Moody’s taking dim view of nuclear option
By Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com This small alert from Moody’s Investor Service has been making the rounds these past two weeks. So we’d be remiss if we didn’t throw it out there with schmear o’ analysis. The “special comment” issued last month is pretty plain. Moody’s analysts found that the construction of nuclear-power plants represents a…
Calling all female filmmakers
The 5th Annual CineMujer International Film Festival (that banner up there is from last year), hosted by the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, is seeking your submissions until August 7. Read the press release below for requirements. No dudes allowed: From Friday, September 4, 2009 to Sunday, September 6, 2009 the Esperanza Peace & Justice…
Buttercup CD release party
It’s 6 pm on a Friday, and happy hour is calling loudly, but we’d be missing out on all kinds of sarcastic bellyaching if we didn’t mention Buttercup’s CD release show happening Saturday. Check out the poster above for info (admission is $10), and read my review of the new album, scheduled to run in…
With CPS playing defense, should a misleading guard become news?
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com What happened to our new era of transparent government? Obama’s been in office months now and I still can’t see through the polyester-nylon weave of local burrocrats and into to their rolls of loveliness and anti-fungal-scented briefs. Obama’s Sudsy Summit is in the rearview, yet open dialogue is still in danger. What…
Live & Local preview: Jeannette & Richard
We’re all geared up to hear some banjo this week with folksy bluegrassers Jeannette & Richard, scheduled to play tonight (Friday) at Limelight. Also on the bill are Austin’s One Hundred Flowers and locals Cartographers, who’ll be celebrating the release of their new CD. Admission is $5. Check out Jeannette & Richard in the video…
The Chosen Juan
Juan Garcia’s defeat last November in his quest for a second term as state rep was stunning, but not exactly a surprise. The Corpus Christi-based Garcia had achieved the near-impossible in 2006 by taking the seat away from an incumbent Republican in an overwhelmingly GOP district, but last year’s election proved that his glittering resume…
When will Justice flatten probation mobsters?
By Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com While our DA is investigating complaints that pee-testing contractor Treatment Associates had a clean-pee-for-hire program working for some probation officers, we’re looking forward to larger federal case. Guess that will be in the courts in October â?? unless the U.S. Department of Justice cares to step in, in the meantime. Either…
elicitthought.org sends us a cabinet door
You’re looking at what I guess you’d call a “press release” from the Elicit Thought Project. This thing weighs like 10 pounds. On the left is what I’m assuming is the front (pictured with a big ass rubber-band ball to show its magnitude) and on the right is the back (pictured with my business card…
Travels with Frenchie
Part XI: Lost in the bayou
James Martin & Medianoche
James Martin & Medianoche Composer: James Martin & Medianoche Conductor: James Martin & Medianoche Label: Self released Release Date: 2009-07-29 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording The self-titled debut from James Martin (no relation to the writer) & Medianoche is finely crafted wallpaper, but it’s wallpaper nonetheless, content to hang unobtrusively in a room, engaging only those…
Post-Nothing
Post-Nothing Composer: Japandroids Conductor: Japandroids Label: Polyvinyl Release Date: 2009-07-29 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Canadian duo Japandroids* are concerned with only two things: guitars and girls (and not necessarily in that order). Their much-hyped full-length debut, Post-Nothing, is a brief, blistering set of low-fi garage that transcends its carport origins by replacing cock-rock swagger with…
Change Remains
Change Remains Composer: Starlight Mints Conductor: Starlight Mints Label: Barsuk Release Date: 2009-07-29 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Let’s be honest: Any idiot can write Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” What takes real creativity is a hooky pop song that stays fresh after 20 listens. The Starlight Mints are a complex pop group capable of that: The…
VH1 Storytellers
VH1 Storytellers Composer: David Bowie Conductor: David Bowie Label: Virgin Release Date: 2009-07-29 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Bowie introduces the show, “I wish I had more time. Oh, the things I could tell you. … You don’t know the half of it!” It’s fair warning, but Storytellers feels light and less than fully satisfying after…
The fern bar lives!
Release Date: 2009-07-29 A hot tip from a Bar Tab enthusiast alerted us to a legendary haunt “just like the Regal Beagle,” the much celebrated fern bar from ’70s sitcom Three’s Company. But Regal Beagle comparisons get thrown around a bit too casually when old-man bars are the topic. Bar Tab has been on the…
Critic’s Diss
Critic’s Pick The Ugly Truth Director: Robert Luketic Screenwriter: Robert Luketic Cast: Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler, Eric Winter, John Michael Higgins, Nick Searcy Release Date: 2009-07-29 Rated: R Genre: Film Our Rating: 1.50 There are certain things you probably shouldn’t title your movie, like Lookin’ to Get Out or Drag Me to Hell for example,…
San Antonio and Houston Throwdown
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2009-07-29 In H-Town’s corner, we’ve got Nibiru, whose “Visions of a Terminal Reality” injects the prototypical grindcore death rattle with a nearly imperceptible bit of sci-fi mysticism; Battle Rifle, which gets a few bonus points for its Houston-rap-inspired song titles such as “No Love for Dem Triflin’ Ass Hoes” and “Death…
Bastards of puppets
In 1989, Matt Groening changed the face of television — literally — by figuring out that there are certain types of humor you can get away with much more easily if they come from precious-looking animated characters. Eight years later, Matt Parker and Trey Stone took the humor one step further (and the animation one…
Body stockings
During the sleazy paperback era of the 1950s, femme fatales dominated book covers. Creator of more than 600 covers, Robert A. Maguire mastered the form and crafted images throughout the decade and into the 1980s. Pop-culture historian Jim Silke surveys this prolific painter’s career in the retrospective Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of…
Dear Uncle Mat
I am a guy heading into my junior year of high school. I consider myself to be happy, although at times I tend to reflect on the fact that I haven’t been involved in an actual relationship. Although I realize the joy I derive from my experience in high school isn’t entirely dependent on being…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Are you a gelatinous pool of longing yet? Are you a perfumed garden of madly blooming purple explosions? Are you throbbing and gooey and half-nauseous with that delicious sickness some people called love? If not, I don’t know what to tell you. By all astrological reckoning your gut should be swarming…
“Tonight We Dine in Hell” – Madex Thirteen
The orchestral strains of the 300 soundtrack briefly confuse things, but the requisite Leonidas sound bite leads immediately into the muddled guitar skronk that doubles, apparently, as Satan’s dinner bell. And forget vegetarian options, the only item on the menu is a “death grip holding you tight.” But if James Magallanez’s blood-gargling growl, or the…
LIVE & LOCAL
The Gatsby is a strange spot for a rock show. Paintings of jazz trumpeters and the high-class clientele cast a top-hat-and-monocle-shaped shadow over the jean-clad rockers set to perform. Access to the show is limited to adults 21 and older, which makes July’s presence in the room somewhat awkward, given that guitarist James Perez is…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
Bett Butler, one of S&F’s favorite local jazz artists, hosted a four-hour songwriting workshop last Saturday for Gemini Ink’s Summer Literary Festival, and says the class-preparation process taught her a few things about some highly familiar, beloved standards. For instance, Butler says she was struck by the daunting melodic intervals of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” the…
Swell Maps
Jackson Albracht — guitarist, vocalist, and primary songwriter for San Antonio’s Cartographers — explains how “Aldon,” a lyrically abstract and musically complex standout track on the band’s self-released untitled debut, started out as an ad lib meant to piss off a friend. “Originally, I was really singing it just to embarrass Aldon,” Albracht explains at…
Trial and eros
“Don’t worry, I’ll send you positive vibes,” said the beauty to the beast. But the thoughts that the girl from Monaco inspires in the head of her aged and unalluring (but sympathetic) barrister beau are hardly the sort that will bring him success in his career-making murder trial. Parisian attorney Bertrand Beauvois (Luchini) has come…
¡Ask a Mexican!
SPECIAL HOUSTON EDITION Dear Mexican: Why do Mexicans at construction sites always draw a dick and vagina on the interiors of porta-potties? They sure are not as poetic as they are artistic. Then you got the white-boy reply, “Here I sit flexing a …” You should know the rest. — Original Schreck in Houston Dear…
S’nuff film
Not to alarm you, but I think Austin may be trying to steal your children. Until Saturday, August 1, the Austin Film Festival is accepting submissions for its Youth Filmmakers Competition. There’s no entry fee, but entrants must be between the ages of 13 and 18, and the fest recommends submitting films no longer than…
Wendi and Shek’s Monte Vista and Tobin Hills
“Typically, my work is very minimal, often small-scale, while Shek’s is vibrant and over-the-top and sometimes fills entire walls,” writes Wendi Kimura of her and partner David Vega’s work. They both developed their styles and mediums on the street — Shek as one of the city’s outstanding graffiti artists and Kimura as an art pamphleteer…
The penis mightier
Hung (10 p.m. Sundays on HBO) questions one of the most basic assumptions of manhood by suggesting that maybe all life’s problems aren’t solved by having a giant dick. Well-endowed but woebegone head basketball coach Ray Drecker, played believably by the shabbily handsome Thomas Jane, discovers this sad truth while trying to reverse his life’s…
Amuse-BOUCHE
In American restaurants — at least in those that don’t operate under the French brigade system — it’s perfectly kosher to move from kitchen to kitchen to gain experience. This chef shuffle is expected. But maybe not so fast as one recent turnover. Before his most recent job at the helm of Nosh, Silo’s casual, late-night…
The QueQue
Drive time All roads seem to lead to toll roads these days for the Metropolitan Planning Organization. How else to explain the contentiousness we’re seeing at the local agency, which controls the purse strings to more than $200 million in federal and state transportation funding? Two years ago, the 19-member MPO passed over outspoken toll-road…
War of the Rosés
It’s summertime, y’all, and that means, in addition to 100-degree days, crisp rosés. Texans, bucking the national trend, seem reluctant to drink them at any time, but Omniboire will persevere until pink wine has a positive reputation. The Fig Tree’s Moe Lazri needs no encouragement. “I grew up drinking rosé in Tangier,” says the Algerian-born…
Urine trouble
New allegations by former employees of the Bexar County probation department are a good reminder that the mounting legal fight against the agency isn’t all about the mellow yellow. In early 2008, after the department contracted out its urinalysis drug testing to Victoria-based Treatment Associates, probation was awash in questions from probationers, criminal-defense attorneys, and…
Cultural imperatives
Meg Langhorne: Animal Langhorne takes her work in a provocative new direction with this show, relaxing some of the elegant and delicate detail of her previous drawings and adding a note of disorienting eroticism and humor to these gouache works on paper, which replace one-half of Harlequin Romance-style clinches with attractive fauna. Free. Through August…
Human architecture
The “literary” graphic novel has been both a boon and a bane to comics as an art form, given that so much of what’s been produced under the banner rarely works as comics. A comic’s narrative pleasures, when the form is really cooking, are based on visual invention as much as traditional literary merit —…
ARTifacts
This week as y’all know by now is your last chance to experience the Original Extravagantly Hot CAM, or forever lose your “back in the day” bragging rights `see the calendar, page 28`. Not to dance on Old CAM’s grave, but here’s a preliminary big-picture wish list for New CAM, which debuts next March, during…
NBAF & the E-N: putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable
Here’s a fun comparison: First, the Washington Post’s story, published yesterday, about a preliminary report from the GAO, which thinks the Department of Homeland Security used outdated science and poor, rushed decision-making when it decided to relocate the NBAF bio-defense research lab from an Atlantic island to the middle of Kansas. According to the Washington…
Wage freeze preceded by promotion of VP’s?
By Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Upper management at CPS Energy were getting promotions in May of this year, according to CPS staff. In June, however, employees were being notified there would be no more raises or promotions as the utility navigated an economic slow-down. Now, a day before CPS Energy’s CEO Milton Lee’s incentives package comes…
Merykid album giveaway at Gatsby
Local one-man band Nick “Merykid” Mery will be passing out free copies of his album Merykid: Live @ The Magic Attic at his show tonight (Tuesday, July 28) at the Gatsby. Admission is $5, and Blowing Trees is also scheduled to play. The flurry of Merykid press releases I’ve been getting all describe his sound…
