‘NBA Forever’ commercial steals NBA Christmas spotlight
On an NBA Christmas schedule that began with a Celtics – Knicks thriller in Madison Square Garden and ended with the Los Angeles Clippers sitting above their big brother Los Angeles Lakers in the standings, the most memorable moment might have been the ‘NBA Forever’ commercial that TNT unveiled. The Spurs begin their 2011 -…
The best local albums of 2011
The blood-letting, tear-jerking, and aural ancestral communions that still demand attentionThe blood-letting, tear-jerking, and aural ancestral communions that still demand attention
The Wicked Stage: Bah, Humbug edition. Or: a message for The San Pedro Playhouse
Other critics might ring in the New Year with a Best of Theatre Top Ten List — but we here at the Wicked Stage take our moniker seriously: we’re bad to the bone. And just when we were looking for a chance to post something appropriately Grinch-like to the blog, behold! manna from heaven: a…
Dog trainer of scene-stealing terrier in ‘The Artist’ speaks
While most cinephiles are lauding over performances by George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep during what is now the end of Oscar season, a lot of attention is being paid to another actor, one who is just as likely to be excited to be given a chew toy as an Academy Award. Meet Uggie,…
Fast Foodie: Little Aussie Bakery & Café
As a frequent and faithful consumer of a wide range of breadstuffs, The Little Aussie Bakery & Café piqued my interest at the door. A sign asked me to please refrain from entering with any gluten products. This is serious stuff. I emptied my pockets of bâtard crumbs and seitan dribbles that I carry around…
Homeland Security to test thought-crime detection to weed out ‘malintents’
Since at least 2008, the Department of Homeland Security has been toying with mind-reading technology, trying to develop a system to identify and catch would-be criminals, terrorists, or other so-called “malintents” before they strike. According to a DHS document released this week, the feds now plan to test the pre-crime detection program, called “Future Attribute…
‘The Submariners,’ by Nathan Engel
Nathan Engel’s The Submariners’ careening jubilation of plot is reminiscent of one of Jeffrey Ford’s single-sentence stories in Witpunk. It crashes along recklessly giving us a glimpse of a world that may or may not be our own (while I’m tempted to say that it could not possibly be our own, I’m much, much too…
New EPA mercury rule requires at least $16 mil in retrofits for CPS Energy
After 20 years, four presidents, and a last-minute lobbying tsunami of opposition by the power industry, the Environmental Protection Agency has finally released rules limiting emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants. The facilities have until 2016 to reduce emissions to levels of the cleanest 12 percent of power plants, according…
Sleeping in public?
Late Wednesday, members of Occupy San Antonio sent out a series of photographs like the one featured above, apparently showing a San Antonio Park Police officer napping while keeping watch over HemisFair Park. Occupiers say the photos were taken late Tuesday night. Sign of a crackdown on the local Occupy contingent, a fluctuating group of…
How Southside’s Jennifer Espinoza became Freddie Mercury
Don’t wake me up unless I won," 18-year-old Jennifer Espinoza told her mother in early December. On the 5th of the month she had traveled to Los Angeles to take part, along 24 other contestants, in the final audition for The Queen Extravaganza, an effort to assemble a Queen cover band to head out on…
Hazanavicius’ ode to cinema is a colorful story in black and white
Disturbed that their marriage is falling apart, Doris Valentin (Penelope Ann Miller) says to her husband, “We have to talk, George.” However, George (Jean Dujardin) cannot talk, not merely because he is a defective spouse or even because he is a star of the silent screen; George does not speak to Doris, or anyone else,…
Grifter vs. grifter
Leverage (8pm Sunday, TNT) Leverage is Mission: Impossible with a sense of humor about itself. In every episode, Timothy Hutton’s gang of thieves and hackers pull off a difficult task to help some underdog. They also pull off the difficult task of entertaining us, making it look easy. The gang members are crooks with hearts…
Nicolás Leiva crosses dimensions at Ruiz-Healy
Nicolás Leiva dreamed of paradise, a realm of angels and celestial beings who fed and nurtured him. "Now," he says, "I return every day since." Leiva accomplishes this amazing journey through his art practice, explaining that, "It is a street that takes you to the mystic elevation. You pray, you work. It is the same."…
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Special Christmas gift edición
Taste this: Vegetable Stir-fry, $7
Although my ordering habits at Niki’s Tokyo Inn typically call for high-calorie configurations of fried oysters, spicy scallop rolls, and tempura shrimp, nothing beats the simplicity of the vegetable stir-fry, one of the menu’s sleeper stars. Cooked perfectly al dente with a smoky finish, it works equally well as a shared side or as a…
Imminent Descent: Imminent Descent
The thrash-death outfit Imminent Descent, San Antonio’s latest attempt to recapture the glory of its mid-’80s metal scene, makes no bones about the oldness of its school. Intro track "Descendit" recalls Bathory and Mercyful Fate, while the frantic riffery on "Spirit Reiver" and "Commited" pay a respectful homage to both the classic thrash of the…
The leader of Trans-Siberian Orchestra reveals the magic of big cats
A year ago I sat at a deli and noticed what quite possibly was the greatest concert shirt ever made. On black cotton was a ferocious white tiger clawing an ’80s style metal guitar, with crimson blood pouring out from the instrument’s body. In bold Old English letters were the initials "TSO." On the back…
The Apoca-List
AKA The “We’re Fucked” Index
Censored scientist John Anderson on how to restore sound policy-making in Texas and (maybe) save the Texas coast
Two months of sustained outrage from scientists, academics, and newspaper editorial boards may have changed things at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — at least when it comes to publishing hard, peer-reviewed science. John Anderson, a prominent Rice University professor who in October accused the TCEQ of censorship, says the commission has finally agreed…
Film review: War Horse
Horses came galloping across the screen in the very first narrative film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), and it was a horse that Eadweard Muybridge photographed in the 1880s in still frames that, strung together, pioneered the illusion of motion pictures. Even without National Velvet, The Grifters, and Sea Biscuit, thousands of "oaters" — enough…
The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Their Last Time Out
If you know only one jazz song, chances are it’s by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. That tune, 1959’s "Take Five," along with a string of successful subsequent releases, made Brubeck and his band the most well-known and successful jazz band of the ’60s. The last stand of this classic lineup took place on December 26,…
A turning point for San Antonio film?
Whether the topic is music, film, or any of the arts, really, it’s always easy to put down a small market, especially if you live in close proximity to a big market like Austin. “The music scene sucks.” “Local films suck.” We’ve heard it all before. But the 2011 48 Hour Film Experience showed me…
The QueQue: Bye-Bye Occupy?, Science may win in censorship standoff with TCEQ
Bye-Bye Occupy? Two months of cooperation devolved with a 15-minute ultimatum Monday when a handful of arrests at HemisFair Park effectively quashed the rosy relationship that’s existed between local police and Occupy San Antonio members. By midday Monday, at least six occupiers had been arrested for disobeying police orders to leave an area in and…
Live & local: Muldoon
"We’re here to remember a time before text messaging, before skinny jeans, when it was OK to be a local band ripping off Cursive," Jerid Reed Morris, guitarist/vocalist for Muldoon and (lately) Pillow Talk, told the crowd Friday night. The time in question is 2006, the year Muldoon released their locally celebrated A Coat of…
The Roots: undun
The Roots have delivered increasingly poignant and thematically focused records on life’s trials. undun, their 13th album, is their most emotive, urgent, and (at less than 40 minutes) brief work. Beginning with his death and working backward, it chronicles the life of fictional Redford Stephens, a character who is a blank canvas for the experiences…
What will new life for Casa Maldonado mean?
The Avenida Guadalupe Association contended the ramshackle pile known as the Pink Building or Casa Maldonado was in the way of their federally-funded Promesa Project, intended to bring attractive office space and workforce training to the Westside. Both the State and the City refused to list the building as an historic property. But last Thursday…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the fictional world of the wizard Harry Potter, muggles are people who have no magical powers. Because of their deficiency, certain sights may be literally invisible to them, and certain places inaccessible. I’m going to boldly predict that you Aries people will lose at least some of your muggleness in…
Newest resident of Olmos Circle has some ‘destination’ decisions ahead
At first, I thought I’d be perfectly happy ignoring the McCullough Avenue Grill, a place that appeared on Olmos Circle almost before the body that briefly was Tangeré grew cold. Rumors of burgers, calamari, and mac and cheese (please, God, no more calamari, no more mac!) swirled about the new operation, yet another grill. (Please,…
Ring out the old with Jason Dady
Chef Jason Dady is offering a sweet holiday special — for every $100 you purchase in gift certificates, you’ll get a $25 gift certificate. With the Lodge shutting its doors at the end of the year, you could use that extra $25 to ring 2011 out in style and celebrate the end of a great…
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Stage Whisper
If there’s a group more likely to make terrible records than the offspring of rock stars, it’s actors. Charlotte Gainsbourg just so happens to fall into both categories. She’s the daughter of (in)famous French songwriter-actor-director Serge Gainsbourg and British actress-singer Jane Birkin, and an accomplished actress on her own right (starring in The Science of…
Fast foodie: Gallo Pizzeria
Should you for whatever reason — say in quest for puffy tacos at Ray’s — find yourself on Castroville Road just west of 19th, it’s not likely that you’d pay a lot of attention to Gallo Pizzeria. Oh, you might subliminally note that it’s odd to see a pizza place where a taco joint might…
David Fincher’s talented fingerprints are all over new ‘Dragon Tattoo’
From the start of the opening credits two-time Academy Award-nominated director David Fincher (The Social Network) wants everyone to know the new adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first book of the widely-popular Stieg Larsson series, is a Fincher film. Borrowing from his music-video aesthetic, Fincher unleashes what can only…
Stragglers own the center of ‘Before the End’
Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection, Before the End, After the Beginning, is filled with the strivers, drifters, and dreamers who inhabit the Southwest from Los Angeles to Austin, that long road of exile that runs from broken memories towards the next hopeful, bewildering horizon. Written after his stroke in 2009, the suite of 10 stories begins…
The nightmare before Christmas
On the night of December 9, jazz pianist Jordan Pollard did something she had never done before: she left her Nord Electro 2 keyboard inside her car. She had just finished a private gig and decided to leave the instrument in the car because she had to give a class early the next day. Bad…
Casual champagne and cognac cocktails
Champagne and cognac are dress-up drinks in most people’s minds. One gets trotted out at special occasions — weddings, graduations, New Year’s Eve; the other conjures up images of velvet jackets, crackling fires, a faithful spaniel at one’s feet. I’m exaggerating only slightly here. But snifters and smoking jackets are not always required to enjoy…
Chimpanzees gaining new protections that may further limit medical use at SA lab
I was on my way back from Spain when I saw the New York Times write-up announcing the Institute of Medicine’s report that will seriously curtail medical research on our closest genetic relative — the chimpanzee — in the United States. In a report released last Thursday, IOM researchers wrote that chimps have been rendered…
AG sues Texas Highway Patrol Museum
That official-sounding Texas Highway Patrol Museum on the edge of Southtown? After an investigation into the group’s dealings and finances, State Attorney General Greg Abbott claims the operation is a sham, filing a lawsuit against the museum, its affiliate organizations, and a handful of its top employees. The suit, filed in a Travis County probate…
