Heat, Water, Power: weak climate bill precedes nuke-cost announcement
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Last week, the Texas Public Utility Commission hoisted the yellow flag â?? sort of a National Threat Assessment for electricity users â?? urging folks to forgo unnecessary appliance-assisted tasks. We’ve been peaking, in case you didn’t know. Waves of angry sunage have been bustin’ thermometers across South Texas. So, on yet another…
Chaléwood No. 13: Ramón Rodríguez
Ramón Rodríguez – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen By Kiko Martinez San Antonio Current contributing writer kiko@cinesnob.net Standing at the base of an Egyptian pyramid, actor Ramón Rodríguez didn’t miss the opportunity to take a moment and let it all sink in. Not only was he shooting a scene for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,…
How solar salve was squandered at the Lege
Alicia Ramirez aliciak2010@gmail.com In a session where about 70 renewable energy bills were introduced, only one for the advancement of solar was sent to Governor Perry’s desk for approval. However, the most significant efforts to establish a viable solar energy industry in the state died. The final solar energy bill to die was House Bill…
Young protestors take nuke objections downtown
Tomorrow’s leaders aren’t waiting for us to screw things up (any more). Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Local activist organizations Southwest Workers Union and Fuerza Unida sent a shock troop of high-school-aged student interns into the breach today to protest developing plans to double the size of the South Texas Project nuclear complex. Outside City-owned CPS Energy’s…
Worst free comedy/music show ever
But what else are you going to do on a Tuesday? Seriously though folks, despite the self-deprecating name, the Worst of Both Worlds, featuring local comedians (and sometimes musicians) Johnny Luna and Bobby Smith looks like a bargain. Stand up comedy, musical performances, and a film screening, all for free. Judge the comedy for yourself…
CAM 09: Jump-Start’s Shimi commemorates the Stonewall Riots
Jump-Start’s CAM edition of the Windows will be more transitory, and transvestite, than previous versions of this regular First Friday public installation. Indispensable troupe member S.T. Shimi is rolling straight from her performance in the Neon Twins, through June’s W-I-P (a traveling buffet of dance, outside, 7pm, tonight!), and into an under-construction tribute to the…
Wilco (The Album)
Wilco (The Album) Composer: Wilco Conductor: Wilco Label: Nonesuch Release Date: 2009-06-24 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording It’s ironic that as the U.S. collectively shits the bed, Wilco — the band that built a career on articulating modern American angst — hasn’t sounded this upbeat in a decade. Coupled with the feather-light Sky Blue Sky, Wilcologists…
#1 Record/Radio City
#1 Record/Radio City Composer: Big Star Conductor: Big Star Label: Fantasy Release Date: 2009-06-24 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Big Star got to power pop when it was fresh-squeezed from the Kinks and Beatles. Before the concept of mellow melodic rock with pop hooks became Hansonized and Jonas Brothered into a joke, the form was malleable…
Time Turns Elastic
Time Turns Elastic Composer: Trey Anastasio Conductor: Trey Anastasio Label: Rubber Jungle Release Date: 2009-06-24 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Collaborating with arranger Don Hart, lead Phish Trey Anastasio has crafted a soundtrack without imagery, a trilogy of movements that ebb and flow with cinematic tension between Hart’s swelling orchestrations and Anastasio’s delicate guitar phrasings. Album…
The E.N.D.
The E.N.D. Composer: The Black Eyed Peas Conductor: The Black Eyed Peas Label: Interscope Release Date: 2009-06-24 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Let’s face it: The Peas have already made this decade’s two most embarrassing rap singles — “My Humps” and “Let’s Get It Started” — but that doesn’t faze the foursome. Why should it? They’ve…
Not so ‘Easy’
Easy Virtue Director: Stephan Elliott Screenwriter: Stephan Elliott Cast: Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth Release Date: 2009-06-24 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Comedy Our Rating: 3.50 Scandalizing his genteel English family, a dapper son of privilege marries an upstart American divorcée. When Edward VIII brought Wallas Simpson home to Buckingham Palace in 1936,…
Critic’s Diss
Year One
Travels with Frenchie
Part X: Olmos Park nonpareil
Sohns & TheGrasshopper Lies Heavy
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2009-06-24 These two local bands got into rock for the best possible reason: to see how much noise human beings are capable of generating. Test your decibel endurance level against typical Sohns track “A Convocation of Marksmen” — weary old-man ears will pick up only Alex Mendez’s mutilated chipmunk shriek and…
Plein-air party
Release Date: 2009-06-24 Ten years from now, in a potentially dystopic future when River Walk North is overrun with hotels and chain restaurants, we’ll look back and laugh at those crazy early days when anything seemed possible. Some might even recall a surreal little club that set up shop along the river in the parking…
Barr y Barrios
Playwright Gregg Barrios and the late Candy Barr sure have a lot in common. Get this: both are products of Victoria, Texas. Both are “sexual outlaws” whose provocative work has raised ire, eyebrows, and erectile tissue from Texas to Las Vegas to L.A. Both spent time in federal facilities (Barr as an inmate in Huntsville,…
America’s game
“Democracy is great, but baseball is more mature.” That’s one of many memorable lines in Richard Greenberg’s 2002 Broadway hit Take Me Out, which opened last weekend at the San Pedro Playhouse. Anyone dismayed by the current state of American democracy (or baseball) is sure to enjoy being taken out of that reality and thrust…
ARTifacts
One of these things is not like the others: burgers, beer, and video art. Seem unlikely? Heck, no! Indulging in all these delicious elements simultaneously sounds like fun to us. And to organizers Utah Snyder and Michael Stoltz, too, seeing as how they’ve started up Sam’s Video Jam, an ongoing compilation series of video treats…
LIVE & LOCAL
Ears are practically still leaking gray matter from local metal act Water Became Blood’s vicious final notes when Ledaswan’s ready to play. “We’re going to change it up a bit here,” Ledaswan lead vocalist and sometimes guitarist Erica Gutierrez says, and it’s a huge understatement. Gutierrez addresses the mic on tiptoes, looking less like a…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
It’s not often that a San Antonio band releases a new CD in Canada before it schedules a local CD-release show, but local pop-rock quartet Passenger found itself in that position last week, as one of 200 bands picked to showcase at NXNE, Toronto’s answer to South By Southwest. The group decided to get its…
The QueQue
STUDENT COUNCIL REPORT SA’s newest Council members got their swearing-in on Friday, June 19, but the lame ducks did not go gently into our tropical night. An entertainingly cantankerous Lourdes Galvan lit into Roderick Sanchez, director of Planning and Development Services, over the City’s plan to waive procedural requirements and rename two sections of Perez…
Rave on
Breakneck beats, nudity, and ecstasy. It’s a wonder the cops didn’t show up sooner. A decade ago, the state of Texas burned bright as a hot spot for the electronic music movement. On weekends, from the mid ’90s to early aughts, thousands of thrill seekers in their early teens to late 20s flocked to the…
Team Castro
On Saturday, May 9, Robbie Greenblum and Jaime Castillo ran into each other at the victory celebration for newly elected Mayor Julián Castro. Castillo arrived at the campaign headquarters in his capacity as a columnist for the Express-News and Greenblum, a local immigration attorney, was “just there for the party.” Greenblum and Castillo have been…
“My Way” – Southern Sickness
San Antonio MC Mike Jones has a pretty unfortunate name for an upstart Texas rapper, but he’s proud of it anyway, I think. Judge for yourself: “For better or worse not being a Jones is a curse, and when I leave this bitch my name itself is gonna need a hearse.” Another Mike Jones claiming…
Dear Uncle Mat
I wrote to you last year regarding my own personal problems involving women upon entering my senior year. Now a proud high-school graduate, I can say your advice helped to make my last year one not completely lacking female promiscuity. That said, I’m writing you with a new question, seeing as you were very helpful…
CHISME Y CHICLE
RUMOR: We heard that visionary hotelier Liz Lambert has purchased the Havana River Walk Inn, but a company rep says they’re only going through “feasibility.” Having set new hipster-hotel standards with Austin’s San Jose and Marfa’s Thunderbird (with the help of SA’s own Lake Flato), we can only wonder what might happen to the distinctly…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt used to be skeptical about the power of prayer. But his wife Heidi, herself a devout believer, urged him to keep his mind open. Then, as an experiment, Spencer asked God to help him and Heidi get a double date with teen pop star Miley Cyrus…
The Omniboire
Pool juice and patio pounders “Quaffable” was the buzzword of the afternoon at the last Omniboire panel tasting. So much more appealing than any of the other faintly derisive descriptions applied to simple wines made to be enjoyed in hot weather — preferably alongside a body of water. A wading pool will do in a…
Film clips
Two naked women fight over a sweater in Stephen Keep Mills’s “Liminal,” but not because they’re chilly. Joy (Tonya Cornalisse) viciously chastises Ina (Alejandra Gollas) for wearing a too-shear, form-fitting sweater, to which Ina replies, “You don’t dress me, motherfucker!” It sounds funny, but it isn’t. The shockingly violent 15-minute short instead appears to be…
Artist in Residence Vol. IV
When she’s not devising harrowing reinterpretations of Disney’s saccharine America, artist Kelly O’Connor manages the extensive contemporary-art collection at the Linda Pace Foundatio and visits Harley the parrot at Pet Works. Artist in Residence apears the last Wednesday of every month. Click here to download Vol. I-III. Twin Sisters 6322 N. New Braunfels(210) 822-0761twinsistersbakeryandcafe.com Vaguely…
Golden child
Adam Rocha began the Golden Shower Video Festival in 1994. He screened gritty exploitation flicks and low-budget experimental films for seven years before the lack of local media coverage convinced him to change the name to something less pornographic. Fest curator Rocha, who announced this year’s lineup at a recent news conference in a dapper…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: You once asked why Mexican bands don’t hit it big in the good old US of A. I think the simple answer is that there are no Mexican Mouseketeers. You don’t get to be Justin Timberlake by picking a guitarrón. Slater from Saved by the Bell doesn’t count. The real question is why Disney, a…
S’NUFF film
This week in film news (yes, that’s actually what this column is supposed to be covering): Well, there’s this film festival you may have heard about (everything you want to know is in the story to the left), but there’s less festive stuff going on, I suppose. Slab Cinema’s breaking out the golden-age Tom Hanks…
Critic’s Plug
Listen, I’m always promoting you art people and your this-es and that-ses. The truth is, sometimes: 1. The Current needs to supplement its adult-ad revenue with some real-time real-life cash, and 2. Every once in a while, you gotta get your vodka on. Perhaps you’ve noticed the pop-up ads on our website. This Friday, we’re…
In the red
Famed British architect David Adjaye’s preliminary design for the collection of the late San Antonio art patron Linda Pace features cantilevered skylights above four spacious galleries. Designated for Camp Street in a spot currently occupied by an old warehouse, the building will be clad in red, the signature color for Pace, who once dreamed of…
CAM era
The Current couldn’t be happier that Contemporary Art Month is moving, after this July, to March. We look forward to all the meteorological advantages: making studio visits without blacking out from heat exhaustion, maintaining a semblance of on-purpose hairdo, not secreting ice packs in our pants, wearing shoes to openings. But this last in-July CAM…
the Terminator of Broadway
After a season of uncommonly strong programming — including tours of The Color Purple, Frost/Nixon, and Avenue Q — Broadway Across America has taken a big step backward. Though we’ve not sunk so low as the annus horribilis of 2007, BAA is again programming a previously seen production on their (putatively) new subscription series, just…
Environment Thrown to the Wayside in Favor of TVs
Surprise Veto of TV Recycling Bill Turns Heads Since the 81st regular legislature closed up shop June 1, environmental organizations here waited to hear Governor Rick Perry say yes and officially sign HB 821, otherwise known as the TV TakeBack Bill, into law — or at least let it slide by unconfronted. The TV TakeBack…
