N-BAF gets puff treatment from ‘News’
By Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com As a writer, consumer, and critic of that all-so-serious thing we call “news,” I often find myself reminded of a former small-town publisher’s words: “It’s not so much what you put in the paper, but what you don’t.” When it comes to our San Antonio media’s initiative regarding a proposed $500…
CDs Nuts
She Ain’t Me Carrie Rodriguez (Manhattan Records) The song titles betray a common theme — “Absence,” “The Big Mistake,” “Can’t Cry Enough.” Somebody bitch-slapped Carrie Rodriguez’s heart and probably right before she hit the recording studio. The snot-nose jab in the title track sounds like that email you regret when you’ve sobered up, and it’s…
Don’t flip that switch!
By Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com This is the week my second major story on CPS hit the street. When I took them on a year ago the challenge was tied to climate security concerns: The promises of decentralization and pitfalls of nuke overlooks. My split with CPS Energy plans was based on economic argument and generation-scale…
Bling Bling Fling
Release Date: 2008-08-06 The Martinez Street Women’s Center hosts the 5th annual Bling Bling Fling, this year themed “Fantasy Island — Where Your Dreams Come True.” The night of tropical fun and flair features tunes by Sean G & JJ Lopez of the diggindeepquartet and a silent auction of work by local artists. Proceeds benefit…
Rattletree Marimba & Joel Loviolete
Release Date: 2008-08-06 Giant wooden marimbas are the instruments of choice for Rattletree Marimba, who infuse their high-energy dance music with Zimbabwean chants and intricate percussion ensembles. Songs last 10-30 minutes and audiences churn themselves into a dancing frenzy. The Austin-based group has been featured in Global Rhythm Magazine and on Afropop Worldwide, played over…
San Japan: Japanese Culture and Anime Convention
Release Date: 2008-08-06 San Antonio’s first major Japanese Culture and Anime convention opens its doors this weekend, and visitors are expected to show up in droves for the three-day affair. Swedish bubblegum-pop group Smile.dk headlines the list of musical guests, while the convention includes appearances by voice actors, panels by industry specialists, Japanese art demonstrations,…
Overture to Fashion
Release Date: 2008-08-06 Local Latinos from Salon Eden host a soiree of drinks, music, and fashion, showcasing a group of local independent stylists who’ve dedicated themselves to setting the trend. Expect some of the most avant-garde hairstyles in the city — the works of director Stanley Kubrick primarily inspired the show. De los Muertos add…
ArtSlam! Revenge of the Superheroes
Release Date: 2008-08-06 Rising from the ashes of April’s Lucha Libre-themed event comes Deadbeat Hero’s next project. Rapper Question?, DJ Techneek, and DJM will provide the beats and video while the talented panel of artists creates comic-book style works featuring your favorite superheroes and villains. The Current’s own Chuck Kerr is on the artists’ bill…
Sticky situation
Pineapple Express Director: David Gordon Green Screenwriter: David Gordon Green Cast: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson, James Remar, Joe Lo Truglio Release Date: 2008-08-06 Studio: Sony Pictures Music Score: Jonathan Karp Rated: R Genre: Comedy Our Rating: 4.00 The latest from Rogen, Apatow, etc., etc. (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin) is less about…
‘The slip’
Trent Reznor is an unhappy camper
Seether w. SafetySuit & The Hunger
Release Date: 2008-08-06 Seether’s your standard, radio-ready hard rock, but the band’s adept at mixing their harsh side with their catchy one. How many times have you caught yourself singing along to “Fake It” on KISS? There’s a reason — one of their biggest hits to date, the single locked in the #1 position on…
Splinters of Mexico
I first saw the landmark exhibition, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, in New York, where I was living at the time. My second encounter with that sprawling survey was during a brief return visit to San Antonio, where it was installed at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Same show (mostly), different contexts, different responses.…
Zombies: Onscreen, at the table, in the voting booth
The diverse works presented in the current show at the UTSA Satellite Space seem to me to be less about the media than the message; the exhibit often feels less like a new-media laboratory than a tech-infused political commentary with an Orwellian edge. There’s also a wry fanboy-esque preoccupation with modern archetypes — the superhero,…
High ‘Standards’
For a full-length debut, self-recorded and produced, the Offbeats’ Standards sounds impressively professional and mature. That’s not so surprising when you consider that, in some ways, this local act has spent the past seven years completing it. As the title might imply, the album is a collection of previously released material, a sort of greatest-hits compilation,…
Solo super vato
Bubba Hernandez was having dinner in Los Angeles with his brother when he suddenly started sobbing. It was a curious time for the veteran bassist/vocalist to be overwhelmed by sadness. The following day, Hernandez would begin a new recording project with highly respected L.A. session drummer Willie Ornelas keeping the beat and Carmen Grillo, ex-guitarist…
Authentic faux pho
Pho, a brothy soup of rice noodles and beef, was created about 100 years ago in northern Vietnam. It’s pronounced like “fur” without the “r,” though it’s often mistakenly called “faux.” The word “pho” is probably a twist on the French feu, meaning fire — as in Pot-au-feu, or “pot on the fire,” a soup that influenced…
Brick Lane
Dir. Sarah Gavron; writ. Laura Jones, Abi Morgan, based on a novel by Monica Ali; Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson (PG-13) Even before its appearance in print in 2003, the unpublished manuscript of Brick Lane earned author Monica Ali a spot on Granta’s list of best young British novelists. It also earned the animosity…
Dear Uncle Mat
My friends and I are all single and looking. There are five of us, to be exact, and we can’t figure out what is wrong. None of us can find a boyfriend (there are two girls and three gay guys and one straight guy, but he didn’t want to write in, so I guess there…
Immigrant appetites
If you don’t like fiction, skip to the back of Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of fiction to find six recipes and a cooking commentary. In the book’s final section, the author, who admits to minimal culinary expertise, recounts her struggles preparing Russian fare in the rented trailer in which she, her husband, and their two…
Hot time in the old town
No Texan is safe from bearing the brunt of a good-natured joke at the Cameo Theatre this month. High Hair and Jalapeños!, a musical revue of all things San Antonio, mixes racy, silly, and biting vignettes for a two-hour jaunt through Earl Abel’s, jumbo-tron evangelism, and the Olmos Basin Park (after hours,…
Amuse Bouche
A-B wants to know when fine dining started taking its cues from the airline industry. The object of her ire? Valets who ask for payment upfront. You’re keeping her car, for chrissake, which is not a 2009 model, true, but is nonetheless worth more than 8 effin’ dollars. Chances are she’ll return and pay you…
No ‘good’ deed goes unpunished
Since opening its doors in 2006, the Overtime Theater has become synonymous with infusing the traditional themes of the theater world with offbeat twists and turns. And The Good Samaritan, which opened at the Overtime August 1, is no exception to this trend. Branching out from the conventional “eyes fixed stage front” mentality, and even…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Do you get aroused from squeezing balloons until they explode? Do you quiver with delight as you watch popcorn pop? Have you ever been patient enough to stand in front of a ripe flower bud for hours to witness its slow explosion into full opening? If you answered yes to any…
The Que Que
Cowed by the Feds Ah, us chicken hearts, ’fraid a little foot-and-mouth disease will get loose in the wilds of Far West San Antonio should the Feds decide to relocate and expand the Plum Island bio-defense facility at the Texas Research Park. `See “Banging the drum for Bio-defense,” August 15, 2007.` Ambition should be made…
Ask a mexican
Dear Mexican: Where I recently started working, Latinos make up about 95 percent of the work force. We are, however, prohibited from speaking Spanish. Our supervisor tells us that if we can so much as speak one word of English, that we cannot speak in Spanish. We are constantly being threatened about it. My manager…
Hot Wired
Almost a year ago, I wrote a critique of CPS Energy’s plans for meeting the future electrical needs of San Antonio residents. The feature was titled “CPS Must Die” and included a cover image of a cooling tower in a graveyard. Needless to say, it raised a lot of attention in this little community here.…
Cosplay for the Manga Masses
Last month, downtown Say-Town was invaded by frolicking, cartoon-costumed vigilantes. The anime-inspired rock concert and an Alamo-anime costume photo shoot were the first salvos in a live manga wave that’ll land on the River Walk’s banks this weekend. San Japan, the city’s first annual Japanese Culture and Anime Convention, is expected to draw more than…
High school, re-animated
An apple and a pear sit on a small couch inside a refrigerator and talk about the meaning of life. “Think of a world that is run by pears,” the Red Delicious says to her fellow fridge-mate. In a most facetious way the pear mumbles, “I often do.” This playful dialogue between pomes is part…
Free lunch programs
“Nothing is ever free,” the saying goes, so just how “free” can ”freeware” really be? The word “freeware” describes a software program offered online as a free download. “Open Source” is another name for free downloadable software, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. Turns out, if you’re willing and able to dig around…
S’Nuff Film
What do Fellini’s 8 1/2, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and some jag-off’s Howard the Duck have in common? Would you believe they were all written, shot, and edited in less than 48 hours? If so, I’m not sure how you even managed to read and comprehend the last two sentences, because that’s just dumb. Even poor, poor…
Sound and Fury
It’s been five long years since Mojoe emerged with classic.ghetto.soul — a debut album that marked them as S.A.’s great hip-hop hope — as they’ve slowed down their production schedule to let the industry catch up with their old ideas. For example, Mojoe (high-school friends Charles “Easy Lee” Peters and “Tre” Scipio) spent much of…
Sticky situation
The latest from Rogen, Apatow, etc., etc. (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin) is less about the titular strain of cannibis than the guys smoking it, and less about weedheads than mid-20s dude-children hiding out from adulthood in thick, skunky clouds. The current bud-buddy kings, Harold and Kumar, with their high IQs, stereotype-bashing identities, and…
Live & Local
The back room at the White Rabbit is a slow cooker. Hot, sticky kids pile in for the all-ages show, crowding to the walls and risking second-degree burns from skin-to-skin contact, while the tangy reek of BO gives way to a smell disturbingly not unlike brisket cooking. This is the first show Upon a Burning…
Mellow drama
Based on the by-all-accounts-classic British novel I haven’t read a lick of (and following by more than two-and-a-half decades the widely praised, Jeremy Irons/Anthony Andrews/John Gielgud/Claire Bloom/Laurence Olivier-headlined ITV serial I haven’t seen a moment of), Julian Jarrold’s big-screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is a tense, exceedingly well-dressed film that, upon leaving the…
Cinema Obscura
So, a duck walks into a drugstore and asks for Chapstick. The cashier asks if the duck will be paying by cash or charge. “Neither,” says the duck. “Just put it on my bill.” Howard the Duck could be considered a $37-million screen adaptation of that joke, but that isn’t really fair to the joke,…
Back to school
In her 1999 Academy Award-nominated documentary On the Ropes, director Nanette Burstein traveled to the East Coast to tell the story of three aspiring boxers from Brooklyn as they trained for the most important tournament of their lives. Three years later, she followed up the success of her first film by heading to the West…
