The Fight Club
War Made Easy examines the methods and media that repeatedly lead us into conflicts
News story adrift
Virtual clearinghouse for Hurricane Katrina news stories closes, who will keep an eye on the lax recovery?
Big Tex: The unbelievably tortured story of reforming a Libby site
The only thing more humiliating than love is bureaucracy. Case in point: the Big Tex Grain Company Superfund Site, as the area at 354 Blue Star is suddenly being called in federal documents. Big Tex had been billed as another stage in the post-millennial revival of Southtown after James Lifshutz, son of a late magic-touch…
Half-pants are for wussy gabachos who can’t take the heat.
Dear Mexican: A friend asked me years ago to come up with a Spanish word or phrase that contains fewer syllables than its English counterpart. After years of thinking about this, the only one I could come up with is “Tengo sed” (three syllables) compared to “I am thirsty” (four syllables). This could be directly…
Excuse the mess
CHALUPA RULE Nobody ever really “excuses the mess.” Nadie nunca deveras «Perdona el desorden.» Years ago, no one could sit in the back seat of my car because there was no room. Every inch of seat and floor space was choked with yellowing newspapers, a tangled web of dry-cleaning hangers, a Mount Everest of ancient,…
One cartoonist’s Hell is another’s heaven
One of The New Yorker’s most consistently satisfying cartoonists is Bruce Eric Kaplan, who has a distinctive signature (that little “BEK’ encased in three squares) but doesn’t need it — his blocky, bottom-heavy figures look like nobody else’s. (Except for the anxious, soullessly blank circles they have for eyes, which bring to mind the substantially…
Uneven acting robs Yasmina Reza’s Art of some of its substance
Art 8pm Fri & Sat, Jun 29 & 30 $20 w/ dinner; $15 show only Ruben’s Bakery and Café 14357 Blanco (800) 838-3006 Thecompanytheatre.org As anyone who has ever taken an English course has probably heard ad nauseam, “all poems are fundamentally about poetry.” The implication the tweed is always making is that art is…
The Cocktail Cock Tale
With independence day quickly approaching, great care must be taken when confronting your taste buds. Sake and Guinness should be thrown to the curb in celebration of the gutsy moves the men on our money made in the pursuit of life, liberty, and a good time. Here are just a few cocktail suggestions to grace…
Too darn hot
Local painters and mentors Reggie Rowe and Alberto Mijangos passed away within days of each other this month, and we were yanked abruptly from our steamy spring reverie and deposited momentarily in last November’s early gray chill, when playwright Sterling Houston left us for good just hours behind the artist Mister Danny Geisler. A costly…
Armchair Cinephile
THIS WEEK’S PICK: Warner Bros. Goes Camp: The WB dug deep into the less reputable corners of their vault and came out with four themed box sets for this week. The sci-fi box, with its 50-foot women, may get the most attention, but check out the cornball “Historical Epics” for more laughs. Better yet, try…
Reggie Rowe and Alberto Mijangos
San Antonio lost two of its most respected artists last week, just days apart. Reginald Rowe, 86, and Alberto Mijangos, 81, were among the most influential painters and teachers in our sprawling, diverse art community. Some would argue that contemporary art, by definition, depends on youth and edginess. But youth is a state of mind…
Cape crusaders
Grapes followed the Spanish to the New World and found a congenial home. Grapes followed the French Huguenots and colonists of the Dutch East India Company to South Africa and more or less languished for 300 years — through phylloxera, through a market system composed of large brandy-making cooperatives, and through trade sanctions imposed as…
The Plan to Stay in 2008
In the wake of losing writ of habeas corpus under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the White House declared National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 51) and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD-20) on May 9, 2007 (but without a press release). The directives define just who’s in charge in case of a catastrophic emergency (which…
Snap judgments about this week’s premieres
I want you to give me five reasons why Paul Haggis should be allowed to have any part of the second Blond Bond film. Go. Crash. No. Walker, Texas Ranger. Mmmno. “If the only thing left of you was your smile and your little finger, you’d still be more of a man than anyone I’ve…
Letters to the Editor
ON THE COVER You can’t catch this arresting image, Gary Smith’s “Portrait of My Daughters, How They Remind Me of My Self,” until Out of Generica opens July 5 at Drink. But six other Contemporary Art Month shows kick off this week. See our critics’ notebook and our complete calendar listings. And tune in weekly…
A week on the scene
Satan’s Ghostwriter If it seems like punk-blues trio Boxcar Satan has kept a low profile in recent months, that’s because they have. The band hasn’t played a gig since last November, and has spent the last few months breaking in a new drummer, Aaron Seibert, of the Austin band Gorch Fock. Boxcar Satan’s calendar is…
Sammy and the Babe
The big news in Texas baseball last week came out of Arlington, where future Hall of Famer Sammy Sosa hit career home run number 600, becoming only the fifth player and first Latino to reach that milestone. Sosa’s historic blast came against his former team, the Chicago Cubs, the franchise he represented in the unforgettable…
Strafing the cutting edge of Latin music
Raining In Paradise Manu Chao is a soccer fan. He’s insane about it, to the point of rooting for Brazil, not his native France, in the final of the 1998 World Cup. “I want Brazil to win, but if France wins it’s OK, because it’ll be a slap in the face to all those racist…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Welcome to Part Two of your outlook for the second half of 2007, Aries. We’re checking up on how you’re progressing with the long-term tasks you were assigned six months ago. I hope that by now you’re seeing how much you have to learn. This has been and will continue to…
One-man bandwagon
Joe Reyes 7pm Fri, Jun 29 Free admission Twin Sisters Bakery & Cafe 6322 N. New Braunfels 822-0761 When Joe Reyes was 15, his dad gave him the best piece of musical advice he ever received. At the time, Reyes was deeply into his Judas Priest phase and playing in a local metal band, and while…
Term limits and plans
The campaign to change the term limits for San Antonio’s mayor and council members has already begun. With the re-election of Mayor Phil Hardberger, some local columnists and former council members have begun to trot out the standard arguments about how the term limits approved by voters in 1991 and reaffirmed again in a May…
The coal toll: Taking another look at America’s comeback kid
From the Editor Coal is older than God, practically, and like the Beatles and Duran Duran, more popular than Jesus (at any rate, its lobbying base is nothing to sneeze at). But while politicians embrace it as the key to America’s energy independence, it’s time to reconsider this bedrock (ahem) of our well-lit society with…
Hutto hype
It wasn’t the massive Seattle anti-WTO protest or the Manhattan Stop-the-March, but still, Saturday’s demonstration at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, earned four out of five fighting stars from the Current’s activism critics. Organized by a cluster of human-rights organizations (including Amnesty International and LULAC) and dubbed “Protest-a-palooza” (by las mijas…
Do you know today’s news? Thank a lazy journalist!
Quiz time! Do you know what the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act is? Don’t feel bad, the Queque just found out about it last week. Signed by our paranoid-as-a-meth-head chief executive last October, a section of the NDAA gives current and future presidents the power to mobilize the Armed Forces during “major public emergencies”…
