Culture The face in the mirror is mestizo
A two-day roundtable takes a big eraser to identity lines “I’m looking for the mestizo eye, the mestizo subjunctive, the mestizo soul,” says author John Phillip Santos as we wander through Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin-American Portraiture at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He pauses before “Retrato de un Matrimonio,” by 19th-century painter Hermenegildo…
Music Panic! button
Vegas band signs a record deal and then scrambles to find its sound Ryan Ross, guitarist for Panic! At the Disco, wakes up lost more often than not these days. Today, he’s in England, that much is for certain. “I just woke up, so … yeah, I don’t know,” he admits, still groggy. “I’m somewhere.”…
Arts Artist Foundation on track
OK, no tracks, but the Trolley Art Tour will raise funds for individuals In the heated discussions about arts funding, education, and economic development in San Antonio, artists (who create the art in question) frequently are left out of the equation. Art funds typically support organizations, not individual artists. In a town filled with non-profits…
Music All ears
Too smart for this world If you’ve noticed an unusually content look on the faces of certain sad, shy hipsters this week, it could be due to The Life Pursuit (Matador), the latest long-player by Scottish cultsters Belle and Sebastian. You might notice a touch of relief on those pale faces as well, since despite…
Arts Black, white, and gray all over
Arnoud Holleman turns portraiture into a riddle In order to create a portrait, Arnoud Holleman often begins with a photograph and then layers film, sound, text, and drawing until he believes he has achieved a significant image. The Dutch artist, whose solo exhibition opened recently in Artpace’s Hudson (Show)Room, is known for co-editing Re-Magazine, a…
Music CD Spotlight
Mr. Run Amok Barely a minute into From A Compound Eye, Bob Pollard’s first major solo effort since the dissolution of Guided By Voices, he announces: “I never, ever met a day I didn’t like.” Longtime followers of His Bobness would have to conclude that he’s similarly never met a Pollard composition he didn’t like.…
Arts Home on the Range
A former New Yorker’s guide to the texas adjustment Everyone knows that the San Antonio calendar has 14 months, not 12, if you count Rodeo and Fiesta. Since moving here, I’ve been urged by many to partake of these cultural touchstones, yet I don’t seem to know anyone who actually does. Rodeo is for kids.…
Music Current Choice
Dollars and sense The underground hip-hop landscape traditionally includes an assortment of odd characters who travel in packs. The Shape Shifters, perhaps the most eccentric of such flocks, hail from Los Angeles and have been making challenging music for almost a decade. Formed in the early ’90s around the graffiti collective CBS, the Shape Shifters…
Arts Dancers and New-Age Cavemen
The world-renowned Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble joins the Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry, for an exciting close to Black History Month. The performance will take place in the Carver’s Jo Long Theatre at 8 p.m. Saturday, February 25. The ensemble fuses African and modern dances, and can be enjoyed by young and…
Music Sound and the Fury
A week on the scene South by south waste The tentative band schedule for South By Southwest is in (subject to change, as they say) and San Antonio is glaringly underrepresented, as per usual. The local artists picked for showcases — turntable iconoclast DJ Jester the Filipino Fist, electro-popsters Hyperbubble, and masked punks Skullening —…
Arts Word on the street
News and notes from the San Antonio Literary scene Lee Merrill Byrd and Bobby Byrd, heads of El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press’ publishing family, were in town last month for the American Library Association conference, and among the good news they had to share was that both Byrds have new books on the way. Riley’s…
Media Never say never
Manderlay offers you the chance to lose friends but influence people Let’s just get this sad but very true fact out of the way: You will probably never see Manderlay. You also probably never saw its predecessor Dogville . If you actually do (or did), it will (or likely did) happen one of two ways.…
Media iWant
A DNA self-portrait So what do you get for the guy who iWants everything? Try this: 1) exhume his great-grandmother 2) pluck a hair from her head 3) extract the appropriate DNA and run it through computer filtering, and 4) hang the result over the bidet. As Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of dna11 points out, only…
Media That’s a wrap & Special screenings
The low-down on this week’s premieres San Antonian and Academy Award-winner Tommy Lee Jones returns to the director’s chair for his first feature film, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which earned the Best Actor and Best Screenplay awards at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for Jones and writer Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams). In Estrada,…
Food & Drink All you can eat
Current Online news politics culture News and notes from the San Antonio food scene What’s this we hear about chef Mark Bliss returning to Silo Restaurant? Does it signify a revamping of the bar? A new menu? Apparently, it’s none of our beeswax. “I’m in the preliminary process of looking for a second location `for…
News It’s only words
SA’s Hurricane Katrina evacuees travel to Washington to find answers Nearly six months after Hurricane Katrina demolished most of New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, the area is still covered in detritus, trash, and toxic waste. Only now, after a Congressional investigation and a damning 520-page report — issued despite the Bush administration’s…
Media The light, sans tunnel
A documentary finds hope in the shared sentiments of Palestinians and Israelis “You can’t imagine my life,” says 83-year-old Palestinian refugee Jamal Khalil via translator, in James Marks’ new two-volume documentary The Shape of the Future. “Life today is miserable.” Israel, Palestine, and their shared enmity have been fixtures in the news, the media, and…
News The blame game
Elena Guajardo didn’t kill George Dickerson One Friday afternoon about six years ago, my Aunt Debra was fired from her job at a nursing home. That evening, she went into her bedroom, lay in her bed, opened the Bible to the 23rd Psalm, and shot herself in the side with a 9mm. We found her…
Media Game theory
Channeling Nancy Drew As sales of game software and hardware continue to outstrip Hollywood box-office receipts, non-traditional gamers are hunting around for a good place to get their feet wet. Unfortunately, game stores and gaming magazines can be overwhelming to newcomers. When confronted with blood-drenched new releases such as State of Emergency II, Dead or…
News The defender
President Bush, argues Robert Kennedy Jr., will go down as the worst environmental president in the nation’s history When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was born he hit the jackpot: brains, looks, fame, opportunity, and affluence were his to inherit. With what he’s been handed, he’s etched out his own role in the Kennedy tribe as…
Food & Drink Green acres
She adores a penthouse view, but chicken farmin’ is the life for him I had to sit down before I keeled over. My husband had just excitedly announced his intention to raise free-range chickens — CHICKENS! — to produce free-range, hand-gathered, organic eggs. For a few moments, I was truly speechless. When I managed to…
News Party lines
Citizens join UDC fight District 9 Councilman Kevin Wolff waxed apoplectic last week as City Council tightened rules concerning granting grandfather clauses to developers. “I’m tired of how much we deride developers in this city,” Wolff said. “It’s disengenuous to take shots at developers. If they weren’t here, none of us would be here.” Despite…
Food & Drink Bringing up baby
The obsessive joy of watching chickens come of age One spring, a friend purchased a $2 carton of fertilized eggs at the farmers’ market and, on a whim, stuck them under a borrowed incubator. Twenty-one days later, the resulting clutch threatened to overwhelm her modest backyard coop, and so she farmed out the chicks to…
News Speed reads
A date for healing Travis Park United Methodist Church, 230 E. Travis, will hold a healing service Sunday, March 5, at 7 p.m., “in an attempt to repair the harm the Christian church has caused gays and lesbians and their families,” according to a prepared statement from the church. Travis Park noted that last July…
Food & Drink Everything but the burger
Cool Café’s eclectic menu emphasizes Persian and Mediterranean foods “Just about everything but burgers,” quipped our live-wire waiter as we perused the menu at Cool Café. With hordes of slacker students huddled around hookahs at the outdoor tables, we had easily discerned one element of the menu’s offerings, but here we were confronted with omelets…
Feature Semi tough
Emilio Ledezma and the SA Aztecs refuse to give up on a dream A couple of years ago, the San Antonio Aztecs traveled to Alvin for a semi-pro football game. The driver of one of the team’s vans lost his way en route to the stadium, and at game time the Aztecs had only 10…
