Ageless companions
A Central Market class elicits beautiful music from wine & cheese When you need to add something fresh to your regular repertoire of meals, or you want to delve deeper into something you already love, cooking classes beckon. This home cook experienced that yearning a few nights ago and grabbed one of the last seats…
All You Can Eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene Ostrich: Tastes like cow Crumpets Restaurant and Bakery, 3920 Harry Wurzbach, owner and chef Francois Maeder has made some exotic additions to his menu: tuna steak, breast of duck, bison, ostrich, veal, shrimp, elk, lamb, beef, and lobster – each served “with a feral flair,” the…
Where’s the wine?
Trilogy’s pizza & wine menu favors the pie Apizza & wine bistro sounds like a good idea on the surface of it: Create a bistro serving three popular styles of pizza, add a little pasta, pair it all with wine. What’s not to like? Pizza chef Javier Flores tosses a crust at Trilogy Bistro and…
A little b12 goes a long way
Think of vitamin B12, or cobalamin, as the Pluto of the B vitamins: small, insignificant, ignored for years, but necessary for the body’s well being. Of the B family, B12 isn’t as renown as niacin or as flashy as folic acid. Until fairly recently, doctors and nutritionists largely ignored cobalamin entirely unless a patient suffered…
United and divided
Bett Butler and Joël Dilley are among the 250 local musicians in the union. (Photo by Mark Greenberg) Does the musicians’ union wield power in a right-to-work state? For people of a certain political leaning, the words “labor union” conjure images of cigar-smokin’, strong-armed bosses busting the chops of scabs and skipping town with pocketsful…
No Dick’s need apply
When the City and SARA finally begin renovating the northern part of the river next year, they say they’ll have the locals in mind Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part series about San Antonio River restoration projects. Last week, in “Mission Control,” Lisa Sorg explored planned improvements to the Mission Reach,…
Sound and the Fury
Weirdo on the mend The Weirdos’ March 9 show at the Sanctuary was postponed last week when Dix Denney, guitarist for the seminal SoCal punk band, fell ill. Denney had been hospitalized with pneumonia in January, but he subsequently defied doctor’s orders by honoring the group’s winter tour commitments. While on the road, his condition…
All Ears
From left, Jason Falkner, Brazilian Girls, and Saul Williams are among the notables performing at this year’s SXSW. SXSW: Sleep? Hahaha It’s that time of year again: Time to call up friends in Austin and ask if their couches are spoken for yet. This year’s South By Southwest is light on buzz – no earth-shattering…
Bebop for the eyes
Illustrator Jim Flora designed album covers worth framing For those who spent hours lying on the couch staring at the die-cuts of Led Zeppelin III, freaking out to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, or glazing over the psychedelic graphics of the Flaming Lips’ Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell, album art was as integral to the…
Current Choice: Bare hug
Bobby Bare Jr. As a kid, Bobby Bare Jr. got to hang out with some Nashville heavyweights. He watched the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash sit around the table playing cards with his dad, iconoclastic country singer, Bobby Bare. Impressed as he was by these icons, however, his true songwriting hero has always…
Word on the street
News and notes from the San Antonio Literary scene Desert Blood This month, author and academic Alicia Gaspar de Alba celebrates the release of her latest novel, Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, with two readings in San Antonio. The El Paso native weaves together issues of border culture, gender identity, and globalization in her fictional…
All we need is a mascot
‘It’s Just a Plant’ takes the fight for NORML drug laws to a young audience Since its very seed, this children’s book about marijuana (yes, you read correctly) was meant to spark discussion: between parents and children and between government and citizens. And it successfully accomplishes that, in spades: “An outrage,” says Entertainment Weekly. “A…
Welcome to the new San Antonio Current website!
We are airborne. During the first week the new web site experienced surprisingly little turbulence. Nevertheless, rumor has it that our Web Guy has taken up residence at the ‘Lion and Rose’ and plans on staying until the Smithwick’s are gone. In the coming weeks, look for multi-media features, web extras, contests, and other new…
Pacing rooms and parsing words
Luke Wilson hides his expressive eyes behind a pair of shades in The Wendell Baker Story. Some Wilsons are anxious, others elated as their film, set in a nursing home, opens at SXSW Luke Wilson looks worried. It’s hard to tell if this is because it is opening night at the South by Southwest Film…
Mission control
The Mission Reach project would restore natural habitats and add public parkland to a segment of the San Antonio River. Can nature and people coexist in an urban waterway? Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series about San Antonio River restoration projects. Next week’s story will cover the Museum Reach, which extends…
In search of …
Writer, actor, and filmmaker Jesus Sifuentes in his small studio space. (Photo by Mark Greenberg) Aspiring filmmaker with a script is looking for dough Local filmmaker and actor Jesus Sifuentes needs a brujo. A sorcerer with magical powers could help Sifuentes, whose latest screenplay, The Myth of Brown, was completed in September 2003. He is…
Young, dumb, and full of guns
‘Gunner Palace’ takes an upclose peak at the stressful life on the ground in Iraq For moviegoers whose concern about the war in Iraq didn’t end on Election Day, the new documentary Gunner Palace offers the kind of thing barely attempted by the news networks: an in-depth look at what it’s really like to be…
Do as I say, and as I do
A playwright who died at Stalin’s hand inspires a Ukrainian revolution In 1937, Joseph Stalin’s soldiers marched more than a thousand writers, philosophers, and artists onto a barge in the White Sea, ordered them to remove their clothes, shot each one, and dumped their bodies into the water. Among the murdered was Les Korbas, a…
Armchair Cinephile
Tube tops A big, quote-heavy double-truck ad greeted New York Times readers recently to announce the second season of Deadwood, HBO’s latest small-screen series with cinematic ambitions. They certainly know how to time things: The first season of the Western drama came out on DVD with just enough breathing room to let us newcomers check…
Recent reviews
Bad Education Dir. and writ. Pedro Almodóvar; feat. Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Luís Homar, Javier Cumara, Petra Martínez, Nacho Pérez, Raul García Forneiro (NC-17) Pedro Almodóvar’s spellbinding Bad Education has already been celebrated for so long – from its opening-night slot at last Spring’s Cannes festival through its appearance on dozens…
