Arts Classical attitude
News and notes from San Antonio’s other music scene From a classical-music perspective, the holiday season means hundreds of years of beautiful carols, masses, motets, and the like. Unfortunately those options are drowned out by the ubiquitous, mind-numbing, canned music we are subjected to in the post office, grocery, gas station, and every retail store…
Arts You’re grounded
San Antonio outsider artist Kenneth Karcher (whose work is pictured above) returns with a one-man show December 10-January 6 at Salon Mijangos, 1906 S. Flores. If you miss the opening reception, 7-10 p.m. Saturday, December 10, the gallery is open by appointment, 271-5952. If a Karcher painting doesn’t seem the perfect gift for your loved…
Food & Drink All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene Afternoon tea party During the holidays, Petticoat Tails Tea Shop will celebrate the English tradition of afternoon tea with holiday and signature teas at The Fairmount, where the hotel’s salon has been transformed into a tearoom. This will be a “cream tea,” featuring the Fairmount’s signature…
Screens Follow the money
Syriana plots the convoluted connection between Big Oil and bad governments Early on in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, the son of Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon’s very-American energy consultant) is standing at the edge of a pool being prodded to jump in by an Arabian boy. When Woodman rises to intervene, his wife tells him, “No, let…
Screens He ain’t heavy
A pre-op transsexual finds a son only a mother could love Nothing gets an actor the kind of attention that transforming him or herself physically will, especially when that transformation involves uglification to the degree achieved by Charlize Theron in Monster. De Niro’s done it. So has Zellweger (twice) and, more recently, George Clooney in…
Food & Drink Holiday fake-out
How to get the big family meal without the hassle of making it yourself Ahhhh. It’s that time of year again. The weeks before Christmas and New Year’s are full of shopping, entertaining, and endless meals where friends and family gather, and the aromas of baking pie and ham fill a warm and decorated house.…
News Empty-handed
The City is shopping for land for A&M, but the Ledge hasn’t cut the check Over the past 11 years, Gary Haun has built a loyal customer base at his South Side auto-inspection station, which he operates out of a rented building at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Santa Rita. In 2005, the City…
Food & Drink Sin azúcar
El Sol, San Antonio’s only bakery for diabetics It’s easy to drive right by Southtown’s El Sol Bakery without noticing it. It’s located outside the frenzied First Friday zone, and the Romero family hasn’t tarted up the building with splashy graphics. But, once inside, Mauricio Romero will treat you to the verbal equivalent of flashing…
News Briefs
The poop on SARA’s watershed-protection plan Steve Lusk of the San Antonio River Authority recently announced that bacterial levels in the San Antonio River watershed have significantly decreased “to the point where we are close to meeting the state stream standards in our project area.” SARA last week conducted the first of three public meetings…
Food & Drink The bar tab
No water for whiskey The lobby of the St. Anthony Historic Hotel is fairly well abandoned by 10 o’clock at night. The Christmas tree lights twinkle and the chandelier sparkles, but the shoe-shine station is closed and the cold, white marble floor echoes with each step, and one has the sense that one ought not…
News Party lines
City rolls out eco-friendly fleet District 10 City Councilman Chip Haass last week proudly unveiled one of San Antonio’s new Toyota Prius hybrid sedans that will replace part of the City’s 500-vehicle fleet. Although the fleet currently includes 26 hybrids, 39 new gasoline-and-electric-powered Priuses were recently purchased through the City’s replacement program. The City plans…
Screens Armchair cinephile
We give, and we give … This December isn’t the most lavish on record for DVD junkies. Many of the big releases came early in the year, and most of the remaining gift-worthy stuff has been covered here already. Still, aspiring Santas do have some excellent options for the movie-lovers on their lists: The sound…
News Speed reads
Uresti to run for state senate State Representative Carlos Uresti wants to switch sides. No, not to the GOP, but to the other legislative chamber, the state senate. Uresti has served in the Texas House since 1997, and represents District 118. He plans to run for State Senate District 19, which includes 22 counties including…
Screens That’s a wrap and special screenings
Based on the novel by C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe follows the Pevensie children—Lucy (Georgie Henley), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Peter (William Moseley), and Susan (Anna Popplewell)—as they enter a magical world through a wardrobe in World War II stricken London. In Narnia, among an assortment of creatures,…
Feature A Pandora’s box
EPA’s proposed rule on pesticide testing on children is stirring an ethical controversy Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency recruited for a pesticide study 60 infants and toddlers whose low-income parents were bringing them to Florida public-health clinics and hospitals. The two-year study was observational—no infants were to be intentionally dosed with pesticides—so EPA could…
Music Immigrant song
The Greencards find a stateside home for their Aussie/Brit bluegrass Blame it on Austin. After a stretch backing fellow Aussie Kasey Chambers on her 2001 tour of the States, Kym Warner of the Greencards returned home to Sydney convinced that Texas’ Capital City was his own personal Oz (the storybook one, not his native country…
Arts Back in black
The little b!%*&k dress: friend to cash-strapped fashionistas everywhere The annual office holiday parties, cocktails with old friends visiting from out of town, client luncheons, open houses: Most of us have more social obligations between Thanksgiving and New Year’s than we do the rest of the year. You want to look classy, festive, and impressive…
Screens Safe for consumption
Hollywood’s Aeon Flux is warm, fuzzy, and ethical. Yawn. For a brief period in the mid ’90s, I was heavily involved with Aeon Flux, the animated MTV series created by Peter Chung, spending hours on the couch entranced by late-night, back-to-back episodes. The installments bled into one another with little introduction and no background. It…
Arts The long road down
Harvey Pekar picks up where American Splendor begins What we might have missed had Prozac been around back then … If you’re a fan of the perennial comic or the award-winning film American Splendor, then you know Harvey Pekar. Now Pekar’s small legion of fans has reason to rejoice: The Quitter, the story of Harvey…
Music Killer B-girls
Martha Cooper rekindles her hip-hop obsession with a look at the culture’s female presence No one has done a better job of visually documenting the roots of hip-hop than Martha Cooper. The acclaimed photographer behind the seminal tome Subway Art (and the more recent Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984) was a dogged follower of the…
Arts Sour candy
Painful memories are purged through writing and comida For most people, the pink Mexican candy known as the peanut patty is an old-time favorite that can be found at any corner store or taco shop in San Antonio. For Dolores Sanchez (her name has been changed to protect her identity), the sight of the simple…
Music CD Spotlight
Return trip Most people don’t get the Darkness. Considering the unitards they like to prance around in, it’s easy to understand why. “Joke band,” some call them. On the other hand, those who do claim to “get them” usually don’t have a clue either. Yes, the Darkness are post-modern arena-rock gods—they get that much right.…
Arts Big art for small people
Howard preschool gets a real art gallery “Their excitement is contagious,” says Wilma Sosa, principal of Howard Early Education Center in Alamo Heights. The light, happy voices of children sail through the hallways as they sing the letters of new words. At Howard, an autonomous campus for kindergarten, pre-K, and other early-development programs, days are…
Music Current Choice
Doll parts In case you’ve ever wondered how pop-culture would have been altered if Ava Gardner or Lana Turner had learned to play the stand-up bass, Devil Doll (aka Colleen Duffy) is on a mission to provide the answer. Equal parts sultry torch singer and rockabilly hellraiser, she’s a classic product of her adopted Los…
Arts Gotcha!
Richie Budd is a gas. If you left the house at all last summer, you probably saw his ecto-plastic sculptures, globs that feed on consumerist popular culture. Permeating exhibitions in and around Blue Star during our hottest months, their gluttonous masses let off bursts of white smoke like a pressure-relieving belch after a heavy meal,…
Music Sound and the fury
A week on the scene Yule gatherings It’s beginning to look a lot like Ken Slavin around these parts. San Antonio’s favorite jazz crooner will be tunefully roasting some holiday chestnuts on an open fire when he and his band make their annual visit to KTSA-AM 550 on Tuesday, December 13, at 7 p.m. for…
