News : Counterpoint
Worst President? Try worst AG – Alberto Gonzales is leaving a legacy that would make Stalin smile Is President Bush the worst president in U.S. history? There’s been a lot of speculation about this lately, the debate made difficult only because some of W’s predecessors behaved so egregiously (Warren Harding and Richard Nixon come to…
News : Party lines
If you can’t beat ’em… Leon Thomas’s house was flooded by Salado Creek in 1998. He says the City piled dirt displaced by Alamodome construction in a field downstream, and several homes in two separate subdivisions were consequently flooded. Last Wednesday, Thomas stood before City Council and vowed that if the City is negligent again…
Feature The Texas Books Issue
Starcke reality At 86, Walter Starcke says he’s learning to walk his talk An army of Juan American identity in Latino war lit Art crimes Peter Carey exposes liars and culture burglars A tribute to Mr. Texas Bill Witliff saved J. Frank Dobie’s most personal papers for all to see Free Bird? Need a little…
Feature : Free Bird?
Need a little mind-bending? Cuddle up with Daniel Pinchbeck With an extraordinary mix of desperation, hope, critical acumen, self-doubt, and sheer chutzpah, Daniel Pinchbeck launched himself several years ago on a psychedelic odyssey to comprehend the possibility of the End of Time — in our times. The result? His “extravagant thought experiment,” 2012: The Return…
Feature : Starcke reality
At 86, Walter Starcke says he’s learning to walk his talk There’s just no pinning Walter Starcke down. Ask him what he professes, and the cheerful octogenarian will answer, “to be alive.” Ask him what his next lecture is going to be about, and he’ll provide, “the answer to everything.” Starcke isn’t being coy or…
Feature : Great beauty
Free Gift with Purchase chronicles the career of a magazine fashion maven Before Sephora’s laid-back, kid-in-a-candy-store approach, the Saturday circulars were our makeup siren songs. For my grandmother, it’s Elizabeth Arden. My mother gravitates towards the French-styled powerhouses Lâncome and Estée Lauder. I have had more serious relationships with Clinique and Origins than with some…
Feature : An army of Juan
American identity in Latino war lit As San Antonio recovers from its Fiesta hangover, an uncomfortable reality remains: a virtual cottage industry of “Alamo” and “Texican” literature continues to disseminate the notion that Texan slaveholding secessionists were somehow champions of freedom. The nature of the “Texas Revolution” is rendered even more complicated by the fact…
Feature : Romance aforethought
Dressed to Keel A crime has been committed in nurse-turned-bumbling-sleuth Darcy Cavanaugh’s debut novelette. It’s a crime of impersonation, and it has nothing to do with the strangely attired retirees aboard the cruise ship that serves as the story’s setting. I suppose I should have been tipped off by the cover illustration, which is more…
Feature : Auto-da-fé y’all
Local self-pubs go down in flames, but not without a bright moment or two “Gone are the days,” a former Publisher’s Weekly columnist recently wrote, “when self-publishing was virtually synonymous with self-defeating.” Unfortunately, that’s not entirely true. The Current receives many a self-published book from Texas authors and, as often as we can, we read…
Feature : A river of poetry
An El Paso alchemist turns fire into a river of poetry If you ever have the chance to meet author Lee Merrill Byrd, and I hope you do (she’ll be appearing June 5 at the Twig), I think you’ll notice that there is something metaphysical about her. She seems to exist in a plane slightly…
Feature : A tribute to Mr. Texas
Bill Witliff saved J. Frank Dobie’s most personal papers for all to see Certainly, any “Texas Books” roundup failing to pause at least once within its pages to drop the weighty name of J. Frank Dobie should — and would — be taken swiftly and unflinchingly to task for such an oversight. Assuming, of course,…
Feature : Camper van book
Home Away From Home: The World Of Camper Vans And Motorhomes With summer just around the corner, it’s time to start scheduling vacations and getaways. For those looking for an alternative to their typical summer travel plans, Home Away From Home: The World of Camper Vans and Motorhomes proposes another option: Under the motto, “if…
Feature : The high-yellow rose
Making Myth Of Emily: Emily West De Zevala And The Yellow Rose Of Texas Legend According to the Handbook of Texas Online, Emily West-Morgan was a black woman who was in General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s tent at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, when Sam Houston and other rebel Texans attacked and won…
Media : Hero heresy
A (contentious) Top Ten list With X-Men 3 about to inject some major dollars into the world’s box office, it seems like a good time to acknowledge the great comic-book films that preceded it. Especially since there’s little chance the third chapter in a trilogy kicked off by Bryan Singer — director of this summer’s…
Media : That’s a wrap
The low-down on this week’s premieres Strange bedfellows this week: Megaton blockbuster X-Men: The Last Stand cuddles up with a dyed-in the-wool foreign indie. Play nice, fellas. Kelsey Grammer as Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand. For what seems like years now, fanboys and other dedicated denizens of comicdom have been emerging en masse from…
Music : Sound and the fury
A week on the scene His back pages The former Robert Zimmerman turns 65 on Wednesday, May 24, and that same night, Casbeers presents its 9th annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash, with a host of local and visiting artists paying tribute to the incomparable career of rock’s first great bard (with apologies to Chuck Berry…
Media : Armchair cinephile
The doc days of summer First off, an update: That lefty film club Ironweed, discussed here a few weeks back (ironweedfilms.com), doesn’t release each month’s film in a limited edition just to toy with viewers. The idea, I’ve learned, is that each title is made available briefly in the hopes that theatrical distributors will pick…
Music : After sunset
Jazz catharsis On this slow-moving Sunday, I feel compelled to write about love. For it is love in which I find myself tangled, this mess of longing, loathing, lusting, requiring and repelling love. In the ballads of “Sir Duke” (Ellington) and the imposturous tongue of an Ella scat, furiously fast, or slow and sultry, love…
Media : Jesus Christ, super stud
How many children did Lady Macbeth have? Despite fierce scholarly disputes, the question never incited murder. But the claim that Jesus begot a child with Mary Magdalene has, in Dan Brown’s adroit imagination, left a trail of blood staining two thousand years. Many pious contemporary Christians are incensed at the fictional premise that, as one…
Music : Current choice
Space commandos To accuse the Phenomenauts of gimmickry would be like accusing Dirk Nowitzki of having big teeth. It’s a fact so self-evident that making the point amounts to a colossal waste of breath. The Bay Area quintet’s gimmick — that these guys are not Oakland working stiffs, but mutant beings from another planet —…
Media : This one’s for the antelopes
Mountain Patrol is a surprisingly harrowing pursuit of Tibetan poachers Somewhere in the aesthetically pleasing but multifariously deadly Kekexili region of the Tibetan plateau, upwards of about 100,000 antelopes are currently living decidedly more carefree lives than they might’ve, say, a decade ago. At least, that seems to be the positive message to be gleaned…
Media : Special screenings
Slab cinema: My Favorite Brunette Elliott Nugent (1947) Road to… series co-stars Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour star in this mistaken-identity farce/parody, wherein a hapless baby photographer (Hope) is mistaken for a private eye by a beautiful baroness (th’other one), who prevails upon him to help rescue her uncle, a baron, who’s been kidnapped by…
Food & Drink : Cool beans
Fair Trade coffee: all the caffeine, plus living wages At 8,000 feet, the air is pure and clear in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico where steep, green hillsides are plushly carpeted in maize fields, banana plants, and coffee trees. Here, in the rich, volcanic soil, the trees break out in red berries that, when…
Food & Drink : All you can eat
News and notes from the San Antonio food scene This week, SA has two new restaurants to counterbalance the sad news that Massimo’s Ristorante e Bar has closed (not to mention that the restaurateur recently opened Sage Ristorante e Bar, 401 S. Alamo. See story page 36). Chris Erck has announced the opening of Flip…
Food & Drink : Don’t get too saucy
Massimo Pallotelli sounds off on pasta and his new restaurant, Sage “This is a million dollar place that didn’t cost a million,” reveals restaurateur Massimo Pallottelli, his deep-set brown eyes darting about like a soccer goalie. “I always wanted to move downtown, but I never had a chance in such a beautiful place.” Pallotelli’s new…
Feature : Art crimes
Peter Carey exposes liars and culture burglars Peter Carey has always been interested in provenance. His novels teem with people who lie about who they are and where they’re from. In his cackling new tale, Theft, Carey transposes these themes onto the world of contemporary art, where, despite the existence of art police and rabid…
Music : Loving cup
Buttercup embraces the SA heat with a perfect summer-pop collection Two years ago, Buttercup made a decision that required local music aficionados to figure out what to do with their Monday nights. The group decided to scale back the regularity of their Grackle Mundy shows at the Wiggle Room, reliably unpredictable gatherings that found the…
Food & Drink : The Patty nuke show
Meatless in Steer City For the record, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Schlosser killed the beast. Interpret “airplanes” as the allegorical airplanes of sober, meditative consideration, and “the beast” as my now-subdued habit of treating stuff-that-once-walked as comestibles, and you’ve got a sketchy origin story for my somewhat accidental, still-nascent vegetarianism — though not…
News : Robbing Peter to subsidize Paul
College students pay the price for Republican tax cuts Oh, those pesky liberal professors, with their insidious agendas and uncanny talent for turning fertile student minds into cesspools of aberrant thought — second only to fluoride as Communist conspiracies go. Just this year David Horowitz tipped us off that there may be as many as…
News : It’s Baker, not Rove
Greg Palast knows who stole 2000 and 2004, and how they’ll take 2008, too Have you been getting soft lately? Taking the New York Times as gospel? (It’s so well-written, after all.) Greg Palast — BBC investigative reporter, American journalist-non-grata, winner of the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award, bearer of bad news for democracy…
News : Hung up
Facing a lawsuit and consumer questions about its role in the NSA spying program, AT&T isn’t taking any calls A recent episode of Real Time With Bill Maher featured a bogus commercial for AT&T. The ad touted the telecom giant’s 2005 merger with SBC, and offered more good news for customers: an AT&T-SBC merger with…
Music : CD spotlight
Small favors “Burn the Masters,” the second track from Rye Coalition’s latest album, Curses, opens with this rowdy bunch of dudes howling, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” It’s a shameless rip of the White Stripes’ bratty melody from “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and considering Jack and Meg’s ubiquity, there’s no doubt that Rye Coalition…
