Incendio
Release Date: 2007-07-25 LA-based guitar trio Incendio, currently on a Southwestern run promoting their latest release, Seduction, hits San Antonio this weekend. Featuring bassist Liza Carbe and guitarists JP Durand and Jim Stubblefield, the group melds Spanish classical-guitar licks with modern rhythms and has created some buzz on the jazz and jam-band scenes. The musicians’…
Merging Modes
Release Date: 2007-07-25 In the only dance offering on this year’s CAM circuit, choreographers from the Modern Dancers Co-Lab team up with 3-D animators, flash videographers, and digital composers for a night of collaborative performances called Merging Modes. In one piece, live-feed video brings the outdoors in as choreographer Christy Walsh “gets wired” in her…
The Adolescents, Second to None, The Perturbed, One Last Shot, & Prevail Within
Release Date: 2007-07-25 One of Southern Cali’s beloved hardcore punk bands, the Adolescents were originally a supergroup made up of early members of Agent Orange and Social Distortion, highly regarded as one of the leading bands of the 1980s punk revival. Their 1981 self-titled debut release is considered an influential punk-rock album, their raging energy…
Snap judgments about this week’s premieres
Well, Yahoo! Movies says I Know Who Killed Me is a wide release this week. Mentiroso! I agree. It’s not like I’ve gotten any PR about it. But all the same, the people need know, just in case. Plus — and I must be having an extraordinarily good day in the karma department — I…
Album reviews
Lowe Rise At My Age Nick Lowe (Yep Roc) Among many other things, Nick Lowe is a masterful thief. You’re reminded of this only a few seconds into Lowe’s new album, At My Age, when he pickpockets the melody from Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” for “A Better Man.” Lowe has a long history…
Killers, mutants, enfants
The Host (Magnolia): This deeply odd Korean import updates the Asian-monster-movie with Jaws-style peril, an unpredictable sense of humor, and a none-too-timid critique of lumbering American imperialism. It’s a blast, and its arrival on high- and standard-def DVD ensures that fans can see every drop of saliva dripping from the tentacled mutant’s maw. Zodiac (Paramount):…
Olmos like being there
San Antonio artist and Sala Diaz founder Alejandro Diaz has been in New York for going on a decade now, occasionally getting the media exposure his gently reproachful work deserves — like that time his “I ™ Cuba” accessories for the Eighth Havana Biennial ended up all over the island and in the Washington Post.…
Of saints and ‘sissies’
Sometime between high-school graduation and my sophomore year of college I got an unforeseen call from an old friend. We had attended school — a Baptist school — together since the 7th grade. During our senior year, he started keeping me at arms-length. Like many of my classmates, he made fun of me. When he…
The pro-am challenge
Volume One of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County series, Tales from the Farm (Top Shelf), centers on a lonely boy who, orphaned and sent to live on his uncle’s farm, takes to wearing a cape and mask wherever he goes. Grief and rural isolation force him to nurture his imaginative side, to the point that readers…
I grow up at solo serve
“Do you know of one your pants legs is lighter in color than the other one?” It was the 1970s and one of the most popular girls at McCollum High School had me cornered. I was too horrified to look down and confirm her chilling observación. She was talking about the polyester bell bottoms I…
Sinaloa’s plentiful poppy fields spawned some of Mexico’s most brutal kingpins.
Dear Readers: You love us, you really love us! Mere moments after publishing my July 12 column (in which Know Nothings had their say on the failed Senate amnesty bill), ustedes bombarded the Mexican with letters expressing your disgust toward those pendejos. Space prohibits the printing of all, so let’s give the only word not…
“Dream” (2002) 5:00
Curated by Leslie Raymond Originally created as a large projection component to an installation, “Dream” presents us with an unusual underwater landscape in which a diver swims through what appears to be a vacant sunken household. “Dream” (2002) 5:00 Anne Wallace
In memory of Linda Pace: rest in peace
With love, Scotch! and Tatum
Jalisco is my business
My story begins at Panchito’s Mexican restaurant over dinner with a large group of friends. A man I’ll call Dr. Moreau, a successful local physician, challenged me to investigate what he called the “big lie” on the San Antonio Mexican food scene: the illegitimacy of Jalisco-style restaurants. These restaurants are a fraud, he claimed. There…
Uresti in pieces
Oh, how the mighty have overspent. Every campaign-finance report tells a tale, and Senator Carlos Uresti’s six-month report spins a yarn of debt and redemption. Things were very different for Uresti a year ago. For one, he was a state representative. For two, Senator Frank Madla was alive, and Uresti had just beaten him in…
Global Warming hates South Texas
At first it was just one dry year. The next offered no relief. Then thereal punishment set in. Bob Harriss’s father fought the 1950s drought head-on as the manager of a farm and ranch outfit on the borderlands of Cameron County in deep South Texas. Harriss recalls the men stalking pockmarked river beds with machetes,…
Bloggers: picking candidates so you don’t have to
From the Editor I’m from Minnesota, but thanks to a childhood earful of NPR, I don’t drag the letter “O” across my tongue like a cheap pair of nylons snagging up a stubbly leg, or end statements with the open-ended “Eh?” So I usually prattle unnoticed under the brushy twangs and baroque rrrrrrs of my…
Naked Chardonnay
Riesling boosters may beg to differ, but by most accounts chardonnay is the top grape in the white-wine universe. According to grape goddess Jancis Robinson, its homeland may be Burgundy, but “it is quite happy to set down roots in a wide range of much warmer (and some cooler) climates all over the world.” Not…
Campaign Fun-ance
Mid-year campaign-finance reports for elected officials (and aspirants) were due on July 15, and thanks to convenience-minded engineers in our governments’ IT departments, tens and tens of thousands of pages of political goodness are available online for you to peruse: Federal: Fec.gov/disclosure.shtml State/County: Ethics.state.tx.us/php/cesearch.html City: Epay.sanantonio.gov/campfin/search.aspx You can scroll through the PDFs to…
Kid Icarus
As the story goes in the new sci-fi movie Sunshine, our sun will begin to die 50 years from now. Earth will plunge into an unprecedented ice age and our only hope will lie with eight astronauts aboard a spaceship called the Icarus II. Armed with a nuclear device that will theoretically “jumpstart” our star,…
Spoiler alert!
The rains keep falling, sheets upon sheets, and puddles and flooding are piling up like mattresses, and the Queque itself spent the weekend alternately in bed and easy chair, dreaming of faraway destinations like …. Diagon Alley … Godric’s Hollow … the Forbidden Forest … Bill Miller Bar-B-Q on the South, East, and West sides.…
At the drive-in
As the sun sets on Sutherland Springs, Bobby Peters sits outside his concession stand, sipping an ice-cold drink, looking out upon the field before him. Cars, loaded with occupants young and old, pack the horse-pasture-turned-drive-in-theater behind his family-operated steakhouse. Peters has owned the OK Corral Steakhouse for 12 years, but just added the theater a…
AT&T: your world. Censored.
In mid-June, the Current reported on AT&T’s announcement that in cooperation with several major players in the media world, they would create a new technology to combat the piracy of copyrighted materials through their networks. `See The Mashup, June 20-26.` Before this announcement from Big Brother Telecom, threats of this kind were the domain of…
Laos and back again
Rick Blaine’s reason for coming to arid Casablanca (“for the waters”) makes as much sense as Dieter Dengler’s explanation for ending up in southeast Asia shackled and tortured. “I only wanted to fly,” he tells an interrogator. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Werner Herzog accompanies the former Navy pilot back to the Laos-Vietnam border…
Atlas shrugs
Even great bands have to start somewhere: Slogging crate amps and drum kits from one skeezy venue to another, logging hours in a smelly van, day after day; nights spent in front of a still-empty house, shortly after the doors open or in someone’s basement playing before their five friends. Every once in a while…
Kiss the chef
A few weeks back, I tagged along to a smallish engagement party for one of my wife’s friends, and happened to strike up a conversation about contemporary German cinema with a young woman and her husband. Now, naturally, I know next-to-nothing about German cinema, contemporary or otherwise — but what a classy opener, hey? I…
Chainsaw Buzz
About three hours into the Sunday, July 22, benefit show at Atomix for recently hospitalized music-scene institution Tony Chainsaw, Chainsaw entered the club and was quickly greeted by well-wishers. Looking remarkably healthy for a man with multiple facial fractures from a beating he’d suffered less than two weeks earlier, Chainsaw, 47, had his left eye…
