PHOTOS: Zombie Walk 2011
Photos by Michael Barajas
Tracking the Donkey Lady beneath Donkey Lady Bridge
In H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, diabolical experimentation by a madman leads to an island being inhabited by a menagerie of anthropomorphic beast men. However, the notion of hybrids between humans and animals dates far back in history, with accounts of creatures like mermaids and centaurs being prevalent in…
A child’s view from a hot place fails to escape the pit
Hell, despite what Sartre, said about it being “other people,” is usually depicted as a lonely place, either the cascading trauma of lost relations in Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, or the clammy cochlea of torture tunnels in the those too-loud Pinhead movies inspired by his quite novella. Isolation is the everlasting imp, whether its…
Hank Williams dump means millions of Americans now report feeling ‘unprepared’ for football
ESPN has announced they are ending their nearly 20-year hostage negotiations between Hank Williams Jr. and the NFL. What started as a quiche promo for the Monday-night event became two decades of flag-waving, barn-burning hellfire led by the Country Western singer whose hold on introducing the sport to millions of fans grew to tyrannical proportions.…
The Castro, Doggett YouTube war
We here at the Current thought this little you-helped-gerrymander-the-map flap could just be a flash in the pan, sure to subside since the district fellow Democrats state Rep. Joaquin Castro and Congressman Lloyd Doggett are fighting over is anything but certain. But now that the two have opted to battle it out over the YouTubes,…
Headlights by Amanda Salerno
Here’s a piece where time is understood in the fragmentation and uneven flare of car lights passing through a room. Sleepless nights are like that. Significance shifts around and is often locked into one’s head broken only by a creak or a sudden light. Here it appears to be chronic. If you can’t sleep, check…
Interview with ‘Scare Tactics’ host Tracy Morgan, executive producer
Whether it’s escaped mental patients, zombie outbreaks, or demonic dolls, host of the SyFy hidden camera reality show Scare Tactics Tracy Morgan finds it all hilarious. During my interview with him and executive producer Scott Hallock, we discussed why watching someone who is terrified out of their mind makes for good comedy. Season 5 of…
The Wicked Stage hands out Dodecahedra
So I’ve been asked by two different parties for my thoughts concerning the ATAC Globe Awards’ list of potential winners for excellence in theater. (The awards ceremony is this Sunday.) The requests startled me. In the past, the only reason I’ve ever had any thoughts concerning potential winners was because of egregious critical lapses in…
TEDx San Antonio–dynamite for your mind
Last Saturday, I attended the 2nd annual TEDx San Antonio event at the Stieren Theater located on the Trinity University campus. TEDx (x is for independent) is a locally organized version of the highly acclaimed TED events. TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to ‘Ideas Worth Spreading.’ After starting out in 1984 as a conference…
ACLU of Texas sues ICE, private prison company
The ACLU of Texas Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking damages for three women claiming they were sexually assaulted by guards at a Texas immigration detention center with a long history of abuse. Named in the lawsuit is Donald Dunn, a former guard at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s T. Don Hutto immigration…
Manuel Solís on CineFestival’s Screenwriters Spotlight Competition
By Enrique Lopetegui elopetegui@sacurrent.com (photo by Kate Solís) CineFestival curator Manuel Solís has a point: you can make a bad movie out of a good screenplay, but you can’t make a good movie out of a bad screenplay. In that respect, CineFestival’s decision to give $1,000 to the best writer in the Screenwriters Spotlight Competition…
Evanescence: Evanescence
Evanescence’s third studio album (and first in five years) is the type critics love to hate: it comes from a pretentious band full of oversized drama and digestible darkness that has sold more than 20 million albums in a relatively short career. If Fallen (2003) was a surprise smash hit, and The Open Door (2006)…
The Classic transports to the House of Bernarda Alba
Matriarch Bernarda Alba runs a tight ship in Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba as she seeks to preserve her five daughters for marriages that suit her landed-gentry bloodline — though, as becomes clear as we watch that control unravel, no one can contain the passions of such willful women. Even the seclusion…
FUNstival requires dancing shoes, eating pants
For 51 years the Greek FUNstival has been celebrating Greek culture in San Antonio. This weekend, the three-day festival at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church (2504 N St. Mary’s) offers food, drinks, dancing, and shopping with a Mediterranean flare. Tickets are $3 at the gate, though you’ll need to buy food and drink tickets inside.…
El Paso author welcomes your criticism
The biggest threat to the literary arts, according to El Paso-born author Sergio Troncoso, is the “money culture in publishing.” It is the merging of “TV and movie culture” with publishers who want to serve as money machines.What remains, for large part, is literary escapism. “Beach reading. Reading that doesn’t matter, and doesn’t make you…
Chase Durousseau has a lot of vowels
The last time I saw Chase Durousseau he was wearing a tight-fitting dinosaur shirt featuring a very menacing velociraptor — not for his love of God’s “little jab at creationists” but for his joy in outdoing all the hipsters sporting wolf-themed shirts. Part absurdist and part realist, Chase dives into material ranging from his belief…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): If you have been resisting the command to go deeper, now is the time to surrender. If you have been hoping that the pesky little voice in your head will shut up and stop bugging you to get more involved, you’d better stop hoping. If you’ve been fantasizing about how to…
The Sandworms: Terror at Sunshine Park
Reviewing an album by the Sandworms is like describing honey without actually tasting it. More so than with other bands, you only get the full Sandworms experience by seeing them live, where they usually perform for burlesque troupes and traveling freak shows. Unlike most instrumental surf-rock bands mostly interested in grooving, the Sandworms’ third album…
Chris Isaak: Beyond the Sun
Like a dog with a rubber chew toy he won’t surrender, you have to admire Chris Isaak’s tenacity. Since emerging a quarter-century ago, he’s delivered the same Sun Studios-inflected rockabilly/crooner pop with effortless grace and implacable TV star cool, and you have to admit the two or three he hits are pitch-perfect. It makes evaluating…
Prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic gets away with murder
If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Is there a reason to remake good films beyond the obvious temptation to cash in on a great title? For artistry’s sake, it’s certainly better to remake good ideas marred by bad acting, writing, or directing, than trying to imitate what’s been done before, and better. The Thing,…
¡ASK A MEXICAN!
Dear Mexican: Really? You answered "When Should You Use Usted Instead of Tú?" recently over my "Why Won’t My Gardener Fuck Me Again If I Demand an HIV Test?" Any sad gabacho can Google for grammar tips (no offense to Yo Quiero Hablar). Meanwhile, we clueless gabachas need to know how to love our Gardeners…
Advice to the children’s museum from a past director
Last Friday the Express-News broke the story that the San Antonio Children’s Museum had received $20 million from Charles Butt, CEO and chairman of H-E-B, to build a new facility on Broadway in Alamo Heights. Butt’s gift provides almost half of the $45 million needed to construct the new complex that will almost double the…
The QueQue: SA fluoride resistance hits LULAC, Streetcar wrasslin’, Occupy speaks
SA fluoride resistance hits LULAC Thanks to San Antonio activist Henry Rodriguez, the League of United Latin American Citizens took a strong swipe at the fluoridation of public drinking-water supplies in July. But as quickly as his proffered resolution against the forced “mass medication” of the public while potentially harming minority populations and “sensitive subpopulations”…
Fast Foodie: Mesón European Dining
There’s a sliding scale for any kind of review. You know How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a bad movie, but it can be nice on a lazy Sunday. The Black Eyed Peas aren’t making ground-breaking music, but it makes a great jogging soundtrack. Some things are empirically terrible, but have a…
Live & Local: Morris Orchids at LoneStar Studios
Leonard Rader — guitarist, vocalist, and one half of the creative nucleus of Morris Orchids — describes his band as more “album-” than “stage-” oriented. But that was only the beginning of the difficulties they faced last Friday at LoneStar Studios SMART Music Festival. Rader took the stage with an updated lineup including collaborator Chris…
‘Farm system’ for covert tech contractors on display in San Antonio
The spies are in town. Thousands of them, from those inside U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies to reps with major government security contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop-Grumman. They’re all swarming the halls of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center this week for the industry’s annual trade conference known as GEOINT, shorthand for “Geospatial…
Behind the magic of Coco’s chocolate drink creations
“You know all those pre-Prohibition-style bars downtown? We’re none of that,” says Mathieu Muckensturm, head bar guy and more at Coco Chocolate Lounge & Bistro. This is apparent the moment one walks into the space dominated by red velvet booths and chandeliers both painted and pendant. It’s refreshing to have the theme so directly stated.…
Revamped Footloose is a rebel with a dancin’ cause
So this is a question I know you’ve asked yourself time and time again: How can they remake an ’80s pop culture classic like Footloose? What’s next? A CGI Back to the Future remake starring Zac Efron? I’m hoping not in my lifetime. The movie begins in present day with Blake Shelton’s country version of…
KRTU celebrates its first decade with a whole ‘Year of Jazz’
Aaron Prado was there nine years ago on the day KRTU 91.7 FM decided to go jazz. “We had no idea if it would be a flash in the pan or take off,” Prado told the Current. “Would [listeners and jazz fans] support it? Was San Antonio ready for a jazz station?” At the time,…
Björk: Biophilia
Few artists define "experimental" quite as effectively as Björk, which goes a long ways towards explaining how she has managed to remain so relevant throughout her three-decade career. It also adds weight to the claim that Biophilia, her eighth full-length, is her most experimental to date. There’s the ambitious plan to set up apps for…
Gun Selectah: Gun Selectah EP
This EP is misleading for a number of reasons. First, it’s a heavy EP, weighing in at nine tracks and a hair shy of 40 minutes. Secondly, the original material consists of only three songs jointly produced by local beat smith Ernest Gonzales (here under his Mexicans with Guns moniker) and Monterrey-based, cumbia-EDM maestro Toy…
CineFestival wants YOU
The 34th annual edition of Cine-Festival (the longest-running Latino film festival in the country) will take place at the Guadalupe from February 25 – March 3. The early deadline for entries is Friday, November 4, and films will be accepted in the following categories: Latino features, shorts, documentaries, animation, experimental films, and youth works. The…
All hail Pearl Jam: The grunge band is immortalized in a Cameron Crowe documentary
Pearl Jam Twenty (9pm Fri, PBS) I prefer Nirvana to Pearl Jam, but now Pearl Jam has something its Seattle rivals don’t: a career-capping documentary by a brilliant filmmaker. American Masters’ Pearl Jam Twenty was directed by Cameron Crowe, known for Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, the latter a memoir of his side career as…
How the quest for fire led me to the punishing Four Horsemen
More than 6,000 years ago, fledgling civilizations from Peru to the Bahamas were cultivating chili plants alongside such staples as maize and yam. And while those ancient peoples couldn’t know that research conducted millennia later would suggest that the chemical that makes chilis spicy can protect against cancer and heart disease, treat ulcers and burn…
The Apoca-List
AKA The “We’re Fucked” Index
Pillow Talk embraces the suck with an easy country tempo
Generally, musicians and music fans fall into two camps: those who believe that creativity has a shelf life and those who don’t. In the case of Pillow Talk’s Jerid Morris, 29, losing one’s creative edge is just part of growing up. “The more you unravel the whole mystery (of music), the shittier your songs become,”…
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller evoke a sense of trespass
During the 15 years that Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been in collaboration, sculpture has come into new prominence. Public art has received enhanced status as it continues to morph from plop art to site-specific projects, while gallery sculpture has become interactive, melding with installation and media works. In 1999 Cardiff…
