Food & Drink All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene Last week, chicken-fried steak lovers and passersby took solace in Earl Abel’s old-time neon sign, which read, “Everything is alright.” Earl’s reopened at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, March 21, with a full menu and plans to stay open until it moves to the old Hometown Buffet on…
Music CD Spotlight
Case study The conventional wisdom among critics has long been that Neko Case is a singer-songwriter with much more singing than songwriting ability. That partially explains why cultists slaver over Case’s infrequent vocal showcases with the New Pornographers, her power-pop moonlighting project. When removed from the muted, melancholy twang of her own material, Case is…
Music All ears
SXStatus Report As this column’s deadline approaches, South by Southwest is roughly three-quarters done. Plenty of time to collect some some stray impressions, discoveries, and regrets from the field: It was no surprise that the Stubb’s showcase Wednesday featuring Belle & Sebastian and the New Pornographers was a highlight, despite weather that threatened throughout to…
Arts Bite the lion that feeds you
Broadway vet Tony Parise decries the prostitution of the Great White Way Tony Parise has something to say about the corporatization of Broadway. It’s nothing other traditionalists aren’t already saying; voices have long been crying out against the transformation of the country’s most high-profile production establishment into a theatrical theme park dominated by movie-to-stage Disney…
Music Sound and the Fury
A week on the scene – Foggy notions After being consumed by the mayhem and music of South By Southwest for four days, a little reflection is at last possible. Although time conflicts were inevitable, and the days were in constant flux, no matter how hard you wished, you couldn’t divide yourself in half to…
Arts What’s in a brand name?
I don’t claim to have been Earl Abel’s most devoted customer. The waitresses did not know me by name. I do not cherish memories of spending my formative years there sneaking cigarettes at 2 in the morning. But that did not stop me from braving crowds of despondent senior citizens a couple of weeks ago…
Media ‘Chinatown’ through another lens
Robert Towne returns to a fictional LA with Ask the Dust “It gets you through and it pays bills,” writer-director Robert Towne concedes when pressed about how the guy who wrote Chinatown ended up penning Mission Impossible and its equally dreadful sequel. Towne has written two other films for Tom Cruise, Days of Thunder and…
News Class struggle
A teacher shortage has districts looking for alternative ways to staff their classrooms Like many schools in San Antonio, Bernice Hart Elementary in northeast Austin grew exponentially last year, adding 200 new students. Elia Diaz-Ortiz, principal of Hart, was forced to hire and support 13 new teachers. In addition to recruiting them from university programs…
Media Be here; I’m gone
Townes Van Zandt was a musical genius with a deep drug-fueled loneliness Maybe it’s the fallout of too many Apprentice-style corporate fantasies and a culture in which monetary success is the only yardstick used to measure human worth. But there’s been a small backlash of loser-chic in film recently, from Miranda July’s Me and You…
News Good night, and good luck
Counterpoint – Reflecting on five years at the Current Five years ago this week, I arrived at the San Antonio Current stoved up after traveling 1,200 miles sandwiched with my husband and cat in an un-air-conditioned Geo Metro. It was risky moving to a city the size of 22 Bloomington, Indianas, and initially I was…
Food & Drink Tastes like ranch
Looking for Texas’s terroir in an Escondido Valley wine In the world of wine, terroir is the notion that, simply stated, the character of a place can be captured in the flavor of its wine. Terroir is usually attributed to old-school European wines and well-known California vineyards, and there are those who just can’t believe…
News Party lines
PGA inspires annex opponents Despite the tremendous controversy that embroiled the City during its passage through political channels, the PGA Tour development has inspired residents who live outside the city limits. Then-Mayor Ed Garza’s determination to give a 29-year annexation deferment to PGA Village, and then to PGA Tour, paved the way for a lawsuit…
Food & Drink The problem with ProFume
Activists worry a new pesticide will put toxic levels of fluoride in your food “Fluoridation of water is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.” – U.S. Air Force Commander Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. These days, fluoride is hardly viewed as a subversive communist…
News Briefs
Tundra: the new South Texas landscape The new Toyota Tundras manufactured in San Antonio will be bigger, better, and stronger, says Hidehiko “T.J.” Tajima, the honcho at the new Toyota plant on the South Side. Tajima welcomed a majority of City Council members last week for a presentation and tour of the grounds of the…
Food & Drink Museum-quality meatloaf
Museum of New Mexico’s cookbook offers fine art & home cooking Hardback and covered in a lush still life — an imperfect apple appears to have rolled to a rest on a rustic yellow plate — the Museum of New Mexico’s new coffee -table cookbook, Santa Fe Kitchens: Delicious Recipes from the Southwest, seems to…
News Speed reads
Public input on Plaza plan Sure, San Antonians hate to walk, but would a pedestrian plaza be that offensive? We’ll soon find out, as Mayor Phil Hardberger is asking City Council to extend the public-comment period an additional 60 to 90 days on his plan to transform Main Plaza into a car-free zone. Some downtown…
Music ‘Econo’ men
Minutemen documentary celebrates punk as a rule-defying art movement This is the story of two friendships linked by one band. The first one developed in the early 1970s in the blue-collar Southern California town of San Pedro between two kids named Dennes Boon and Mike Watt, who went on to form a revolutionary punk band…
Feature Lies, damn lies
How an archaic measurement keeps millions of poor Americans from being counted Standing before the House rostrum on the night of January 31, President George W. Bush beamed as he recounted the state of the country’s economic health. “Our economy is healthy,” the president declared during his State of the Union address. “Americans should not…
Music Current Choice
Floetry slam Brits Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart met on a basketball court in London, while playing for opposing teams. They soon pushed their competitive fires to the side and formed the neo-soul duo Floetry, a group that has survived the dissipation of a genre often criticized for its smugness. Ambrosious and Stewart have crafted…
Culture Funny ha ha
Rivercenter Comedy Club is looking for the best of the buffoons It’s a Monday night, and the bar I’m in is filled with wall-to-wall funny — potentially. A dozen stand-up comics from Austin to Del Rio to San Antonio — collectively, the inaugural leg of the first Search for the Funniest Person in South Texas…
Arts Pssst, buddy. Want a print?
The McNay Print Fair wants you to become a collector Prints are the gateway drug of the art world. Often less expensive than paintings and sculpture, they also tend to fit within the fairly traditional confines of works on paper, making them easily accessible in more ways than one. Nonetheless, the long history of printmaking…
Arts Blast off
Web Exclusive Who wants a supersonic plane? All we want is more Latino Odyssey Something eerie happened as I was reviewing Jump-Start’s Latino Odyssey: Space, the Final Frontera over the past two weekends. It wasn’t that I walked in on an argument over a sculpture of female masturbation in Jump-Start’s entrance (“That is a bleeding…
Arts Classical music for the future
Composer Libby Larsen makes music for the tech-savvy masses In cars, homes, clubs, and shopping malls across the country, music is part of the fabric of everyday life. Yet classical music seems to exist in a separate universe, with its own performance practices, history, and consumer niche. From the most conservative to the avant-garde, most…
Media Special screenings & That’s a wrap
Awesome: I !#@$* Shot That Dir. Adam Yauch (2006) The Beastie Boys anarchic rockumentary comes to town in appropriate fashion, with a coordinated cross-country, one-night-only screening in 200 cities. A Day in the Life of Nathanial Hörnblowér, a 30-minute short starring David Cross as Adam Yauch’s elusive alter ego, will also premiere, after which, it…
Media Game theory
Join the perplexed After scanning Violet Kiteway’s weblog (Quirky Acuity) for just a few moments, it becomes clear that the young librarian is having a bad year. Things got off to a rocky start when the cherished Receda Cube was brazenly stolen from the local university in Perplex City. Since then, Violet has been squabbling…
