Media Your number’s up
A smart-alecky plot revolves around MacGuffins and mobsters When a New York City crime boss called The Boss (Freeman) hires an out-of-town hit man to knock off his rival’s son, he instructs the assassin: “I need you to make it look like it ain’t what it is.” Screenwriter Jason Smilovic might have said the same…
Media That’s a wrap
The low-down on this week’s premieres Tales of inspiration dominate this weekend’s wide releases, beginning with Take the Lead, a PG-13, Stand and Deliver-style tale with tails and waltzes. Antonio Banderas stars as a professional ballroom dancer who volunteers to teach in a NYC public high school, only to find that his foxtrot will have…
News Party lines
City eyes bonds on steroids San Antonio City Council may implement a plan this spring to raise more than $1 billion in property-tax-based bond issues over the next 12 years in an effort to repair the city’s battered streets and build sorely needed drainage projects. City Manager Sheryl Sculley and Acting Finance Director Ben Gorzell…
Media Special screenings
Selena Gregory Nava (1997) The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema presents Selena, a film celebrating the career and music of the well-known Corpus Christi native and superstar Selena Quintanilla Pérez, who was murdered in 1995 by her former business manager. Jennifer Lopez plays the booty-shakin’ phenom. 7 p.m. Friday, March 31, 1255 SW Loop 410. $8 adults,…
News On the street
Go speed racer, go I arrived at the San Antonio Speedway on State Highway 16 South at about 3 p.m., not sure what to expect. The half-mile NASCAR-sanctioned track was built back in 1977, when it was known as the “Highway 16 Raceway,” but this was my first time at the horsepower races. As I…
Media Game theory
AI thrives in total Oblivion Quietly and without fanfare players are vanishing from their favorite virtual worlds. Rapture-like, they are abandoning their bodies and ascending to another realm. Last weekend, perceptibly fewer adventurers wandered the roads of Tyria (Guild Wars), Azeroth (World of Warcraft), and Norrath (Everquest II). In Paragon City (City of Heroes), there…
News Speed reads
W.R. Grace workers wanted The EPA Region 6 office is seeking former employees and neighbors of the W.R. Grace vermiculite processing facility that operated on the Big Tex site in Southtown from 1961-89 to assist with its risk-assessment project. The EPA is evaluating the site for possible asbestos contamination in advance of a commercial and…
Food & Drink A chop to cherish
Lambykins is precious, but it doesn’t have to be dear As Easter approaches, many butchers will actually stock freshly cut lamb instead of those little hermetically sealed packets in the exotic-meat section. You say a $20 leg of lamb the size of a small toddler doesn’t exactly fit your holiday dinner plans? No matter. Lamb…
News What goes in must come out
Northside population growth overwhelms the wastewater system Attention: Would Randolph Air Force Base and the cities of Schertz, Universal City, and Live Oak please stop flushing their toilets? Now. Cibolo Creek Municipal Authority, which processes wastewater generated by those Northeast Side areas, discharged more pollution than allowed by its Clean Water Act permit every month…
Food & Drink Spring a leek
This leggy lily is slow-growing but worth the wait Whether cleaned, trimmed, and bundled for sale or standing tall in the garden, leeks are at their prime right now. A member of the Allium family of onions, garlic, and chives, leeks look something like overgrown scallions with a mellower, richer flavor that has added depth…
News Texas $$ at work (for Republicans)
What did Governor Perry get for our $1.1 million? Our President’s quaint/nauseating tendency to speak as if Gabby Hayes was his dialogue coach is neither the beginning nor the end of Washington’s Texan tinge. With the second-largest contingent in the House of Representatives, two senators who hold seats on powerful committees, the Office of State-Federal…
Food & Drink All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene Things are hopping at the North Star Mall, where, much to the chagrin of young cocoa-lovers, the Easter Bunny is handing out rabbit ears instead of the traditional hollow chocolate bunny. The big hare will occupy his tulip throne in the Dillard’s wing 10 a.m. -…
News Briefs
Mitchell Lake Audubon Center is not just for the birds It’s mid-morning on a spring day at Mitchell Lake, and a small cloud of swallows swirls through the air, swooping after newly hatched midges. A black-neck stilt picks its food from fertile mud, its handsome hindquarters held above the muck on long red legs. A…
Food & Drink The bar tab
Shuffleboard 101 The Shady Lady Saloon once was a country store that sat on top of the bend where Southeast Military Drive segues into South W.W. White Road. There one could purchase a pack of stale baseball card gum for a nickel, and cold beer, ice, and bait figured heavily in the venue’s grocery repertoire.…
News Counterpoint
Bad fences, good neighbors – U.S. immigration policy must support workers and families Immigration reform is a complex issue that is too often treated simplistically and fueled by fear and prejudice — “fear of a brown nation,” as the title of an April 7 Our Lady of the Lake University symposium puts it. Even in…
Music ‘Devil’ may care
Pitbull Daycare joins Ministry for a pleasantly pulverizing tour Stephen Bishop, lead singer of Pitbull Daycare, shares the name of a minor pop star from the late ’70s and early ’80s. That Stephen Bishop was a bearded nerd who put out an album called Bish, had his biggest hit with the ridiculously wimpy ballad “On…
Feature The eternal boys of summer
Age is nothing but a number for the players of the Men’s Senior Baseball League Let’s put this in perspective. In 1939, when ailing legend Lou Gehrig took himself out of the New York Yankees lineup after 2,130 consecutive games, Adolph Hoffman was a junior pole vaulter for the Somerset High School track team. Three…
Music Sound and the Fury
A week on the scene Crosses to bear Eric Hisaw’s The Crosses has such an offhand, slice-of-life ease about it, that you don’t immediately notice how well-crafted it is. With expert, country flavored guitar work from Hisaw himself and unobtrusive pedal-steel from Larry Tracy, the album suggests a honky-tonk Alejandro Escovedo, right down to Hisaw’s…
Culture ‘Artbabe’ grows up
With the complete La Perdida newly published in novel form, Jessica Abel looks for the next adventure Jessica Abel’s Brooklyn brownstone looks pretty much like I imagined it would, with its original wood moldings and heavy old cabinets full of books and records — the home of 30-something former indie-hipsters who’ve traded in bar-hopping for…
Music Body moving
The Beastie Boys turned 50 fans loose with cameras, and wound up with the quirkiest of all concert documentaries Peter De Marco of Albany, New York, sat down in front of his computer on October 8, 2004, anxious about the show the Beastie Boys would be playing at Madison Square Garden the very next night.…
Arts The art capades
Giant tea cozies and Po-Mo sunbursts If you drive by Unit B at night you can’t help but stare in the windows and wonder. There is a family in the kitchen, books line the walls, and a television flickers — but the kitchen apparitions are bodiless and the living room’s books have been flayed. Reconstructing…
Music CD Spotlight
Hard feelings Hard-Fi is going to have a hard time this spring, especially since they were position to be this year’s British “it” band until the Arctic Monkeys stole their thunder. Nevertheless, these four blokes from Staines (basically the armpit of England) deserve just as much attention as those snotty young Sheffield punks. Hard-Fi is…
Arts Some enchanted soprano
Broadway dynamic duo Audra McDonald and Ted Sperling glide into the Carver on a magical voice Anyone losing sleep over the future of the American musical needs to relax. Really. As long as Audra McDonald and Ted Sperling are around, that much-beloved but lately lamented theater tradition is in very good hands. Broadway star Audra…
Music Current choice
Pea Salad Days It’s interesting to consider that present-day mainstream hip-hop entities like Ice Cube and Black Eyed Peas were once signed to Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records, the Galapagos Islands of gangsta rap. Cube left Ruthless and ultimately became a Hollywood player who associated himself with kid movies such as Are We There Yet? and bizarre…
Arts It’s all funny in Texican
Comedia A Go-Go finds the bicultural funnybone at Galería Guadalupe From mariachis to God, SAC students to Sam’s Burger Joint regulars, Comedia A Go-Go sends up San Antonio in What’s funny in Spanish?, now playing on West-Side turf at the Galería Guadalupe. Comedia’s five-man cast and three-man crew perform satirical comedy sketches using multimedia techniques…
Arts Classical attitude
News and notes from San Antonio’s other music scene Congrats to Christopher Wilkins, music director emeritus of the San Antonio Symphony, who was just named music director and principal conductor of the Akron Symphony Orchestra. After 10 musically successful but administratively turbulent years with SAS, Wilkins left in 2001 with many fans, a few battle…
Media Thank you for saying no
Rejection meant Jason Reitman got to make a truly independent film “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan,” begins Christopher Buckley’s satirical novel about American spin culture. “I read that first line and…
