Feature Clickity-clack
Trans-Texas Rail Shop puts private rail cars back on the track As you climb aboard the Vista Valley, be sure to heed the sign that says “watch your step.” The 1948 Pullman passenger car is strewn with machine parts, boxes, and buckets, wires dangle precariously from light boxes, and the air is musty with mold…
Music Sound and the Fury
A week on the scene Seeing red Delphine Gunning spent the last several months going to see her favorite musicians perform in Austin because they never played at local venues. “Finally, I decided I didn’t want to go there anymore,” she says. “I decided that I was going to find a room.” Gunning found that…
Culture Party Mystere:
Where men are men and women can audition for the money shot See the smiling, 20-something blonde in the black dress, with the wine glass and straining décolletage? She’s a Sunday-school teacher. And those two tight-lipped fellows across the room, huddled together, tensely sipping their drinks? Porn directors. Welcome, friend, to Party Mystere. Billed simply…
Music After Sunset
A crawl through the San Antonio club scene – Rainbow coalition At the end of another long work day, a co-worker handed me an invitation to “Celebrate Black History Month with the BHM Committee Members” at The Studio. Our BHM committee had been working hard for the past few months to prepare for our company’s…
Arts Becoming Modern
A McNay exhibition captures the nexus of wealth and art that birthed America’s art renaissance Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950 at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum is many shades of the American Dream. As a touring collection, it surveys the era when America went from being curmudgeonly aghast at the 1913 Armory Show (eek,…
Music CD Spotlight
Computer love Does Alison Goldfrapp dream of electric sheep? Because Supernature, Goldfrapp’s third full-length release, must be what it sounds like when androids become aware. Together with Will Gregory, Goldfrapp’s usual synth partner, she’s made what might be the ultimate expression of her wickedly sultry electro-pop. The album’s parts mesh seamlessly, from computerized glam to…
Arts Of hypertext and holograms
The Heart Without Borders festival explores the literary frontier with Robert Coover In the pantheon of experimental American writing, no one wears the Hamburgler’s grin quite like Robert Coover. Since he made his debut in 1966 with Origin of the Brunists, the 74-year-old prankster has played three-card monte with the conventions and ornaments of literary…
Music Current Choice
How soon is now? There was a time when every sensitive teenage boy had a Smiths’ Meat Is Murder poster on his wall and affected a melodramatic Morrissey croon for his high-school garage band. For Ramesh Srivastava, that time is now. Srivastava, the literate leader of the Austin guitar-pop quintet Voxtrot, performs the most brazen…
Arts Post-Netiquette
Space-age cell phones, Stone-Age manners Last month in a little theater outside Houston, an Australian tourist was enjoying a matinee of Brokeback Mountain. Halfway through the film, a cell phone rang. A woman answered it and began talking. Our international friend motioned for her to be quiet, but when the conversationalist ignored her, she reached…
Arts In the round
News and notes from the San Antonio theater scene This month ITR is all about comings and goings. First, the new kids in town: The Attic Repertory has taken up residence at Trinity University and will make its debutante bow with Harold Pinter’s one-act, One for the Road, May 4-6 (the inaugural season begins in…
Media It’s a hard-knock life
Tsotsi offers gritty redemption in Johannesburg’s slums “Tsotsi” means “thug,” and even that epithet is fairly kind to the character who wears the name in this celebrated new film from South Africa. “Thug” suggests more threat than follow-through, more meanness than menace, but Tsotsi himself is a cold-blooded killer. Right up front, we see his…
Media The quiet after the storm
“The Texas Tornado,” Margo Jones left regional theaters in her wake Sweet Tornado sounds like something you could order at Earl Abel’s (“Another slice of Sweet Tornado Pie, ma’am?) but it’s actually the awkward title of a new PBS documentary about another Texas institution: Margo Jones, a.k.a. “The Texas Tornado,” the life force behind the…
Media Special screenings
CineMujer Film Festival Presented by the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and Palo Alto College, CineMujer, a women’s film festival, continues March 29-31. Featured films include Letters from the Other Side, a documentary chronicling the women left behind by undocumented workers; Shape of Water, highlighting women who combat abuse against women, deforestation, and the Israeli-Palestinian…
Media Blank slate
Unknown White Male is the story about what’s left in amnesia’s wake Mere moments into filmmaker Rupert Murray’s documentary debut, Unknown White Male, I’m rapt. It’s got a heckuva hook to it, to be sure: A 35-year-old man snaps out of an unconscious daze on a New York subway to find that he hasn’t the…
Media Armchair Cinephile
The World and The World It’s been more than six months since this column was devoted wholly to foreign-language titles, and that’s probably too long. Let’s leave the Truffauts and Fellinis on the shelf for a few weeks, and start with the non-romance languages: From Hungary and Greece, respectively, come works by two of contemporary…
News Chief concerns
Bill McManus’s political savvy has made him popular with minority leaders, but not always with the cops under his command When Bill McManus takes command of the San Antonio Police Department on April 17, he might feel like he’s stuck in a time warp. The problems McManus will encounter with the SAPD are remarkably similar…
Food & Drink Don’t think, just eat
Let your belly guide your dim sum choices at Chef Chan Tea House Choreographing a team of crack Chinese-food aficionados for an assault on Chef Chan Tea House, a new dim-sum parlor, wasn’t hard. The difficulty lay in the familiar feeding frenzy that followed. With the arrival of each cart, the excitement only mounted, until…
News Speed reads
Peace choir A Season for Nonviolence Local Task Force Leader Dana Clark is organizing a 100-voice Peace Choir to sing at the final event of this year’s SNV, to take place at the peaceCENTER, 1443 S. St. Mary’s, April 1. Proceeds from the concert will benefit Alamo Children’s Advocacy Center. Those who wish to participate…
Food & Drink All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene Sound the trumpets, Ruta Maya Riverwalk, 107 E. Martin, is finally going to celebrate its grand opening. The four-day pachanga launches at 9 p.m. Thursday, March 30, with alternating spoken-word and DJ sets, and continues throughout the weekend with live music acts Bombasta, Sexto Sol, and…
News Party lines
The Barbara Renaud Gonzalez show Two new members of the board of directors of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Cynthia Segovia and Javier Guevara, sat for their first time last week with four veteran members. Chairman Juan Aguilera called the meeting to order. GCAC President R. Bret Ruiz and board members Patricia Celis and Laura…
Food & Drink High steak dinner game
Bet on the beef at Fleming’s and don’t sweat the sides Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse has been open less than two months and is that the moon-surface terrain of Gregg Popovich’s face shining over the bar? Whispering in his ear is epicurean gadfly Harold Wood who we last met over lunch at Andrew Weissman’s Sandbar when…
News Kicking the fossil-fuel habit
Consumer demand is key to solving our pollution problems On March 19, 60 Minutes aired a segment featuring government scientist James Hansen, the world’s leading researcher on global warming, who contended the Bush Administration has put a lid not only on what Hansen can say about the effects of fossil fuels on the climate but…
Food & Drink Meatless in Steer City
Children of the Quorn Ugandan dictator and alleged cannibal Idi Amin reportedly once remarked that human flesh tastes like chicken. If Amin’s palate was accurate (and who would argue the point?), then human flesh also tastes like Quorn because Quorn tastes like chicken. Available in Europe since 1991, Quorn (pronounced kworn) is made from fungi,…
News Briefs
Bridge over turgid water Construction could soon begin on a bridge that would span one of the city’s notorious low-water crossings on Henderson Pass in District 9, but residents want to know what the public works department plans to do with about 30 oak trees that stand in the way. Mary Mast and other residents…
Music Unseen forces
The Boston band can’t decide what it hates more: trendy political punk or the current administration The Unseen aren’t saying anything new. In fact, it’s all been said before: Our president is the embodiment of evil; corporate avarice is killing the world; we’re going to hell in an oil- and blood-soaked hand basket. Punk rock…
Media That’s a wrap
The low-down on this week’s premieres Fourteen years after Sharon Stone (Casino) ice-picked her way to stardom in Basic Instinct, the Academy Award-nominated actress reprises her role as bisexual murderer Catherine Tramell in the sequel, Basic Instinct 2, minus Michael Douglas. Now settled in London, the sexy novelist is in trouble with the law again…
