Express-News beats drum for $1-billion ocean desal
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Reading Sunday’s paper brought with it a rush of anxiety. Columnists were expounding upon and advocating a wildly expensive centralized facility hundreds of miles away to meet growing San Antonio’s future needs. Sure, the billion-dollar-plus project would produce far more than we actually needed, but that’s a good thing. We could pay…
7.7 Cueca
Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux makes her US debut and brings a dire warning By Enrique Lopetegui candombe108@yahoo.com Ana Tijoux in Texas (Those born in 1977 enter for free) @ SXSW (Austin) Thu. March 18 Flamingo Cantina 515 E 6th St. (21+) midnight Sat. March 20 Maggie Mae’s 323 E 6th St. (21+) In SA Sunday,…
Napkin Notes: Queso Amazo
Sordid admission numberâ?¦well, never mind: I often cruise the cheese counter at Whole Foods for small portions of unusual examples I’ve never seen before. Yes, I know that Central Market has over 700 varieties, but you know what DeGaulle said about a country (his) producing that many fromages: It’s ungovernable. The smaller selection is actually…
Chaléwood No. 28 – Anjelah Johnson
Anjelah Johnson – Our Family Wedding By Kiko Martinez San Antonio Current contributing writer kiko@cinesnob.net Funny girl Anjelah Johnson (right) has been keeping busy in the entertainment industry for the last few years. From her performances as a stand-up comedienne to her short stint as an NFL cheerleader, it’s all been a natural progression for…
Napkin Notes: A Toast to Tost
Jean Francois Poujol’s re-imaging of the once-and -former Soleil Bistro & Wine Bar is now complete. We think. To get there, he took the “a” out of Toast to arrive at Tost. Tost Bistro Bar, to be precise. That was the easy part, assuming the name catches on. (“‘Soleil’ was intimidating to some as a…
SXSW: Latin picks
By Enrique Lopetegui candombe108@yahoo.com There are a lot more bands to watch (especially on the Brazilian side), but these are some of my recommended Spanish-language picks. No Te Va Gustar (Uruguay) Wed. March 17 Billboard.com Bungalow 708 E 6th St (21+) 10 pm Fri. March 19 Flamingo Cantina 515 E 6th St) (21+) 10 pm…
Women Will March (text & slideshow)
Destinee Flores Dflores286@alamo.edu Market Street rang with shouts of “Hyatt, Escucha! Estamos en la lucha!” “Hyatt, Listen! We are in the struggle!” Saturday, March 6, as approximately 2,100 mothers, daughters, teachers, students, veterans, activists and other supporters gathered at the Grand Hyatt downtown to kick off the 20th Annual International Woman’s Day March. Women from…
Americano
Americano Composer: The Krayolas Conductor: The Krayolas Label: Box Records Release Date: 2010-03-10 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording At first listen, the new Krayolas album, produced by Joe Treviño, sounds like any other Krayolas album: The rockin’ conjunto element, the festive tracks like the single “Frutería,” the humor … it’s all there. But as you get…
The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton
The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton Composer: Clogs Conductor: Clogs Label: Brassland Release Date: 2010-03-10 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Behind today’s indie-rock curtain, crossover classical bands like Clogs have been shattering musical barriers by orchestrating instrumental arrangements for rock nerds. Over the course of four albums since 2001, this quartet has evoked everything…
Jet Lag
Jet Lag Composer: Josiah Wolf Conductor: Josiah Wolf Label: Anticon Release Date: 2010-03-10 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording After years of manning the drum kit for his brother’s band WHY?, Josiah Wolf is ready to step out of Yoni’s shadow. On his solo debut, Jet Lag, he proves he’s capable of handling things on his own…
The Stimulus Package
The Stimulus Package Composer: Freeway & Jake One Conductor: Freeway & Jake One Label: Rhymesayers Release Date: 2010-03-10 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Diminishing returns have long been the norm for onetime Roc-a-Fella junior-leaguer Freeway. Since Philadelphia Freeway, his flawed-but-fresh 2003 debut, his distinctively billy-goat’s-gruff flow has lost some of its urgency and ferocity. Unfortunately, The…
The Ghost Writer
Critic’s Pick The Ghost Writer Director: Roman Polanski Screenwriter: Roman Polanski Cast: Ewan McGregor, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Hutton Release Date: 2010-03-10 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Film In light of its director’s high-profile September 2009 arrest — and the festering old wounds broken open anew because of it — Roman Polanski’s The Ghost…
All My Sons
Release Date: 2010-03-10 After bombing in 1940 with the play The Man Who Had All the Luck, Arthur Miller threatened to “find some other line of work” if his follow-up, All My Sons, wasn’t a commercial success. The play won Miller a Tony for Best Authored Play in 1947 and has been adapted twice for…
SCUM
Release Date: 2010-03-10 A shampoo-bottling facility appears to be the source of an oozing plague infecting a small Texas town. Director Paul Gonzalez shot the indie horror flick SCUM entirely in Beeville, Texas, starring SA native (and Bill Miller employee) Brandon Maldonado. For the film, which premieres in its entirety for the first time this…
Luminaria 2010
Release Date: 2010-03-10 With Luminaria coinciding with CAM (and St. Patrick’s Day festivities) this year, downtown is sure to look and feel like a three-ring art circus. First, you’ll want to print out an event map and schedule by visiting luminariasa.org/schedule. This will help you devise a plan of attack (with parking being the first…
Cocina de las Americas: Paella Cook-Off
Release Date: 2010-03-10 Chef Johnny Hernandez and H-E-B Central Market’s Dya Campos will host this Iron Chef-style competition between local and visiting chefs. For this inaugural event, which partners the New World Wine and Food Festival with the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Pearl Brewery, paella is the name of the game. While…
Break Time with The Westside Horns
Release Date: 2010-03-10 Five days of free outdoor concerts begin Monday with a performance by the Westside Horns (5-8pm). “Driven to enlighten your after-work blues,” Main Plaza has organized an impressive lineup, including Patricia Vonne (5-8pm Tuesday), Mitch Webb & the Swindles (5-8pm Wednesday), Buttercup (5-8pm Thursday), Los Texmaniacs (5-7pm Friday), and Grupo Fantasma (6-8pm…
Awesome Color
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2010-03-10 The Stooges better hope no one orders paternity tests, because two of the best bands coming out of Detroit these days bear too much resemblance to Iggy Pop and co. to be anything but the bastard products of their writhing demon seed, and absolutely everybody notices. The folks in Awesome…
SOLI Chamber Ensemble: Systemic Secrets and Animal Space Stations
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2010-03-10 SOLI Chamber Ensemble, SA’s diehard champions of living classical music, present a gallery performance this week featuring the work of Trinity student Isaiah Putman, the winner of SOLI’s first-annual composition competition. Putman is a graduate of the endangered Northeast School of the Arts, which he credits with his early success.…
St. Patrick’s Day River Dyeing Parade
Release Date: 2010-03-10 Each year, the San Antonio River has the unique pleasure of being doused with 35 pounds of (environmentally friendly) green dye and temporarily becoming “the River Shannon.” Beginning at 11am, when the Harp & Shamrock Street Parade steps off (3rd St. and Avenue E.), St. Paddy’s Day celebrations will enliven downtown with…
Closing performance: All My Sons
Release Date: 2010-03-10 After bombing in 1940 with the play The Man Who Had All the Luck, Arthur Miller threatened to “find some other line of work” if his follow-up, All My Sons, wasn’t a commercial success. The play won Miller a Tony for Best Authored Play in 1947 and has been adapted twice for…
Pockets of cruelty-free food at Beto’s
Meatless in Steer City
The Sound & The Fury
Despite its name, Uruguay nine-piece No Te Va Gustar (Spanish for “you’re not going to like it”) is one of the most interesting bands from South America. Their masterpiece, 2007’s Todo es tan inflamable (available on iTunes) is a powerful blend of rock, reggae, ska, Uruguayan murga, and killer horns. They’ll be at SXSW along…
Cruisin’ for an infusion
Vodka is the spirit most tony ’tenders love to hate. Even more scorn is heaped on flavored vodkas, an attitude not shared by the booze-buying public. You have only to look at the relative shelf space allotted to vodka, flavored and straight, as opposed to, say, gin at your local spirit emporium. But many of…
Dear Uncle Mat
My job is eating my soul. I have a fair amount of debt, and I feel stuck in what I’m doing because although I don’t make much money, I have no qualifications to do anything else. The amount of stress and lack of sleep is causing me a variety of health issues, and I’m concerned…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was called “the most famous actress the world has ever known.” She did a few films in the early days of the cinema, but most of her work was in the theater. At age 70, she played the role of the 13-year-old Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.…
SAy Cheese
My friend Jim and I are standing, hairnets at the ready, in a fromage factory deep in the bowels of an otherwise unoccupied concrete warehouse just north of Five Points. It does not exude old-world charm. The equipment has been scrounged, salvaged, reclaimed, and repurposed from motley sources. PVC pipe — food-safe, of course —…
Death by inches
The house of Eric Fonseca, the auteur behind the latest stop-motion-animation adaptation of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is in no way gloomy or in ill-repair. It’s just another house on a typical Southwest San Antonio street. You’d no more suspect it of hosting ghosts than playing headquarters to a promising one-man…
Dis-member the Alamo
Virginia Grise — native San Antonian, recent CalArts MFA grad, this year’s winner of the Yale University Drama Series with her original play Blu, and 2010 Luminaria artist — doesn’t have access to the Alamo. Not the building, anyway, that brick-and-mortar relic, at once stately and squat, that presides over the Ripley’s Believe It or…
On the way to the forum
It’s a chilly, rain-slick evening soon after Valentine’s Day, and members of the AtticRep Theatre Ensemble have gathered in a small conference room in the Ruth Taylor Fine Arts Center on Trinity’s campus to talk marriage. Specifically, they’re out to devise the AtticRep Forum Theatre Project 2010: On Love and Marriage, the latest in an…
The hilarious hereafter
You might be at a Texas funeral if acceptable mourning attire includes cowboy boots and rhinestones. That the guy in the box at the front of the church is named “Bud” might just be another tip-off. So it is in Dearly Departed, David Bottrell and Jessie Jones’s 1991 comedy about losing a mean, surly old…
With friends like these
Plays ripped from the headlines are strange beasts: though obviously timely, they’re not necessarily timeless. George Packer’s Betrayed, adapted from his non-fictional New Yorker piece on the plight of native interpreters in Iraq, feels a bit dated, and it’s only been two years since its premiere in Manhattan. But how time flies! The play’s implicit…
Short Shorts
In this month’s stories, characters try to make sense of what has happened to them or what they have done. Loss is their meaning — cold and silent. Perhaps it’s the economy (or my own outlook on life), but the more these characters implode, the more they mushroom out into the world around them. Submit your…
Rode hard, put away wet
What the fuck does it mean to fuck a bike?” Reverend Phil Sano asked the crowd at C4 Workspace on Monday, March 8. The dozens of San Antonians assembled in the King William community space were about to find out. Sano was screening Bike Porn 3: Cycle Bound. Bike porn is both everything and nothing…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican, When I was in high school, everyone called the Mexican students like myself “cheddars.” I’m not sure where this originated from, or what it really has to do with Mexican culture. When I have asked other Mexicans what this means, they are not sure, either. “Cheddar packing” is a term used to describe…
Never wanted you
Nestle in my Boobies” is a big hit with the family, says Candice Jones, 29, the keyboardist for Atlanta’s the Coathangers. “Nestle,” one of the band’s signature songs, is also a favorite of Meredith Franco’s family who, as I talked with Jones, were eagerly gearing up to watch their little girl lay down the bass…
The QueQue
Coming home to roost By 8:30 Saturday morning, the dining room at the Luby’s on N.E. Loop 410 was already full of the party faithful. It was the first meeting of the North East Bexar County Democrats following the March 2 primary, and the first order of business after the usual agenda protocol was Dan…
Promises fulfilled
Love relationships between great artists have inspired some fine literature throughout history, be it works the artists created for each other during their own lifetimes or as fodder for novels, memoirs, or even motion pictures and plays after the fact. Surely one of the greatest such love affairs of the past half century was the…
Save the fish (and ourselves)
Everybody in the business knows that the Atlantic population of bluefin tuna is in worse trouble than the Pacific population, but how much worse? Well, here’s one measure: Stanford University’s Tag-a-Giant program is now paying $1,000 per tag to fishermen in the Atlantic and Mediterranean who return the tags after they have caught the tuna,…
Live & Local
Puppy Jet only has time for an abbreviated, seven-song set, but that’s OK. Sing-shouting and shaking onstage, they play like they never heard anything louder than their own voices, and they seem like the sort of band for which a part of their music can stand in as a microcosm for the whole. That’s not…
New Dem Party Chair comes in like a lion: Extended QueBlog remix
COMING HOME TO ROOST At 8:30 Saturday morning, the dining room at the Luby’s on N.E. Loop 410 was already full of the party faithful. It was the first meeting of the North East Bexar County Democrats following the March 2 primary, and the first order of business after the usual agenda protocol was Dan…
SAPD promises justice in transgender sex assault, question of training unanswered
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com One week after a local trans-gendered woman, described in the arrest warrant as a “Latin Male,” walked into the South Frio police sub-station alleging she had been raped by a San Antonio Police officer, SAPD Chief Bill McManus and two officers met with members of the San Antonio Gender Association pledging to…
San Antonio’s woulda-been-groundbreaking solar PACE program on the rocks
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Thirty-nine percent of San Antonians are ready to install solar panels and solar hot-water heaters on their rooftops, according to a survey performed last year for the non-profit clean-energy-advocating Solar San Antonio. That is, they’re ready to go solar â?? if they could afford it. Even with the on-and-off-again solar rebates offered…
