Eatin’ up I-35
Tis the season for driving around the state visiting friends and relatives. And we’re not complaining. Last week’s jaunt to Houston and DFW took us past Woody’s Smokehouse on I-45 (we’re still raving about their candied jalapenos to anyone who’ll listen), and we also had time for dinner at Houston’s Strip House — one in…
Eatin’ up I-35
Tis the season for driving around the state visiting friends and relatives. And we’re not complaining. Last week’s jaunt to Houston and DFW took us past Woody’s Smokehouse on I-45 (we’re still raving about their candied jalapenos to anyone who’ll listen), and we also had time for dinner at Houston’s Strip House — one in…
On the Street
Carrot and Wine On Friday night Zubiate Gallery, located at the headwaters of Broadway, hosted an amazing event. There were things for sale (which people bought), “carrots and wine” (and pastries), some incredibly strong punch (that was more vodka than Red Dye 40), an amazing array of music (The Psychics, Fear Snakeface, and a son…
Rub one out for peace
Activists Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, want you to celebrate the first day of winter (12/22) by making that gorgeous o-face of yours. Their Golbal Orgasm for Peace is an initiative which asks the world’s population to experience synchronized orgasm “to effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through the…
On the Street
Carrot and Wine On Friday night Zubiate Gallery, located at the headwaters of Broadway, hosted an amazing event. There were things for sale (which people bought), “carrots and wine” (and pastries), some incredibly strong punch (that was more vodka than Red Dye 40), an amazing array of music (The Psychics, Fear Snakeface, and a son…
Rub one out for peace
Activists Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, want you to celebrate the first day of winter (12/22) by making that gorgeous o-face of yours. Their Golbal Orgasm for Peace is an initiative which asks the world’s population to experience synchronized orgasm “to effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through the…
Wouldn’t you like to know
OK — it’s Thursday. It’s late. You’ve probably made your plans for tomorrow … or have you? (That’s my last Rita Skeeterism of the post, Scout’s honor.) What I’m getting at, rather badly, I’d say, is that the new Sigur Ros film Heima will be showing at 1100 Broadway (that’s at the corner of Broad…
Wouldn’t you like to know
OK — it’s Thursday. It’s late. You’ve probably made your plans for tomorrow … or have you? (That’s my last Rita Skeeterism of the post, Scout’s honor.) What I’m getting at, rather badly, I’d say, is that the new Sigur Ros film Heima will be showing at 1100 Broadway (that’s at the corner of Broad…
A Tuna Christmas
Release Date: 2007-12-19 The second in a trilogy of comedies set in the fictional town of Tuna, A Tuna Christmas brings back the entire cast of eccentric characters from the original hit, Greater Tuna. It’s 24 hours before Christmas and all comic hell is about to break loose as the wacky characters attempt to cope…
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Release Date: 2007-12-19 The second in a trilogy of comedies set in the fictional town of Tuna, A Tuna Christmas brings back the entire cast of eccentric characters from the original hit, Greater Tuna. It’s 24 hours before Christmas and all comic hell is about to break loose as the wacky characters attempt to cope…
A savory taste of Malabar
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has little to do with lumens and Lysol and all to do with loneliness and lack of sympathy, and yet its title has become a kind of synonym for restaurants low on aspirations but high on wattage. Arriving at night at Taste of Malabar,…
A Tuna Christmas
Release Date: 2007-12-19 The second in a trilogy of comedies set in the fictional town of Tuna, A Tuna Christmas brings back the entire cast of eccentric characters from the original hit, Greater Tuna. It’s 24 hours before Christmas and all comic hell is about to break loose as the wacky characters attempt to cope…
Holiday Pops!
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Get into the spirit at Holiday Pops, a night of Christmas cheer brought to you by the San Antonio Symphony. Maestro Robert Moody leads the Symphony to the sounds of “March of the Toys,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and more, while San Antonio native Gail Wettstein sings “My Grown-up Christmas…
White Rabbit X-mas Party w. Nancy Silva Project, Structure, Under Nothing, In Ovo, Sixxer, & Southern Trendkill (Pantera Tribute)
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Join the White Rabbit for a Grinchy Christmas bash, featuring the packed lineup of Nancy Silva Project, Structure, Sixxer, Under Nothing, In Ovo, and The Great Southern Trendkill, a San Antonio tribute to Pantera. Toys will be collected to benefit St. Peter-St. Joseph Children’s home, and the night plays host to food…
Eve of the Eve Concert
Release Date: 2007-12-19 San Antonio four-piece Window takes the stage with a mix of funk, folk rock, and blues for this holiday benefit at Sam’s, solidifying a bill that includes Echo Squad, Morris Orchids, Last Of Our Kind, and more. Admission is cut to $5 with a food donation, and the show benefits the San…
The Toadies w. Girl In A Coma & Dead Twins
Release Date: 2007-12-19 In early-’90s Fort Worth, the Toadies were Nirvana + Pearl Jam, multiplied by 10. They defined the scene, they ruled it, and they inspired it. By the time the band released Rubberneck, their 1994 Interscope debut album, their lineup had turned over a few times and North Texas audiences had spent a…
Naughty or Nice Christmas Party
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Dress naughty or dress nice this Thursday as The Industry’s lesbian scene gears up for the holidays in style. The X-mas party and fashion show features nine designers and nine collections in a holiday runway show from 10:30-11pm, while $2 beer, $.75 wells, and a $50 drink tab raffle guarantees a crowd…
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Trans-Siberian Orchestra has become a tradition for many rock-centric revelers since the group’s 1999 inception, playing for more than one million people on the 2006 Winter Tour. TSO entices audiences with their cross-genre blending of metal and progressive rock, classical themes, great storytelling, and unequalled staging and pyrotechnics. $38-58, 3 & 8pm,…
Lesbian & Gay Masquerade Ball
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Dress naughty or dress nice this Thursday as The Industry’s lesbian scene gears up for the holidays in style. The X-mas party and fashion show features nine designers and nine collections in a holiday runway show from 10:30-11pm, while $2 beer, $.75 wells, and a $50 drink tab raffle guarantees a crowd…
Black Heart Birthday Bash & Valentine’s Party
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Dress naughty or dress nice this Thursday as The Industry’s lesbian scene gears up for the holidays in style. The X-mas party and fashion show features nine designers and nine collections in a holiday runway show from 10:30-11pm, while $2 beer, $.75 wells, and a $50 drink tab raffle guarantees a crowd…
Joy Division/New Order Party
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Dress naughty or dress nice this Thursday as The Industry’s lesbian scene gears up for the holidays in style. The X-mas party and fashion show features nine designers and nine collections in a holiday runway show from 10:30-11pm, while $2 beer, $.75 wells, and a $50 drink tab raffle guarantees a crowd…
2nd Annual Bettie Page Look-a-Like Contest
Release Date: 2007-12-19 Dress naughty or dress nice this Thursday as The Industry’s lesbian scene gears up for the holidays in style. The X-mas party and fashion show features nine designers and nine collections in a holiday runway show from 10:30-11pm, while $2 beer, $.75 wells, and a $50 drink tab raffle guarantees a crowd…
Remodel the Alamo
San Antonio’s most identifiable, and most controversial, landmark is about to get a $60-million makeover. For nearly three centuries, the mission first founded in 1718 by Fray Antonio de San Buenaventura y Olivares has served as the literal and figurative center of the city — through three relocations and numerous transitions, from religious settlement to…
Westside/Southside story
Their story is often told in the local arts scene, details of it sometimes slipping into the territory of urban legend. It was 20 years ago last week that a 19-year-old Alex Rubio took 10-year-old Vincent Valdez under his wing, after naming Valdez the winner of an elementary-school poster contest. The prize: an opportunity to…
THE QUE QUE
Wonder Wall Months back, when reports began circulating about Al Qaeda creeping across our southern flank, Queque got those practiced patriotically cold chills. Once we were certain we’d feared and loathed sufficiently to be considered a Good American, we started to think. We recalled stories from decades back. Libya, now a reformed WOT (War on…
ARTIFACTS
’Tis the season to be jolly, right? With Christmas literally days away — and of course, you still haven’t bought any gifts (haven’t we helped you enough with our November 21 Gift Guide and weekly Clothes-minded columns?) — we at the Current believe that if you’ve procrastinated this long, then you just don’t care about…
Abbott swings for the Craddick team
Late last Friday evening, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott finally weighed in on the controversy swirling around House Speaker Tom Craddick’s late-session power grab. The result? You got “pwned.” Or you did if you were a House member who opposed Craddick. In the most controversial Attorney General’s Opinion in at least a decade, Abbott droned…
Southside/Westside connection
As Sexto Sol played in the background, serving as the unofficial soundtrack of the highly anticipated Vincent Valdez and Alex Rubio show San Anto: Pride of the Southside/En El Mero Hueso, a crowd of nearly 800 people anxiously awaited the unveiling of an artistic trek. The opening drew a range of people: NESA students, professionals…
Revealing Briefs
AUSTIN — Corpus Christi classroom teacher Ray McMurrey officially entered the U.S. Senate race for John Cornyn’s seat on Tuesday with a press conference in Austin. McMurrey will face State Representative Rick Noriega (D-Houston), in the Democratic Primary next March. AUSTIN — Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the…
A look back at ol’ S.A.
As a San Antonio native, I have a strong appreciation for all things local, especially historic black-and-white images. Historic Photos of San Antonio wrangles in some 200 images for a journey through the Alamo City from the 1860s through 1969. San Antonio’s evolution from a town into a city is beautifully depicted throughout the book.…
Something new
Somewhere in the midst of my books and papers is a scrap of paper with the barely legible words “Kicking & Screaming” written on it: a note scrawled to myself in the darkness of a theater after watching a trailer for director Noah Baumbach’s first film and deciding it was worth seeing. That note is…
‘Flinch Gordon’ Ping-perfect
If the Overtime Theater were a cult, John Poole would be its charismatic prophet. He leads a handful of faithful devotees, who range from seasoned comedians to oddly refreshing n00bs, back to a golden time when “a sparkler in a paper towel tube was a rocket ship.” Flinch Gordon and the Return of Ping the…
CRITICAL Darling
Elation, thy name is winter — season of gorgeously crappy weather and we-saved-the-best-for-last films. I recently screened Juno and Margot at the Wedding within 24 hours of one another, and by golly, am I ever happy. Sure, I’ve still got Juno’s mite-overused Moldy Peaches song stuck in my head, but I think I like it…
Mex in Manhattan
Pungent animal hormones infuse the air with fight-for-survival heat that can only mean two animals have claimed the same territory. Sensing the possibility of bloodshed, the other creatures in the vicinity of the impending fight determine the immediate location of safer ground. The competitors’ pupils dilate; allowing a wider field of vision should the opponent…
Overwriting doesn’t keep ‘Juno’ from being one million-dollar baby
Sometime in the near future, you’re going to be hearing about Diablo Cody. Perhaps in the coming months, perhaps before the year’s out. Or maybe it’s happened already, and your head is bobbing sagely as you read this, contentedly aware of things about which others may only speculate. If this last case is yours, please…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: U.S.A citizens are sick and tired that for more than 40 years, Latin American elites have lived like monarchs because they pimp their poor to American businesses for cheap labor that American taxpayers have been forced to subsidize with health care, food, housing, education, and so forth, costing taxpayers trillions of dollars annually.…
The Great Debaters
Dir. Denzel Washington; writ. Robert Eisele; feat. Forest Whitaker, Denzel Washington, Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker, Nate Parker (PG-13) So erudite and accomplished is Professor James Farmer (Forest Whitaker) that one awestruck student declares, “He must be the smartest man in Texas.” Though he loves and reveres his father, James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker, no relation…
Clothes-minded
The candlelight and carols starting to get to you? Grinch finally fading away as the true spirit of the season reveals itself? Put away the ribbon and bows then, and make a tax-deductible year-end donation in honor of yourself or someone you love. Another wonderful charitable gift comes our way from MercyCorps, the international humanitarian-aid…
‘Kite Runner’ gets off track
When the CIA intervenes to protect the lives of two young actors prior to their big-screen debut, you know you’re not dealing with your typical film. Such was the case — as recently reported by NPR and The New York Times — with the cinematic adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner. Readers will…
Dear Uncle Mat
I work with a guy who is annoying. He is superficial, condescending, and often talks behind the backs of others. His comments pertain to our co-workers’ job performance most of the time, and he isn’t wrong. His work isn’t perfect and no one really likes him. He is very metro-sexual and people make fun of…
Armchair Cinephile
PICK OF THE WEEK: Blade Runner (Warner Bros.) This is the kind of thing the DVD era was made for. As with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece has a long history of alteration and compromise, all of which is detailed in a box set containing not two, but five versions of the film,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Ambition is a bad excuse for not having enough good sense to be lazy,” my ex-girlfriend Arlene used to say. She claimed to be a Zen master whose duty it was to deprogram me out of my absurd striving to make something of myself. She believed the key to enlightenment was…
Humans are dogs
Two new studies of animal intelligence caught my attention last week because they proved that humans are no better than dogs and monkeys. This is something I’ve always felt to be true on an anecdotal level, and now cognitive science backs me up. A researcher in Vienna trained dogs to sort photographs into two categories:…
Fawning over sushi
Bambi’s flesh was pale, the way veal is pale. It was flesh born of DNA and milk, rather than work and forage. Dead for a week and hung in the cold, Bambi’s meat was still glowing with life. The evening had begun quite normally. Slices of wild game — fawn in this case — were…
Lords of the new church
What do you get if you start with rock and roll, and take out the sex, irreverence, abandon, swagger, arrogance, anger, and grit? Toad the Wet Sprocket and Hootie & the Blowfish swiftly come to mind, but the correct answer is “Christian Contemporary Music,” better known in the faith biz as CCM. Its biggest acts…
Amuse-BOUCHE
We passed the Colossus of Texas, David Adickes’ 70-foot-tall statue of Sam Houston, which appears to stand astride I-45 frowning at Dallas-bound drivers, just ahead of lunchtime on Saturday. Fortunately, Old Sam Jacinto also signals that hungry travelers aren’t far from Woody’s Smokehouse in Centerville. In addition to a deli case that justifies the title…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
According to bassist Jenn Alva, when Girl in a Coma opened their first show for Morrissey at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, a fan quickly helped them overcome their nervousness. “There was a guy out front clapping and saying ‘hallelujah,’ because he was glad we weren’t the opening act `Kristeen Young` he’d had before.” Morrissey seems…
Tome for the holidays
It might be a bit Grinchy to say it, but the holidays are about self-preservation. It’s almost impossible to survive the unholy trinity of familial obligation, unspoken rules of reciprocity, and gluttony. So gird yourself with these holiday reads. In The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family, Laura Schenone writes…
Bono, Quincy, Lee, and The Nightfly
The Joshua Tree U2 (Island/Universal) I still remember the first time I heard The Joshua Tree (Island/Universal). Living in a podunk Gulf Coast town, my best access to new music at the time was a radio show out of Houston that, every Sunday at midnight, played extended chunks of upcoming albums; I was half asleep…
aural pleasure
Under the Influence of Buck The Derailers (Palo Duro) Dwight Sings Buck Dwight Yoakam (New West) “Most modern country sounds like bad rock bands,” says Tom Petty in Peter Bogdanovich’s great new documentary about him. Conversely, it’s ironic that a lot of old Buck Owens has always sounded like great rock ’n’ roll bands. There’s…
A Bali-would flop may still be saved
Do not be downhearted about the outcome of the Bali talks. They did not deliver the binding commitments to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that are desperately needed, and as a result millions may die who might have lived. But they did show us something remarkable. They showed us the human race trying to grow…
Playback
I love Led Zeppelin as much as your average rock obsessive. I once stayed awake through a midnight-movie showing of The Song Remains the Same and didn’t even ask for my money back. I’ve yelped along with the intro to “Immigrant Song” and played double-neck air-guitar to “Achilles Last Stand.” In short, I’ve got the…
FCC: Consolidate now!
The Current is frantically parsing today’s decision by the FCC to relax, as the parlance goes, the 32-year absolute ban on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. If we’re reading the PR-massaged bureaucratese correctly, the commissioners’ reasoning is that it doesn’t serve the public’s interest to have a passel of unrelated fly-by-night (economically speaking) media owners floundering alone in the…
My grown-up Christmas list
Oh, I wish I were six years old again looking forward to sneaking a peak underneath the Christmas tree to spot what Santa Claus brought me, fretting if he got it wrong … which he almost always seemed to do. Well, as I’ve grown older I’ve naturally grown wiser. So, Santa, baby … I’ve come…
Stock Drop & Roil
NRG’s VP Kevin Howell mysteriously dumped almost 25,000 company shares last week, selling them of at $43 per after a failed attempt to buy back $4.7 billion of senior debt. Two days later the executive VP followed suit with 6,500 shares in the same pay range. Still, the new nuclear-plant owner and prospective operator of…
Get Perky?
For what it’s worth, I couldn’t say it any better. Please consider the words of Mr. Skye Cosby below and ask yourself if the city’s Christmas Eve domolition of the Reverend Seymour Perkins’ home in any way expresses the sort of city you can be proud of. Best, Greg Harman To: San Antonio Current C/o:…
FCC: Consolidate now!
The Current is frantically parsing today’s decision by the FCC to relax, as the parlance goes, the 32-year absolute ban on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. If we’re reading the PR-massaged bureaucratese correctly, the commissioners’ reasoning is that it doesn’t serve the public’s interest to have a passel of unrelated fly-by-night (economically speaking) media owners floundering alone in…
My grown-up Christmas list
Oh, I wish I were six years old again looking forward to sneaking a peak underneath the Christmas tree to spot what Santa Claus brought me, fretting if he got it wrong … which he almost always seemed to do. Well, as I’ve grown older I’ve naturally grown wiser. So, Santa, baby … I’ve come…
Stock Drop & Roil
NRG’s VP Kevin Howell mysteriously dumped almost 25,000 company shares last week, selling them of at $43 per after a failed attempt to buy back $4.7 billion of senior debt. Two days later the executive VP followed suit with 6,500 shares in the same pay range. Still, the new nuclear-plant owner and prospective operator of…
Get Perky?
For what it’s worth, I couldn’t say it any better. Please consider the words of Mr. Skye Cosby below and ask yourself if the city’s Christmas Eve domolition of the Reverend Seymour Perkins’ home in any way expresses the sort of city you can be proud of. Best, Greg Harman To: San Antonio Current C/o:…
