News Briefs
If you can read this, you’re not from San Antonio A national study conducted by Central Connecticut State University found San Antonio ranked 64th of the 69 largest U.S. cities in literacy. The study, “America’s Most Literate Cities,” was headed by University President John Miller, who said it “attempts to capture one critical index of…
Food & Drink Good year, and good luck
Eat your way to fortune in the New Year “What do you put in your black-eyed peas?” asked Ma Harper of one of her chefs, Charles Pitts, a New Orleans evacuee now cooking at Ma Harper’s Nawlins Creole Kitchen on W.W. White Road. “What would you put in there to cure your overnight drunk on…
News Party lines
We’re Scrooged again Nobody attended the 11 a.m. Friday, December 23, meeting of the Bexar County Commmissioners Court, except the commissioners and a skeleton crew of court staffers. The contingent of environmental activists and those who have consistently fought City and County politicians over the PGA Village giveaway were absent; apparently defeated in the face…
Food & Drink Liquid gold
Anything is better than bouillion, but homemade vegetable broth is the standard The last time I made vegan curry soup the result was bland, salty, and boring. After beating myself up and dumping the disaster down the drain, I realized the blame lay neither in my recipe nor my culinary skills but in the store-bought…
News Speed reads
Dragon slayer Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a non-profit research organization that tracks the influence of money and corporate power in politics, was selected by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of its 15 “Mavericks, Renegades and Troublemakers of 2005.” After examining former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s successful, yet dubious Congressional redistricting…
Food & Drink All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene “I feel very comfortable and empowered here. We have an opportunity to voice our opinions, and I feel like the company cares,” explains an employee of Whole Foods Market, which was recently honored in the first “50 Best Companies to Work for in Texas.” Asked why…
Feature Learning to fly
Experimental planes leave contrails in the Texas sky Icarus soared too close to the sun and plunged to his death in the sea, but his fatal flight overshadowed his father’s legendary accomplishment. Daedalus continued his aerial escape from Crete to Sicily, where he built a temple to Apollo and retired his wings. Since the youthful…
Arts Nurturing nature
Three books explore the relationship between humans and the natural world In August 1970, four months after Americans celebrated the first Earth Day, Neil Young released After the Gold Rush, a mystical album whose apprehensive title track contained the line, “Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s.” Since its release, Young has…
Music House of cards
Archer Avenue hooks up with Pete Anderson, records an album in Burbank, and contemplates living in the same city For Archer Avenue, rehearsals are a long-distance proposition. With its members spread over four cities in two states, the roots-rock quartet has learned to collaborate via the postal system: Frontman Jack Bonner writes a batch of…
Arts Watch for thorns
Leigh Anne Lester’s Artificial Arrangement is a seductive warning Leigh Anne Lester is suddenly everywhere. With shows running simultaneously at Women & Their Work in Austin, the Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, and San Antonio’s Sala Diaz, I can no longer claim that she is underappreciated. Lester and artist Jayne Lawrence opened their Blue…
Music All ears
Going to Ethiopia When most Americans hear the word “Ethiopia,” the thoughts running through their heads probably are similar to the ones that run through mine: images of famine and war, mainly, and not a lot else. Maybe the portrait of Emperor Haile Selassie will come to mind, but all I know about him comes…
Arts The grappling hook
River City Wrestling is powered by mania Professional wrestling has a longstanding history in Texas. From Hall of Fame wrestler and Houston-based promoter Paul Boesch and his cross-state marketing campaign in the ’60s and ’70s to Dallas’ Von Erich family to San Antonio’s connection with Jose Lothario and Shawn “The Heartbreak Kid” Michaels, Texas’ roots…
Music CD Spotlight
Promises, promises What better gauge of our growing dissatisfaction with Bush country than witnessing America’s most beloved melody maker suddenly scribbling his frustrations and personal politics on a lyric sheet after more than a half-century of silence? And then having Sony tell him he’s gotta take out the “F” word. Bacharach’s music has been persistently…
Arts History with the gloves off
Larry McMurtry explores an America haunted by massacres “If we know anything about man,” writes Larry McMurtry in this grim but stirring little book, “it’s that he’s not pacific.” As evidence, the Pulitzer Prize-winner points to six famous massacres that took place in the West after 1830, beginning with the Sacramento River Massacre of 1846…
Music Current Choice
Road warrior When Willie Nelson penned the lyrics to “On the Road Again” for Honeysuckle Rose, he created an anthem for musicians around the world who spend their lives trapped in bus-shaped coffins hurtling down the highway. Then there are the folks, musicians or not, for whom there is no other life, for whom the…
Arts Home on the Range – A former New Yorker’s guide to the texas adjustment
The electric snowman and other Merry Texmas tales “Oh, no, there ain’t no Sanity Claus.” – The Damned Phone calls to friends and family back East go something like this: In summer I whine about the heat and they wonder why I moved here. In winter they bitch about the cold and I try not…
Music Sound and the fury
A week on the scene Men still pause When VH1 aired its Bands Reunited series in 2003, the guilty pleasure quotient was undeniable. The chance to see a middle-aged Limahl make nice with Kajagoogoo or a follically impaired Flock of Seagulls struggle to remember their own moronically simplistic tunes was pure Martha Quinn heaven. Sound…
Arts Prints and housewares
“Simple forms, truth to materials, and the use of nature as the source of pattern” Stonemetal Press, 1420 S. Alamo, has an invitational prints exhibit featuring artists from the Netherlands and Mexico through January 22. The show consists of artists’ books, dynamic prints, and handmade paper. A special postcard exchange among artists has also been…
Screens They’ll always have Virginia
The New World forsakes creation myth for romantic tragedy Like George Washington tossing a silver dollar across the Potomac River or William Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword, Pocahontas leaping in to save the life of John Smith became an enduring American legend. Its only historical source is brief and dubious,…
Screens Love ’em and leave ’em
Heath Ledger returns to his pretty-boy roots as the infamous lothario If you’re looking to Hollywood to provide you a few laughs over the holidays, maybe to help you get over all that time you’ll be spending with the family, don’t count on perennial funny ladies Jennifer Aniston or Sarah Jessica Parker to be there…
Screens Dastardly deeds Down Under
Wolf Creek goes beyond voyeurism in a hands-on tale of sadism Uncanny things sometimes occur in films from Down Under. Based on an actual incident, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock dramatizes the enigmatic disappearance of several schoolgirls during an excursion to a wilderness park. In Fred Schepisi’s A Cry in the Dark, which also…
Screens Armchair Cinephile
Reel reads Amid the season’s best-ofs and sum-ups, the realm of film books gets short shrift. So in this last week of 2005, we offer an incomplete look at what bookstores offered the film buff in the last year or so. The genre’s bread and butter, one assumes, is the movie guide—the listings meant to…
News Dubious honor
The P.U.-litzer Prizes 2005 More than a dozen years ago, I joined with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, to establish the P.U.-litzer Prizes. Since then, the annual awards have given recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year. It is regrettable that only a few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer.…
Screens That’s a wrap
The low-down on this week’s premieres Director Ang Lee (Hulk) takes audiences to the heartland of Wyoming in the early ’60s in Brokeback Mountain, a film that is already on many critics’ Top Ten lists, including mine. When ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are employed by…
News Do the right thing
Council has a second chance to oppose the Patriot Act In August 2004, City Council squandered an opportunity to take a stand on one of the most vital constitutional issues of this century: the Patriot Act. Passed by Congress in October 2001, the euphemistically titled law expanded the federal government’s surveillance, spying, and search powers…
Food & Drink Exploding chickens
Step aside duck, Piatti’s pollo is dynamite It appears I’m on a chicken kick. After shunning it for years in favor of flossier duck or lamb dishes, I have re-embraced the fowl with fervor, and nowhere has the encounter been more explosive than at Piatti with the Pollo ala Mattone. Half of a partially boned…
