SAVE THE DATE
October 11-13 Pink Martini with the San Antonio Symphony Majestic Theater 224 East Houston 224-9600 (Ticketmaster) One of the most encouraging developments in recent pop music has been the way cultural, rhythmic, and even language barriers have dissolved in an insatiable thirst for fresh new sounds. It is partly a product of the rise of…
WARHORSE PRANCES INTO OPERA HOUSE
If Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard, and the other starving artists who hang with them in Paris’s raffish Latin Quarter were alive today, they would probably not be attending La Bohème, the opera in which they appear. It is not just that they are poor, so poor that Rodolfo survives a chilly winter day by using the…
LOW-COST CULTURE
Every year, the San Antonio scene offers an abundance of high-brow, low-dollar opportunities, but every year the list gets slimmer. Some perennials: The Stieren lecture series at Trinity University is not only free, it provides some of the most provocative discourse in town. Music organizations frequently perform on a “donation” basis, and if you are…
SOMETHING FOR THE CHILDREN
Most theaters and live venues advise you to take children no younger than age 3 to their performances, but we’ve been dragging our toddler to dance performances, concerts — including chamber and club music — and art exhibits since she was a few weeks old. A few words of advice: It helps if your child…
NEW REVIEWS
Sex and Lucia “Erotic contraption from Spain” Writ. & dir. Julio Medem; feat. Paz Vega, Tristân Ullaa, Janwa Nimri, Daniel Freire, Javier Cámara, Silvia Llanas, Elena Anaya (no MPAA rating) The translation, Sex and Lucia, is more accurate than the original Spanish, Lucia y el Sexo. As crucial as Lucia is to the puzzling plot,…
Armchair Cinephile
Time After Time (Warner Bros.), recently reissued on DVD, takes some liberties with the life of H.G. Wells — suggesting not only that he actually invented a time machine, but that one of his best friends (played with suave dementia by David Warner) was Jack the Ripper. Jack hijacks the machine to 1979, and H.G.…
SPECIAL SCREENS
The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) “A very rare opportunity” Dir. Luchino Visconti; writ. Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (novel), Suso Cecchi d’Amico; feat. Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon (Unrated) It’s not uncommon for us at the Current to get on a soap box in this “Special Screens” section, urging our readers to come out of their…
NEW WORLD, DISORDERED
It’s not uncommon for bands to tour beyond their prime. Eighties’ hair bands like Poison and Warrant routinely hit the road in summer, playing 2,000-person venues full of mullets and 30-somethings reliving their teen-age years. Classic rock icons like the Rolling Stones, the Who, and KISS are still on the road — in the latter’s…
HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE
Seadrift stinks like hell. A sulfur smell spews from smokestacks that mar the flat, Texas horizon with steam and flames. Along Highways 185 and 238, chemical companies Dow/Union Carbide, Formosa Plastics, BP, Seadrift Coke, and Alcoa are braided among the modest farmhouses and black, loamy fields. When the rain pours and the wind whips —…
REVERIES, MEDITATIONS — ANYTHING BUT TRANCE
Ah, the days. It was the summer of 1994, and I had just arrived in the former East Germany as an exchange student with wide eyes and open ears. This was to be the first great experience of my life, and as a teenage punk rocker from the Pacific Northwest I was looking forward to…
ANIMAL RIGHTS, CORPORATE WRONGS
Every time Nick Mallard went out to demonstrate against animal testing, he knew there was a chance he would be arrested for disorderly conduct — a misdemeanor. The last time he went out, the charges were much more serious: He and eight other activists took it upon themselves to protest outside the Hill Country home…
ALL EARS
It’s a scary thing to see so many of my friends producing offspring. I’m still struggling with “Why is the sky blue?” for myself; I’m not ready to be surrounded by inquiring pre-schoolers, however cute they may be. Well, at least this month I know something super-cool to buy ’em for their birthdays: Leave it…
SPIN DOCTORS
Last week Texas’ notorious death machine executed Mexican citizen and convicted murderer Javier Suárez Medina — apparently violating the Vienna Convention that protects the rights of detained foreign nationals — so Mexican President Vicente Fox cancelled his waltz through the Lone Star State, including an August 28 visit to San Antonio. While Fox’s no-show is…
RATTLING THE GOURDS
“I had the pleasure of seeing the Band in 1970, and these guys have got that soul. They don’t hit the mark every time, but they’ve got it.” My friend may have been 73 sheets to the wind, but that is still the nicest thing anyone might say about an ensemble like the Gourds. And…
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PERFORMANCE SEASON
There is a custom in the theater, this place that is the crossroads of custom and innovation, of the ghost light. The custom says no stage is ever left in total darkness. So begins the “Ghost Light” speech, an invocation recited at the introduction of every play produced by the Shoestring Shakespeare Company, authored by…
UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB
The minimalist fiction that Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and others were writing 20 years ago was sometimes called “K-Mart realism.” Feeding off the banal details of backwater lives, it did not breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mike White, whose screenplay betrays a literary sensibility, sets the opening and much of the rest of The Good Girl in…
