Live Review: Queensryche @ Sunken Garden Theater – May 23
Story and photos by Greg M. Schwartz gschwartz@sacurrent.com One of San Antonio’s hidden gems received a rare chance to shine this past weekend when the Sunken Garden Theater in Brackenridge Park hosted the two-day South Texas Rock Fest. With the stage’s Greco-Roman architecture and pastoral park setting, the venue brings to mind classic West coast…
Live & Local: Articles of Separation
Tonight, Live & Local will be heading out to watch Articles of Separation perform at the Ten Eleven , the club formerly known as the Warhol. The Articles will be opening for Kill Rocks Stars artists the Shaky Hands and the Thermals (read our reviews of both these bands here). The Articles claim to play…
Voter ID showdown looms in Austin this weekend
Months of contentious debate could come to a head tomorrow with a looming legislative showdown at the Statehouse in Austin over the controversial voter ID bill, SB 362. Speaker of the House Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) has scheduled the bill for debate on Saturday. The bill would require Texas citizens to show a photo ID…
Chaléwood No. 9: Zulay Henao
Zulay Henao — Fighting By Kiko Martinez San Antonio Current contributing writer paperboy5456@yahoo.com Don’t let Colombian actress Zulay Henao’s innocent look fool you. Although she didn’t get to show off her skills in her new film Fighting, she does have some combat training under her belt from the four years she served in the U.S.…
Gonzalez bombs climate change bill
Or: Why if circus trainers were politicians, they would have no faces to speak out of… Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” the old saying goes. It does not, the precipitator of this maxim surely knew, count with global warming legislation. U.S. Representative Charlie Gonzalez is trying to put the…
River Re-Development Roundup Part 4: Museum Reach Preview
Next week, (coming out 5/27), the Current brings you a mega-special feature on the May 30th opening of the San Antonio River’s “Museum Reach” re-development: what we like, what we’re dubious about, and what we think it means for the city and the arts. Many images, interviews, history, hopefully some maps, and some recommendations. So…
Wind Beneath Their Own Wings
By Gilbert Garcia This is the moment when today’s Council lovefest got out of hand: After nearly an hour of Council members telling Daddy … um, make that outgoing Mayor Phil Hardberger, how much they’ll miss him, District 2’s Sheila McNeil saluted her friend, District 6’s tearful Delicia Herrera, by referring to her as “my…
210SA: Imitation is the sincerest form of hackery
We haven’t picked on 210SA in a while (publicly, anyway â?? every issue you guys put out contains at least one unintentionally hilarious item that makes for great inter-office riffing), but the cover of this week’s not-alt mag had us experiencing déjá vu. Under all that tasteful type treatment, we’d recognize the distinctive swirls and…
OPERATION ALL TALK, NO-ACTION ACTION
There are some aspects of the Underground economy I wanted to cover in this story, like barter and trade among artists, and places and people who send money to Mexico, which will appear in later stories. I did 17 interviews (over two and a half hours audio footage) over several weeks and a ton of…
Jigar Shah: Solar Titan
Don’t disrespect, Jigar told SA audiences yesterday. Solar is ready. Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com What do we eat, if not the Sun? We’ve long gobbled up its energy converted by plants, converted by cows, converted with extra bacon grease. More recently, we have learned to consume the sun’s energy more directly, converted by photovoltaic arrays on…
Thermal expansion
Release Date: 2009-05-20 Released in 2006, the Thermals’ breakout album The Body, the Blood, and the Machine was a masterpiece of Bush-era bitterness. Frontman and lyricist Hutch Harris exorcised his impotent anger at the Christian hypocrisy, American empiricism, and politics of fear that defined the reign of Texas’ favorite son over bassist/drummer Kathy Foster’s unrelenting…
Live & Local
Release Date: 2009-05-20 Every so often a band reaches you at the perfect time. Maybe you’ve had some relationship issues, family issues, or just regular “I need to get drunk” issues. Whatever your troubles may be, the Cardinal Health is willing to take you away from them for about half an hour and transport you…
Time out of place
Release Date: 2009-05-20 Dive bars are like gritty community theater, with cheap production design, over-acting, and occasional soliloquies of dysfunction. In contrast, the modern hotel bar is like a slick Hollywood film — extravagant production design, understated performances, with style favored over substance. Enter the Aloft Hotel (of the boutique W Hotel family). Our first…
American Violet
Critic’s Pick American Violet Director: Tim Disney Screenwriter: Tim Disney Cast: Nicole Beharie, Alfre Woodard, Michael Oâ??Keefe, Tim Blake Nelson, Will Patton Release Date: 2009-05-20 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Film Just when you think it’s safe to call yourself a Texan comes another case of such brutish bigotry you wonder if maybe Governor Rick Perry was…
Veckatimest
Veckatimest Composer: Grizzly Bear Conductor: Grizzly Bear Label: Warp Release Date: 2009-05-20 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording From the first jazzy chords of kinetic album opener “Southern Point,” Grizzly Bear has a spring in its step — the kind of sly self-possession that signals the group knows something you don’t (and not just the proper pronunciation…
21st Century Breakdown
21st Century Breakdown Composer: Green Day Conductor: Green Day Label: Reprise Release Date: 2009-05-20 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Divided into three acts with recurring themes and musical motifs running throughout, American Idiot follow-up 21st Century Breakdown is another indictment of rampant American idealism. But where Idiot took on Bush and his overseas war machine, Breakdown…
Funcrusher Plus
Funcrusher Plus Composer: Company Flow Conductor: Company Flow Label: Definitive Jux Release Date: 2009-05-20 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Maybe the best comment on 1998 underground hip-hop classic Funcrusher Plus comes after Company Flow’s Bigg Juss spouts a stream of seemingly random letters and numbers in “Population Control.” If you don’t understand, Juss explains, “this isn’t…
The Bright Mississippi
The Bright Mississippi Release Date: 2009-05-20 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording If you’ve heard a great song recorded in New Orleans sometime in the second half of the 20th century, chances are pretty good Allen Toussaint had something to do with it. He’s a songwriter, producer, arranger, pianist, and (occasionally) singer, who’s worked with Elvis Costello,…
Art Opening: grays and blues
Release Date: 2009-05-20 Lawrence Markey presents five oil paintings by Rudolf de Crignis (1948-2006) entitled grays and blues. Each painting is on a 30×30 inch square canvas focusing on grays, and, yes, blues (aquamarine to be specific). At first glance the paintings seem monochromatic, but are in fact an accumulation of more than sixty layers…
Cedric the Entertainer
Release Date: 2009-05-20 You have to give Cedric his due. Not only for his accomplishments in film, television, and comedy, but because he’s actually going to come here. Following a string of cancellations over the last few months (and let’s not even mention swine-flu related unrest) we’re happy to see a top act make it…
Sole w. The Vultures
Release Date: 2009-05-20 It’s hip-hop night at the newly minted Ten Eleven club (formerly the Warhol.) It’s extremely funny/sad that, considering how much Andy ripped off all the artists around him, his institution would have the balls to sweat other people. Touring act Sole headlines but we’re very curious about the macabre hip-hop madness of…
Kerrville Folk Festival
Release Date: 2009-05-20 The Kerrville Folk Festival returns for its 38th year with 18 straight days of acoustic singer/songwriter music. Consider it one big open-air coffee shop, but without the coffee. Performers come from small towns and just about every crunchy hippy hideout across the contiguous 48 states. In addition to a plethora of South…
Falling for Las Canarias’ New American cuisine
Release Date: 2009-05-20 Las Canarias would be one of the city’s loveliest dining spaces even without its perch on the River Walk. But toss in a table at the windows overlooking el rio, season with strains of classic guitar by el Curro, and they have you before hello. The food that follows is appealing, too,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The fleas infesting dogs’ skin have greater leaping power than the fleas on cats. Why do you think that is, Aries? Maybe you should use your waxing brainpower to get to the bottom of this great mystery. Just kidding! While it is true that in the coming weeks you will have…
Miner threat
Cole Wilson knows what you’re thinking, and, quite frankly, he’s getting kind of annoyed. The North East School of the Arts grad is all too aware of the impression you get from his band Apple Miner Colony’s MySpace page — which boasts a 20-member band roster and sepia-toned group photos featuring the 20-some odd vintage-washed…
The Sound & The Fury
If you’ve ever wondered what Minor Threat would have sounded like with bagpipes and mandolin, Flatfoot 56 might not provide a satisfactory answer, but this Celt-obsessed Chicago Oi! punk quartet probably gets as close as you’re liable to find in this lifetime. With rampaging anthems such as “City on a Hill” and “Brotherhood,” this veteran…
Amuse-BOUCHE
20Nine Wine Bar is hosting a tasting and bottle-signing of the excellent Ridge Zinfandels this Thursday, 6:30-7:30 p.m., and if you find them as addictive as A-B does, you can buy a retail case for a 10-percent discount. $19 includes appetizers; call (210) 798-WINE to reserve a seat. These are great wines to have on…
Film SA! Take three
It looked like things might turn around five years ago. Drew Mayer-Oakes was settling into his new job as head of San Antonio’s film commission, created in 1985 as an arm of the Convention and Visitors Bureau. The commission, paid for with a portion of the CVB’s multi-million-dollar hotel/motel tax funding, was established to court…
S’Nuff Film
Attention potential stage parents: Has your child always had a secret wish to perform? A wish they’ve always been too shy to express or even perceive, perhaps, but a desire that’s been eating them up inside ever since you, I mean they, were young? If so, drag the sniveling little ingrate to the downtown branch…
Book of revolutions
John Connor’s initials are JC. That’s not to alarm anybody, but considering a few instances of obvious cross imagery, the film’s conspicuous subtitle, and the fact that the series has so far manufactured its dramatics almost exclusively through self sacrifice, none of us should be too shocked if this new trilogy of films Christian Bale’s…
Arrested development
Danville Chadbourne must have been hot shit in the ’80s. A sensualist and a perfectionist of formal abstraction, he’s also amazingly prolific: 1,400 documented works in 29 years, by his own count. Blue Star’s large main gallery is currently very full with part one of a retrospective: paintings, sculpture, and ceramics, all in the artist’s…
Blown cover
The boy in the art bubble is back, bounding through HemisFair last week in his latest creation, the Walking Fish, for local artists and documentarians ThePrimeEights, who are creating a short film for Texas visual-arts site Glasstire.com. The Current caught up with Jimmy Kuehnle for a quick chat while he huffed and puffed in the…
Between a rock and a Hardberger
Phil Hardberger likes to say that the San Antonio City Council is a family. At times, a backbiting, frustrated bunch of sibling rivals, but a family nonetheless. From the moment he assumed the mayor’s office in 2005, Hardberger has taken the old-school, head-of-the-table (or head-of-the-dais) role of family patriarch: alternately stern and reassuring, a spoonful…
Goats in the machine
Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia? uses one of society’s few remaining unmentionable taboos to explore the limits of tolerance. It begins as a conventional drawing-room family comedy, then verges on absurdist farce only to metastasize into blood-soaked Shakespearean tragedy. Director Tim Hedgepeth and a top-notch cast punch every possible emotional button during…
Home on the Range
My 16-year-old pit-bull mix Nemo died in February, and now everyone seems to want to know when I’ll be getting another dog. I find the question mildly insensitive, but I also understand where they’re coming from. When my other pit-bull mix Lola died a few years back, I did start shopping for a “replacement” almost…
ARTifacts
When I was a high-school miscreant and habituated speech tournaments, Agnes of God was a favorite cutting to be performed by a certain type of teenage actress: mystical, enigmatic, yet capable on a nanosecond’s notice of delivering Methodesque, caterwauling, turned-up-to-11 histrionics, so you’d better watch out. In case you don’t already know, John Pielmeier’s drama…
The QueQue
Pee porridge hot In the ongoing case against Bexar County Probation — your local “don’t ask me for a reliable pee test” Community Supervision and Corrections Department — we spy justice’s golden glimmer. Local attorney David Van Os has been busy gathering depositions from Chief Bill Fitzgerald, his legal eagle Kathy Cline, and others, despite…
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY
In a country whose economy is experiencing the worst crisis since the Great Depression, San Antonio’s got the dubious luck of being a poor city already: Our average median family income scrapes along at about two-thirds the national benchmark. Roughly a quarter of Bexar County’s children live under the poverty line, yet we consider ourselves…
Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop
Publisher: Capcom ESRP: $39.99 Back in 2006 Capcom came out with the original Dead Rising for the Xbox 360. It turned out to be a great new title, one of the few released during the 360’s first year on the market. If you missed it on Xbox then your big break has arrived, like several…
Dokapon Journey
Publisher: Atlus MSRP: $29.99 Most party games are so awful that you could fill a book with all their shortcomings. Since print is dead, Atlus opted for making a game to show DS owners how incredible the genre should be. Dokapon Journey is a party game that sets itself apart by introducing turn based RPG…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: My wife and I have an argument going on about pirates. And since you are the source for all things Mexican, I thought I’d ask: While I know there were Spanish and Portuguese pirates back in the early 1600s and 1700s, were there EVER any MEXICAN pirates? Not pirates from Spain who pirated…
MLB 2K9
Wii Sports proved that the Wii had the potential to be a great console for the game formerly known as America’s pastime. Its lack of anything beyond batting and pitching was its limitation, however, and Major League Baseball 2K9 by 2K Sports hopes to provide a more complete experience. From the moment you start up…
Dear Uncle Mat
I’ve been reading your column for a few months, and I am surprised to find myself asking for advice. I was talking to this girl for a couple of months and found myself liking her a lot. I haven’t dated in a while and wanted to get back in the scene with this girl. Unfortunately,…
