Discovery Hearts! (Happy Valentine’s Day!)
The cutest Valentine email I got today included this bit from discoverymagazine.com! Sharing the love with our loyal fans. xoxo, Tech Tease
‘Girls with Cameras’ opens Feb 15 at Gevers Street Art Studio
With the On & Off Fredericksburg Road Studio Tour opening Friday, this is a big week for annual art shows in the neighborhoods. Here is another exhibit to check out, opening Tuesday, Feb 15. Girls with Cameras puts the spotlight on the younger set—young women ages 9-14—whose photographs will be on view at Gevers Street…
Texas Uncommon beer on tap at Freetail Brewing Co.
There’s no doubt that Anchor Brewing Co. helped jump start the craft beer movement to come when when it revived (and name trademarked) an old California style of beer called steam beer, but the brew known more generically as California Common is finding its way into more Texas breweries. Freetail Brewing Co. in San Antonio just tapped…
“A Fresh One” by D. Ellis Phelps
Introduction This week’s flash fiction “A Fresh One” by D. Ellis Phelps explores the possibility of redemption and the rekindling of emotional attachments. Jake finds herself willing (again?) to let the certainty of “that first, long deep drag promising satisfaction guaranteed, every time” give way to another kind of first (again?) much more uncertain but…
Valentine’s Day in Bexar County divorce court (Part 1)
When this letter arrived at my friend’s house (click image for an expanded view), there were a lot of high fives between roommates and a sincere joy at the irony of it’s timing. Yes, her divorce was set for it’s final draft on Valentine’s Day. How perfect? How positively charming! I believe everyone should get…
Grand Illusion
No one appreciates a classically trained magician anymore. With contemporary tricksters like Criss Angel freaking your mind, it’s not enough these days to make a canary vanish from its birdcage or pull a silver dollar out from behind someone’s ear to grab an audience’s attention. In the French-British animated film The Illusionist (L’illusionniste), director Sylvain…
Chang’s new book a nod to anyone tortured by their own aspirations
The ladies of Lit-URL are taking a break this week, and have enlisted the help of the Current’s contributing writer Adam Coronado for a short and sweet book review. Coronado reviews Lan Samantha Chang’s novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). I write about Lan Samantha Chang’s newest novel All Is…
‘Beyond Scared Straight’ — troubled youth glimpse bleak future
Take a peek at this video, and then take a moment to think about it. It’s a clip from one of A&E’s new – and very insightful – reality shows, “Beyond Scared Straight.” In watching the show, I came to know the stories of a handful of teenage girls and why they were chosen to visit an…
Also seen: OH, THE HUMANITY in Houston
Longtime readers of the Current know that I’m often baffled by the programming choices for theater in San Antonio: it’s as if the city’s artistic directors go out of their way to ignore America’s most talked-about playwrights. (I mean, honestly, how many more revivals of Steel Magnolias can any city require? or even survive?) And…
Teen Mom 2 update, brought to you by Us Weekly
A few weeks ago, I forced myself to watch one ?episode of Teen Mom 2, and I hated it! The one story I did find compelling was that of Leah and Corey, two dim kids sacked with twins at the tender ages of 16 and 17, respectively. I was happy to see in the tabloids…
Trinity University’s KRTU brings all shades of jazz to San Antonio
“I don’t have a definition of jazz… You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.” — Thelonious Monk From the dulcet tones of Sade to the swinging sounds of Benny Goodman’s licorice stick; from Be Bop to Dixieland; from Brubeck to Spyra Grya … all that is jazz music is on the air…
Cut Copy: Zonoscope
Cut Copy: Zonoscope Label: Modular Recordings Release Date: 2011-02-09 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording On Zonoscope, this Australian dance-rock band takes a small step away from the dance floor. Album opener “Need You Now” starts out with a pulsing synth beat, undercut by handclaps and shimmery curtains of tinkling keys, broadcasting itself as a dance-floor number…
Chisme: Storytellers
Chisme: Storytellers Label: Acquired Taste Preferred Records Release Date: 2011-02-09 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Storytellers, the debut album from Saytown rap duo Chisme (“gossip” in Spanish), melds the fidelity of Madlib, the antics of MF Doom, and the rap styles of the Definitive Jux crew into a fantastic piece of local hip-hop. Producer Progeny allows…
DJ Afro: Free
DJ Afro: Free Release Date: 2011-02-09 Genre: Recording Free, the debut album from Venezuela’s DJ Afro (José Luis Pardo), is a grim reminder of how much electronica flirts with digital Cheez Whiz. On Free, DJ Afro encounters the same problem. It’s not that he’s not a force on the console. The production is Timbaland-sleek and…
Alamar
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 Writer and director Pedro González-Rubio’s 2009 film Alamar (To the Sea) tells the story of five-year-old Natan, who, before moving to Rome to live with his mother Roberta, gets a crash course in his father Jorge’s Mayan lineage and adventurous way of life. Against an idyllic backdrop, Natan learns how…
Garage of Goods
Release Date: 2011-02-09 Banking on the success of its November debut, Garage of Goods is back to offer more “fabulous finds for the frugal” from 40 local retailers, artisans, and independent vendors. While you browse for furniture, artwork, jewelry, plants, flowers, textiles, and new and vintage apparel, all at discounted prices, reps from the San…
Valentine’s Day Serenata with Mariachi Campanas de America
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 Since it falls on Monday, expect to see a lot of cooing and canoodling lovebirds celebrating Valentine’s Day early this year. Among the date nights with sweet SA flavor is Mariachi Campanas de America’s Valentine’s Day Serenata at Our Lady of the Lake, an annual favorite that frequently sells out.…
The Cure
Release Date: 2011-02-09 In writing the contemporary “rock fable” The Cure, self-described “schizophrenic songwriter” Mark Weiser found inspiration in the New York City nightclubs that employed him as a teenager. Evidently, Weiser met some bloodthirsty nightcrawlers while working at the Tunnel, the Limelight, and Webster Hall, because The Cure is all about the last surviving…
Vanity Theft, Hunter Valentine, Heather Go Psycho
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 “We have vaginas, but we’re not pussies,” says Vanity Theft’s bassist Lalaine Paras, once a child star in Disney’s Lizzie McGuire (she was Hilary Duff’s best friend). The Ohio riot-grrrl revivalists (Paras, guitarist Brittany Hill, keyboardist/vocalist Alicia Grodecki, and drummer Elyse Driskill) have just released their second full-fledged album, Get…
Art opening: Works on Paper
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 “Works on Paper” features six of the Texas-focused David Shelton Gallery’s artists as a companion to “Texas Draws,” opening this month at McNay Art Museum. The exhibit opening Saturday presents drawings in graphite and ink, but works in collage and cut and sewn paper will also be included. Sara Frantz…
Texans Head to Foot
Release Date: 2011-02-09 For Texans Head to Foot, the Institute of Texan Cultures reinterprets Footprints and Imprints, an exhibit readers might remember seeing in the museum’s entrance between 2002 and 2009. The display of hats, shoes, boots, and accessories provides “three-dimensional character sketches” of such famous Texans as Buddy Holly, Selena, Dan Rather, Kinky Friedman,…
MAQUILAPOLIS (city of factories)
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 While focusing on Tijuana’s multinationally owned factories, their futures, and the ways in which they operate, Vicky Funari’s and Sergio De La Torre’s Sundance Institute-supported documentary MAQUILAPOLIS (city of factories) presents a personalized account of globalization “through the eyes of the women who live on its leading edge.” In the…
Gallista Plays Songs of Love
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2011-02-09 Romance scents the air this Second Saturday — the South Flores Arts District’s alternative to First Friday — when Gallista Plays Songs of Love opens at Joe Lopez’s eccentric art gallery. Inspired by popular love songs, visual artists Dennis Ochoa, John Valles, Martha Stroud, Imelda Robles, Adrian Alvarez, Ashley Sanchez,…
The 10th annual Jewish Film Festival is all about healing and not forgetting
How can you organize a Jewish-themed film festival without movies directly or indirectly related to the Holocaust? And how much Holocaust is too much Holocaust? Is there such a thing? Those are some of the questions dealt with by the selection committee of the Jewish Film Festival, which runs February 12-16 at the Bijou. Whatever…
The chosen ones
Anita (2009, Argentina, 104 min.) Dir. Marcos Carnevale The life of Anita, a teenager with Down Syndrome (a superb Alejandra Manzo), is turned upside down when a van bomb destroys the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA). The movie is based on the July 18, 1994 event that killed 85 people…
Pranking perspective: Fernandez’ larger paintings approach Magritte’s doorstep
Ana Fernandez makes her local debut at Joan Grona Gallery this month with large oil paintings in which cars and houses sit in a neighborhood that promises the familiarity of home but delivers a rather uncanny air drifting through the trees. If you often happen to live in paintings, the wind shouldn’t blow too harshly.…
Review: Killing Kasztner
Unknown to most, even among most Jews, Rudolph Kasztner was “the Jewish Schindler.” In 1944 he negotiated directly with senior SS officer Adolf Eichmann for the release of 1,685 Hungarian Jews in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds. After the war, he moved to Israel and became an important member of the Ministry of Trade…
All you need is love
It didn’t take long for Natalie Portman to sink that great Black Swan buzz. In fact, all it took was No Strings Attached, a romantic comedy co-starring Ashton Kutcher about a friends-with-benefits couple who get serious. Why so cynical? Because romantic comedies kinda blow. More often than not, they’re made by greedy studios cashing in…
Oscar Shorts coming to San Antonio’s Santikos Bijou
Lewis Howlett’s superb Catholic guilt-ridden performance (especially the movie’s devastating last close-up) in The Confession, one of the nominees for Best Live Action Short at this year’s Academy Awards, is worth the ticket price alone. But there’s a lot more to watch. These 15 films, divided in the Live Action, Animated Action, and Documentary categories,…
Ask a Mexican!
Dear Readers: Although many of you have loved and/or loathed my columna for years, the Mexican still finds new readers every week in the unlikeliest of spots (Hola, Chattanooga! See you in August, inshallah!). As a result, I sometimes receive questions about the methodology of the column, questions all of us know the respuestas to…
Spuriosity: Why the Rookie Challenge is where NBA action is
The regular NBA season is a 29-city, 82-game marathon beginning in late October and ending mid-April. While regular season results dictate post-season positioning, it’s ultimately a medal-less marathon. The real grind happens in the playoffs — 16 teams competing in four rounds, each one a race to four wins in seven shots. During the 2006-2007…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Before I loved you, nothing was my own,” wrote Pablo Neruda to his lover in one of his sonnets. “It all belonged to someone else — to no one.” Have you ever experienced a sense of being dispossessed like that, Aries? A sense of there being nowhere and nothing in the…
Urbane tacos
Before I entered Urban Taco, I thought it was another Chipotle- or Freebirds-style establishment, fast Mexican food ordered at a counter. I made an assumption based on the name, which brings to mind an upscale Taco Bell. I admit, I made an assumption, and when I assume I make an ass out of myself. It’s…
‘Zine library’ at Unit B Gallery
A few blocks past the Blue Star Arts complex, far enough into the King William residential neighborhood to convince the first-time visitor that she is surely lost, lies Unit B (Gallery), tacked onto a house on Stieren Street. A big “B” marks the entry, which leads into two small rooms. Named for their original uses…
Brain food: IAMA Coffeehouse
Situated in a really sweet corner location on Broadway next to Timbo’s (just around the corner from the ever-expanding Pearl Brewery complex) is IAMA Coffee House. First, what is IAMA? Literally, it stands for International Academy of Music and the Arts. It’s basically a small music school, where patrons can pay for music lessons from…
San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo offers look at ‘classical’ performance
On November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, Calif., the performance artist Chris Burden enacted one of his most remembered pieces, Shoot, in which he had himself shot in the left arm by an assistant from a distance of 15 feet. Two years later, outside a small town north of Colorado Springs, Colo., an unsuccessful bull…
My bunny valentines
If Alice Cooper and Dita Von Teese ever pushed out a herd of love babies, they would most definitely be the Devil Bunnies. Part glam metal, part vulnerable vixens, and part swift kick in the balls, the four members of this horror-themed San Antonio burlesque troupe are named after a sassy Thrill Kill Kult song…
Along for the romp
The Vexler’s production of Unnecessary Farce isn’t exactly unnecessary, but it’s hard to argue that it’s anything like essential: the play is obviously constructed with an eye towards the needs of community and even high-school theaters, and is unlikely to catapult author Paul Slade Smith into the ranks of first-rate farceurs. The set-up seems promising…
Breakdown of the burlesque scene in San Antonio
Before the art of burlesque was ever linked to the modern striptease it served as a parody of traditional opera and theatre — with an important risqué twist. Though it has evolved over the years, most troupes maintain the form’s close ties to music and theatre while continuing to push the limits. Expect acts to…
Reality bites back: Jennifer Pozner delivers demanding case for deeper TV viewing
The cultural trainwreck that is reality TV began with the tough but thoughtful Real World hitting viewers with the hard issues of racism, sexism, and the rest back when MTV was still primarily showcasing music videos. But within just a few years VH1 was replaying a 1998 Real World clip of a man slapping a…
Exponential Records goes international, the Tejano Conjunto Festival wants your writings and art, and Limelight and the Ten Eleven celebrate
Have you ever heard a bad bossa nova? I haven’t. That’s what I realized listening to the first few seconds of “Evaporar” (“To evaporate”) by 19-year-old Brazilian Pazes (Lucas Febraro). The alternative bossa song (which you can download at exponential.bandcamp.com/album/the-southpaw-ep) is part of the mostly electronic The Southpaw EP, to be released on February 15…
San Antonio City Council distress, pregnant kids, Texas Enterprise Fund, and the cost of obesity to State businesses
Council distress It’s long been understood that low pay and term limits play a dual role in limiting the city’s ability to attract and retain qualified, truly independent candidates to our City Council. But a report released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts puts in perspective just how low our politicos’ wages really are.…
Recovery quest: Bands and artists unite to help bassist Matthew Shelton
“He was always so good about wearing his helmet,” said Michelle Jiménez Reyes, the mother of 20-year-old Matthew Shelton. But around 4:40 a.m. on New Year’s Day, Matthew, former bassist for Cut-rate Icon, had no helmet. According to the police report, Jiménez said, Matthew “lost control of his motorcycle and was thrown 80 to 100…
Bexarly legit: Bexar County Democrats stuck in whirlwind of controversy, bad blood
If there was a single warning shot presaging the unraveling of the Bexar County Democratic Party, it would have been the June 2009 letter penned by precinct chair D’mitri Kosub warning party leaders that a close look at the books “has revealed a breakdown of the party’s financial underpinnings.” Kosub, troubled by hundreds of “unexplained”…
Live & Local: Un Día Más at La Bikina (with video)
La Bikina is one of the best venues on the North St. Mary’s strip, but unless you dig the norteño stuff, chances are you’ve never been there. A shame, except for on this night — where if you stayed home, you were lucky. And I don’t mean the bands were horrible, but the inside of…
The new normal: Education cuts mean rapid rise in unemployment, NISD superintendent warns
Northside ISD Superintendent John Folks said he and other educators were shocked to hear Senate Education Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, speaking of impending public-ed budget cuts, when he said: “Recognize and be aware that this is the new normal.” The comment was made at an education hearing last week as legislators looked for ways to…
zine library at Unit B: installation art is tasty text
Scott Andrews sandrews@sacurrent.com A few blocks past the Blue Star Arts complex, far enough into the King William residential neighborhood to convince the first time visitor that she is surely lost lies Unit B (Gallery), tacked onto a house on Stieren Street. A big B marks the entry, which leads into two small rooms. Named…
Aphrodisiacs 101: eating for love this Valentine’s Day
Although Viagra is a recent savior to modern man’s penis, humanity has been looking for a lift for thousands of years. But with no Walgreen’s on every fucking corner, what the hell did they do? Eat. Food was their sustenance and their medicine. One of the most commonly known aphrodisiacs today, chocolate, is believed to…
