of the law. While he stocks his folksy ditties with recollections of getting pulled over by cops and drinking way too much when he was way too young, the effect is always like your great-grandpa regaling you with…
Texas Folklife Festival
Release Date: 2008-06-11 The 37th-annual celebration of Lone Star culture returns, bringing with it a variety of food, art, music, dance, and crafts. This year’s theme is “We All Belong,” a tribute to the diverse customs and cultures that come together for the three-day festival. Guests of all ages will learn about and experience the…
Weezer
Weezer Composer: Weezer Conductor: Weezer Label: Geffen Release Date: 2008-06-11 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Power pop Disclaimer: I’m not related to Rivers Cuomo or the rest of Weezer, and I never related to their music, either. As a high-school freshman, I once claimed to like the “blue album” to impress…
Unforgiven
Sweet and juicy barbecue portended a lighthearted Western romp, a fantastical retelling of folk heroes and tall tales. This is, I’m sure, what the Buckhorn Museum™ had in mind as it inaugurated its first theatrical endeavor, the Old West Dinner Theatre Experience. Happy diners left the saloon and entered the Texas Ranger Museum, where rustic…
In defense of M. Night
As trailers for The Happening first began to ramp up in anticipation of its June 13 opening, I marked my calendar and confessed, “You had me at Shyamalan.” M. Night, that is, a man who elicits more disdain from the masses than devotion. A recent New York Times article mapped Shyamalan’s “decline” through his films’…
Company of one
More bad bank news is undercutting sunny predictions that our housing-crunch recession has bottomed out, and our city isn’t exactly regarded as a booming performing-arts metropolis in the best of economic times. To hell with it — why shouldn’t Andy Thornton ditch a stable living in favor of a full-time acting career in the Alamo…
CRITICAL Darling
The San Antonio Underground Film Fest’s got a new handle and a new locale. Now the San Antonio Film Festival, the event will carry on for four days (June 19-22 — planning ahead here) at the Instituto Cultural de México, the interior of which fest director Adam Rocha lovingly describes as “Ikea on steroids.” A…
Straight Shooter
Twilight Guardian #1 Words by Troy Hickman Art by Reza $3.99, 24 pages (Top Cow/Image) The Twilight Guardian, an anonymous loser pretending at superherodom, patrols well-trod territory, but Hickman’s (Common Grounds) skill at character development sets this series apart. So far, anyway. The story, told through terse, personal journal entries, is largely uneventful, but the…
Writer-director gets a ‘Promotion’
In March, the Current convened with Steve Conrad, writer of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, at SXSW to discuss his latest vision (and this week’s release), The Promotion — which stars John C. Reilly, Seann William Scott, and everyone’s favorite Office sweetheart, Jenna Fischer — in addition to sweet-ass casting, twisted humor,…
Dear Uncle Mat
I am unhappy. My girlfriend left me two months ago and is preparing to move to Boston for grad school. She didn’t even tell me she was applying. She just sat me down after work one night and told me she had been accepted. I love San Antonio and have no desire to leave. She…
Charlie Gibson’s war
News that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had dropped dimes on both the Bush Administration and the media for their respective mishandling of the Iraq War was a bombshell that created more bloody rubble than any rational person could ever sift through. As this is neither a political nor a media-crit column, we…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent,” writes W. Daniel Hillis at The World Question Center (tinyurl.com/ywth3). Examples: paper money supersedes gold; a painting has more value than the landscape it depicts; the status that an achievement brings begins to overshadow the achievement. The coming days…
Home on the Range
A few short hours after the last party guest had departed — face painted, goodie bag and piñata sack in hand, sweaty, satiated, and blood sugar plummeting — my just-turned-5-year-old daughter Dale announced: “Mom, I can barely remember my birthday party anymore!” Ouch. I quelled my first impulse, to quote a little Shakespeare (“How sharper…
Spittin’ Game
Ninja Gaiden II (Tecmo) Xbox 360 $59.99 At its best moments, Ninja Gaiden II will make you soil your Bruce Lee bedsheets. The improved combat system for this third-person slasher features severed limbs, horror-show blood spattering, and downright unsettling death-throe animations. Defeated ninjas, wizards, and m.f.’ing werewolves will writhe on the floor, wagging their bloody…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Muy Caliente Summer Edition Dear Readers: The Mexican has previously published only one best-of column in his nearly four years living under his cousin’s identity in this country, but I must pull this week’s first pregunta out of the archives because ustedes keep asking it — obviously, not enough of you bought my paperback since…
Myart’s remains
It could have been a 12-step program gathered in the basement meeting room of Mt. Zion Baptist Church. There was no shortage of tears, anguish, or exhaustion. But the demons this gathering was bonding over weren’t those of personal or family addiction, but the more abusive elements within San Antonio’s Police Department. In the slow…
Clothes-minded
Some have said I’m a bit of a handbag ho — complete slander, I assure you. True, my closet is full of impulse-purchase purses that rarely escape onto my arm — but I usually carry one tried-and-true workhorse on a daily basis. That can get a little boring, so I’ve been doing research to find…
Devolution
Planet of the apes Is it fair to ask what’s wrong in Say-town when the AG intervenes on behalf of a few gibbons, but a City auditor who requests a little paper accounting of our local playgrounds is shown the door? Three of the Primarily Primates 12, removed last spring from the non-profit sanctuary for…
Green fables
On April 26, 1972 — a month before my second birthday — President Richard Nixon signed the Father’s Day holiday into law. But that June, when America’s first legally sanctioned Father’s Day arrived, the holiday’s headlines were stolen by the now infamous break-in at the Democratic Committee Headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex. Soon after,…
School of hard knocks
On Sunday, June 8, the San Antonio Express-News published a story that seemed to vindicate former City Auditor Pete Gonzales’s contention that he was pushed out of his job because his drive to inspect local playgrounds would embarrass high-up City staffers. At a key April meeting attended by a full range of government big guns…
Amuse-BOUCHE
Locavores, rejoice! Just as A-B foretold, a free Main Plaza tri-county farmers market has been born in the city of Antonio, and you can make your first pilgrimage to the site this Friday, June 13. (And return every Friday henceforth, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.) But! The inaugural event will extend into the Main…
Deficit attention
When San Antonio Budget Director Peter Zanoni decided last year to move the 2009 city budget process up a month, it was simply a courtesy to give City Council a little more time to ponder the numbers. He had no idea how crucial those extra few weeks would be. After all, recent history has been…
Getting screwed
“I’m over it,” declared Central Market’s Heidi Holcomb. She was referring to her lack of surprise upon opening yet another case of wine to find that the producer had turned to screw-cap closures. Many of the rest of us aren’t yet accustomed, however, so a little history is in order. Ironically, given that the French…
Open Records & SAPD Nailed Files
A few interesting points about assembling this week’s story on civil rights attorney James Myart. Firstly, not only was the recently-suspended attorney himself indisposed, but a good chunk of the legal community that have handled cases against SAPD were simply not up to returning phone calls. It creates a challenge, but I’m sure they all have…
Jumbled gym
The City of San Antonio changed the enrollment-fee plan for a popular children’s summer program last weekend after SA parents protested a steep fee hike up to $250, and changing the lowest reduced price this year from $5 to $20. Using a sliding scale, the City combined the lowest two income brackets to make Kid…
Open Records & SAPD Nailed Files
A few interesting points about assembling this week’s story on civil rights attorney James Myart. Firstly, not only was the recently-suspended attorney himself indisposed, but a good chunk of the legal community that have handled cases against SAPD were simply not up to returning phone calls. It creates a challenge, but I’m sure they all…
Webb Archives
With a family, a day job, and 46 years under his black cowboy hat, Mitch Webb — particularly when it’s a gig-free week — doesn’t get out as often as he once did. So it made sense that when it came time to speak with the Current in advance of his Friday the 13th Lonely…
Jumbled gym
The City of San Antonio changed the enrollment-fee plan for a popular children’s summer program last weekend after SA parents protested a steep fee hike up to $250, and changing the lowest reduced price this year from $5 to $20. Using a sliding scale, the City combined the lowest two income brackets to make Kid…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
SA’s premier roots-music venue is going upscale, but the move should come without sacrificing any of its Americana earthiness. Casbeers owners Steve Silbas and Barbara Wolfe have announced that the club-diner is opening a second location, Casbeers at the Church. The name refers to the fact that the new spot, at 1150 South Alamo in…
Cactus Bra, Three Walls, and R.E.M. deliver in an off-month First Friday
June often suffers from a lackluster First Friday, as the summer heat conspires with anticipation of July’s Contemporary Art Month blowouts to dampen the usual revelry. This June’s art crawl had to compete with yet another conspirator: the eagerly anticipated grand opening of the McNay’s new Stieren Center. Many of the big First Friday draws…
Southern discomfort
When a band can jump the deeply rutted paths of mainstream music to make something their own, it causes a spasm of pure pleasure in the rock-’n’-roll universe. Chapel Hill-based three-piece Bellafea is the cause of some recent gallactic quivering. Nurtured in the bosom of the upright, Baptist-saturated South, bassist Eddie Sanchez, drummer Nathan Buchanan,…
ARTIFACTS
Did you get your mitts on Sunday’s New York Times magazine? The issue is chock-full of architecture, and we can’t help but be reminded of architect Jean-Paul Viguier’s Cool Models/Maquettes Froides show at the newly opened Stieren Center for Exhibition at the McNay. It’s a collection of Viguier’s works, complete with a video that explains…
CDs Nuts
Here I Stand Usher (LaFace) Filler tracks outnumber potential singles at about a 2:1 ratio, but nothing here is unlistenable or even unpleasant. First single “Love in the Club” is catchy but suffers from heightened expectations. The remix improves with the addition of Beyonce, but the extended examination of the song’s stupid premise falls apart…
Gibbon ’em the business
The nation’s oldest primate sanctuary, Primarily Primates of Northwest Bexar County, is welcoming back three gibbons after settling a case with two other sanctuaries. The three gibbons were part of a group of 12 that was adopted by the International Primate Protection League after a 2006 Texas lawsuit found that more than 700 animals were…
Gibbon ’em the business
The nation’s oldest primate sanctuary, Primarily Primates of Northwest Bexar County, is welcoming back three gibbons after settling a case with two other sanctuaries. The three gibbons were part of a group of 12 that was adopted by the International Primate Protection League after a 2006 Texas lawsuit found that more than 700 animals were…
