Cover Story
Paralympic soccer club at Morgan's Wonderland opens new doors
Glossy multi-hued butterflies line the path leading to the Morgan’s Wonderland gymnasium that sits directly adjacent to an immaculate carousel adorned with ponies, zebras, and the occasional tiger. Inside the gym, the celebration of color continues as violet bleachers and lavender walls with light green accents reflect off a glistening hardwood court. A trio of…
Artist opportunity, but hurry
Think public art is an insiders’ game? Many artists do, but it’s the daunting complexity of the endeavor — working with contractors, and managing plans and paperwork — that keeps the same names on the lists. Here’s a way to learn the ropes. Public Art San Antonio (PASA), is working with local artist Cruz Ortiz to recruit a team of local artists and…
Pick of the Day: Lower Dens
After releasing three folksy solo EPs and a “best of” recording (Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom) on Devendra Barnhart’s Gnomonsong imprint, Houston-born Baltimore-based singer-songwriter Jana Hunter re-emerged as the beautifully haunting voice of the indie rock outfit Lower Dens (Hunter backed by Will Adams, Geoff Graham, Nate Nelson, Carter Tanton). NPR described the quintet’s 2010…
ACL Day 3: Red Hot Chili Peppers
At the end of Day 3 of ACL, all stages shut down except for the main stage where the headliner plays. The entire crowd congregates in this one place for the final show. This year, ACL gave us the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Most of the front row of people had been standing there all…
Jenelle Esparza's large format photographs capture prehistoric memories
Inspired by Mesoamerican imagery, Jenelle Esparza’s first solo show since graduating from UTSA is an impressive debut. Shot on a large format film camera using archaic (circa 1950) orthochromatic film made for cinematography, the large black and white prints display fine skin tones, but exceedingly high contrast in capturing fabric. Scanned and printed digitally, leaving…
ACL 2012 Day 3: Gary Clark Jr.
(photo by Jaime Monzon) Gary Clark Jr. knows how to start a show — he throws a bomb from the very beginning. Some (especially those with not enough good material) think you have to start slowly, or else “where do you go from there?” Fortunately for the world, Clark has plenty of ammunition. He started…
ACL 2012 Day 2: Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Neil Young and Jack White were the headliners on Day 2 of ACL, playing at the exact same time. Who would you choose to see? Neil Young is a legend, and Neil Young & Crazy Horse is a legendary band that you wouldn’t get to see normally. So I chose to see Neil Young. The…
ACL Day 2: Gotye
You can’t go anywhere without hearing Gotye’s hit single “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Not even ACL. Nobody here seemed to mind and were definitely hyped to hear them. The band’s set was a mix of music, atmosphere, and visuals. Gotye was never in one place or instrument for too long. Aside from singing,…
ACL 2012 Day 2: Metric
One of the shows I was most excited about at ACL 2012 was Metric. The band recently put out one of their best albums, Synthetica, and it’s been constantly in my stereo as was their prior release, Fantasies. I didn’t think I could like them anymore until I saw them live. They absolutely blew ACL…
Pick of the Day: Échale! Latino Music Estyles with Antibalas and Brownout
This is one of the most exciting offerings of the free Échale series: Brooklyn’s 11-piece Antibalas (pictured) is an unpredictable Afro-funk powerhouse. Their latest self-titled album (released in August) might remind you of Fela Kuti, but it’s only one of the band’s many shades. Nine-piece Brownout is the funky alter ego of Grupo Fantasma, and…
ACL 2012 Day 1: Avicii
While the Black Lips were crushing the Bud Light stage on Friday night, at the other end of Zilker Park (the AMD stage) a dark rave was taking place. Twenty-three-year-old Swede Tim Bergling (better known as Avicii, the sixth best DJ in the world, according to DJ Magazine in 2011) kept the dark crowd happy…
ACL Day 1: M83
Lights set their sights to the sky as people congregated to the Barton Springs stage for M83’s grandiose and heartfelt performance. To begin their set, Yann Gonzalez and Morgan Kibby’s booming croons reverberated in late night sky as metallic synths lightly coated their voices in “Intro.” Later into their set, Morgan Kibby’s dulcet falsetto in…
Pick of the Day: Una Noche de la Gloria
Like many of the most buzzed-about happenings in the the co-mingling art and fashion worlds, Una Noche de la Gloria: Contemporary Art in the Cultural Zone delivers a not-to-be-missed evening of multi-media mayhem. But the four-year-old event breaks the mold as a free celebration that’s open to all. Presented by the Contemporary Art and Literature…
ACL Day 1: The Black Keys
Walking over to the Bud Light stage was not easy 15 minutes before The Black Keys came on. This was undoubtedly the biggest crowd of the night (only Florence + The Machine, which immediately preceded them, came close), and the mood seemed to be that everyone was ready to party. It was the loudest crowd…
ACL Day 1: Weezer
If I could choose the first song that Weezer would play in any show I saw them at it would be “My Name is Jonah.” And that is exactly how it went down. Rivers Cuomo could be seen up on stage kicking a ball around minutes before they came on. From then on it was…
ACL 2012 Day 1: Patterson Hood
At the BMI stage, Patterson Hood (from the Drive-by Truckers) had the risky task of performing at the same time as Florence + the Machine, who stole most of the crowd as a headliner at the Bud Light stage. Yet, Hood (who released his solo album Heat Lighting Rumbles in the Distance in September) had…
ACL 2012 Day 1: Florence + The Machine
As I’m writing this, Florence Welch is still delivering a powerful set at the Bud Light stage (she started at 6:30pm). She’s going through basically every song from her two albums (Lungs and Ceremonials), but I wanted to come back to the media tent and and warn those inexperienced in big festivals: if you really…
ACL Day 1: Afghan Whigs
Afghan Whigs recently reunited after their breakup in 2001. Last time I saw them, they opened up for Aerosmith at Retama Park. People kept asking “who is this band?” They don’t seem to have that problem anymore, as they appear to have gotten more popular while they were broken up. The audience at ACL were…
ACL 2012 Day 1: What to expect when you arrive
Austin City Limits 2012 started today, and here’s some helpful tips to plan your trip: Parking: The One Texas Center lot (Barton Springs Road and South 1st) is free today after 5pm and will be $10 Saturday and Sunday. If you’re loaded, you can park closer to the festival for $30 a day. There’s other…
“San Antonio Four” screening to examine women’s innocence claims
Anna Vasquez, 37, is 12 years into a 15-year sentence at Murray Unit in Gatesville. Arrested at age 19, she had planned on going to nursing school Elizabeth Ramirez, Anna Vasquez, Cassandra Rivera, and Kristie Mayhugh were accused unspeakable things. Ramirez’s nieces, then age 7 and 9, claimed a week-long stay at their aunt’s one-bedroom…
Pick of the Day: The Firebugs
Penned by Swiss playwright Max Frisch in 1953, the radio play Biedermann und die Brandstifter evolved into the dark metaphorical comedy The Firebugs. In the play, Gottlieb Biedermann, a middle-class man of the house, is hoodwinked into allowing a smarmy duo turn his attic into a workshop stacked with barrels of gasoline and blasting caps.…
Oscar winner Mira Sorvino on ‘Union Square,’ ‘Romy & Michele’ sequel
Oscar winner Mira Sorvino (“Mighty Aphrodite”) stars in the family drama “Union Square.” In Union Square, Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite) plays Lucy, a boisterous Bronxite who decides to make a surprise visit to her estranged sister Jenny (Tammy Blanchard) who is about to get married. During an interview with me, Sorvino, 45,…
Time Upon Once: 3 Tales by Johanna DeBiase
The fairy tale is a timeless tale. But we love to update, rearrange, reconfigure the familiar to make it new and more applicable, but the beautiful sometimes horrifying center still quivers, groans and blushes (albeit what we consider to be the “center” shifts with time). Johanna DeBiase proves this with intelligence, humor and creative insight…
¡ASK A MEXICAN!
Dear Mexican: As a college educated Mexican-American, I had my fair share of Chicanas in college…all of which my jefita considered putas with books. But now that I graduated, I’m going out with a gabacha for the first time. She’s nice, bilingual, tall, skinny, educated and a liberal with liberal gabacho parents so they accept…
San Antonio March for Indigenous Dignity still going strong a decade later
Dancers at Columbus Park during the 2010 Indigenous Rights March. It’s one thing that the U.S. (mostly) still celebrates Columbus Day, a federal holiday since 1937. But it’s another thing to have a presidential proclamation ordering the flag to be flown at all public buildings in honor of “Columbus’ bold expedition [and] pioneering achievements,” as…
Pick of the Day: Open Sesame! A Bollywood Pantomime
Like “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” is a folk tale translator Antoine Galland inserted into One Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights). Since the 1700s, the story — about a poor young man who finds himself in a sticky situation after learning the secret password to a loot-filled cave —…
Tom Slick's Mind Science Foundation seeking to do 'Good' for San Antonio
We’re in for it. That was the not-so-subtle subtext of Ian McGilchrist’s Mind Science Foundation-hosted March lecture inside the well-apportioned Pearl Stables. In a sweeping, humorous survey of human cultural development and brain research, the renowned British psychiatrist teased out hints in the seemingly random (studies suggesting children are finding it more difficult to recognize…
RecChanges focuses on recreation to improve communities
This post marks the second anniversary of Beyond Paychecks blog on nonprofits for the San Antonio Current. During the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure to meet a number of passionate, energetic people involved in nonprofit start-ups. The next generation nonprofit entrepreneur is creative, collaborative and looking to challenge the way established nonprofits are…
Pick of the Day: Kathrine Daluz Maple: “Nectar”
Local artist Kathrine Daluz Maple unveils a new series of encaustic paintings at AnArte. At the reception: vino, “Nectar Mimosas,” and an art talk at 7pm. Free; 7pm Wed, Oct 10; AnArte Gallery, 7959 Broadway, (210) 826-5674, anartegallery09.com. Check out our full online calendar of upcoming events here: calendar.sacurrent.com.
CD review: The Citizens Band wants YOU to vote
The Citizens Band Grab a Root and Growl (Press Here Records) ***1/2 Touted as “the most exciting act in New York” by Paper magazine and heralded in The New Yorker and Vogue, The Citizens Band is a cabaret act with a message — “If you don’t vote, you hurt yourself and you can’t blame nobody…
Board rules DiGiovanni violated ethics code
On Tuesday night, the city’s Ethics Review Board issued a gentle admonishment against Deputy City Manager Pat DiGiovanni, ruling that he broke the city’s ethics code but failing to lay out any punishment. DiGiovanni had sought the ERB’s opinion on whether he violated ethics rules when he: 1) Stayed on a selection committee this summer…
Gwendolyn gets friendly
Since opening a year and a half ago, Gwendolyn has firmly held her ground: a circle of land precisely 150-miles in radius from the small restaurant on the banks of the San Antonio River. That’s the limited territory that provides the artisanal fixings for Michael Sohocki’s expression of extreme locavore principles. In a quest for…
Dissecting the albums that drove South Africa nuts
I bought Coming from Reality, Rodriguez’s second LP, at Record Town in Central Park Mall in 1971. However, other than Rodriguez’s Mexican-Indio face on the cover, the recording produced in England had little Latino music roots or cultural heritage. Still, a few cuts soared. My favorite was "A Most Disgusting Song." The lyrics say it…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Ten percent of all sexually suggestive text messages are delivered to the wrong number. Take precautions to make sure you’re not among that ten percent in the coming weeks. It will be extra important for you to be scrupulous in communicating about eros and intimacy. The stakes will be higher than…
Vote God
My first attempt to chat gay rights, women’s rights, and freedom of (and from) religion with a participant at Saturday’s Texas Leadership Coaltion rally abruptly ended when the placard-carrying man looked at me squarely and said, "Hell is a terrible place to be for eternity." He was part of a group of local conservative Christians…
Expect standout wines at Max's Wine Dive this weekend
It’s officially fall: the frost is on the pumpkin, leaves are turning colors, sweaters have come out from under the bed … oh, wait; I haven’t lived in Boston for years. In San Antonio, it’s OK to wear white past Labor Day — and to continue drinking white wine, for that matter. But if you…
Ultraísta: 'Ultraísta '
Nigel Godrich, best known as the long-time producer (and un-official sixth member) of Radiohead, is finally stepping out from Thom Yorke’s small, wiry shadow with a new band and album, both called Ultraísta. Fans of the more beat-centric RH material and Yorke’s Atoms for Peace project will enjoy the usual bleeps, bloops, and fuzzy synths…
Shower scenes just lagnappe in 'Chicago Fire'
Emily Owens, M.D. (8pm Tue, CW) Mamie Gummer plays a young doctor just starting out at a Denver hospital. Emily still bears the scars of being a high school nerd, and she’s dismayed to learn that hospitals are the grownup equivalent of high school. There are the cute guys who don’t notice you, the mean…
Blue Star Brewing's new talent in the kitchen causing more than First Friday commotion
Since 1996, the beer has been the main pull at Blue Star Brewing — with burgers, fries, and the like offered to soak up the suds. Not bad food, but a definite second to the home-brew. But since last summer, changes in personnel have quietly brought changes to the menu and added a new tone…
'American Copia' offers an all-access pass to our national entitlements
"Today I am going to the grocery store," begins Javier O. Huerta’s American Copia: an Immigrant Epic. This is the sentence the INS required him, as part of his naturalization process, to write in order to prove his English language proficiency. Huerta, now a graduate student at UC Berkeley, at the time of this momentous…
'Searching for Sugar Man' (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
For a moment in late September this solid selection of the first two albums was number 3 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. Key track: "This is not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, The Establishment Blues," an epic masterpiece Dylan should be envious of. ★★★★ (out of 5 stars)
Caught between home and the mainland, characters of 'Traveler's Rest' writhe
From the political strife of the 1920s to a hurricane in 2005, Traveler’s Rest, by San Antonio-based author and editor Jonathan Marcantoni, offers a series of short stories that chronicle a family caught in the rovings of the Puerto Rican diaspora like weary travelers in a road trip gone wrong. With allusions to Jack Kerouac’s…
Austin City Limits bids farewell to the three-day format
If you thought Austin City Limits was big, you ain’t seen nothing yet. On October 11-13, 2013, the festival will be expanded into two consecutive weekends of music, after being launched as a two-day fest in 2002 and held as a three-day ever since. The announcement was made 12 months in advance, which shows the…
Van Morrison: 'Born to Sing: No Plan B'
Van Morrison’s best release in ages is bound to invite an unfair comparison. No, it’s not as good as Dylan’s Tempest, but it’s surprisingly agile and lively. Morrison’s arrival on Blue Note is well-timed, as the arrangements and compositions are done in a skillful jazz idiom. But this is no predictable late-career turn to easy…
Go ahead, chalk it up
Painting in pastels (dry pigments mixed with a binder to make chalk), goes way back — Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) mentions the practice in his notebooks. In Europe, pastels have been used in street painting for centuries, most often to make copies of saints’ images in cathedral plazas. Passers-by would drop a coin to the…
¡ASK A MEXICAN!
Dear Readers: The Mexican must take the week off because his home paper is publishing its annual Best Of issue — if the devil ever condemns you to visit Orange County, pick up the OC Weekly! To honor our Best Of, here’s a doozy from 2006 — if you’ve ever heard me lecture, you know…
Newsmonger: State rejects GEO's bid for psych hospital, Fusion Centers under fire, Ethics probe heads to hearing
State rejects GEO’s bid for psych hospital What exactly was it that tanked the GEO Group’s proposal to take over management of the Kerrville State Hospital? Was it the patient found dead in a scalding bath at a South Florida GEO-run psychiatric hospital, his body discovered with skin "sloughing" off his face? The rehab programs…
Slow Food lessons and hip-hop Thai
Chef Michael Sohocki from Restaurant Gwendolyn is teaching cooking courses every Sunday through October 21 to promote Slow Food South Texas, our local chapter of the locavore phenomenon that is Slow Food International. The classes are at 3 p.m. in the Auld House at the San Antonio Botanical Garden (555 Funston). This Sunday, attendees will…
'Searching for Sugar Man' tells inspirational story of disregarded musician
Prophet. Inner-city poet. More popular than Elvis Presley. The numerous ways mysterious Mexican-American folk singer Sixto Rodriguez (also known as Jesús) is passionately described in the fascinating documentary Searching for Sugar Man are all heartfelt. From the interviews with producers who reminisce about his short-lived career to the political insight he brought to South African…
Pick of the Day: Judgement Day
As far as “string metal” goes, Oakland-based trio Judgement Day owns the genre. Formed in 2002 by brothers Anton (violin) and Lewis Patzner (cello) and fully realized with the addition of drummer Jon Bush, Judgement Day went from playing the streets of Berkeley to touring with Dredg and Mates of State and collaborating with Bright…
