Murder Ink
MURDER INK AUGUST MURDERS THIS MONTH: 5 MURDERS THIS YEAR: 67 August 30 3:00 a.m. James Whitehead, who had left the gay nightclub the Saint early Sunday morning, was shot by San Antonio Police officer William Karman, who had responded to a 911 call regarding an assault in the neighborhood just east of San Antonio…
Murder Ink
MURDER INK SEPTEMBER MURDERS THIS MONTH: 4 MURDERS THIS YEAR: 67 September 24 7:40 p.m.UTSA director of publications Elton Smith, 61, was killed by his son Thursday evening at the family’s home in the 25400 block of North Saddle Trail in Leon Springs. The victim’s wife (and suspect’s mother) called police to report that the…
In Defense of the Third Industrial Revolution
Jeremy Rifkin steps back into the conversation about his team’s clean-energy recommendations to SA Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com There is a plan developed by a team of international energy experts for San Antonio that lays out a strategy by which the region can meet its future energy needs, save utility customers a collective $3 billion by…
Weird Press Releases, Volume I: Centered on the Knork
I get some mighty strange e-mails. I’ve decided to start sharing them with y’all. Here’s one. Boldface is emphasis mine, with my comments in parentheses and italics. VOLUME I The Knork sender: a PR lady “I have a product I would love for you to test out. It’s centered on the Knork (centered?) — which…
CD review: Richard Gein â?? Zombie Vomit
Richard Gein Zombie Vomit (Ruler Why Recordings) Before the beat for “Method Man” kicks in on Enter the Wu-Tang, Raekwon and Method Man trade some cartoonishly violent but NSFW torture threats: Chappelle’s Show Hip-Hop News – Wu-Tang Torture www.comedycentral.com “I’ll fucking tie you to a fucking bedpost with your ass cheeks spread out and shit,…
LHI Art-Sci Symposium: The Nature of Place: Land Art / Land Use
Release Date: 2009-10-21 v class=”story”> Directly across the Medina River from the Toyota Manufacturing Plant sits the Land Heritage Institute, a 1,200-acre tract rich in history and archeology. (See “Applewhite bears more fruit,” January 9, 2008.) For “The Nature of Place: Land Art/Land Use,” the LHI has organized artists, curators, archeologists, writers, and anthropologists to…
DJ Tiesto
Release Date: 2009-10-21 2004 was a pretty intense year for trance icon Tiësto. He was voted the “World’s No. 1 DJ” (for the third consecutive year, by DJ Magazine), became the first DJ to play live onstage during the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games (Athens), and was appointed Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau…
Soulfly w/ Prong & Cattle Decapitation
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2009-10-21 They might come from San Diego, but Cattle Decapitation will always have a home in a city as devoted to killer metal — not to mention traditionally made barbacoa — as San Antonio. 2009 marks year 13 for PETA’s least favorite deathgrind outfit (if you’re not up on rock’s uber…
Tastes like teen spirit
Cirque du Freak: The Vampireâ??s Assistant Director: Paul Weitz Screenwriter: Paul Weitz Cast: John C. Reilly, Ken Watanabe, Josh Hutcherson, Chris Massoglia, Ray Stevenson Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Film In the same way that sarcasm, that handy, postmodern tool against the forces of evil, helped Buffy combat the Anne Rice romanticism of undead…
Local Review
Bumps Composer: Seven-One Conductor: Seven-One Label: Rock Solid Records Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording This 20-minute compilation from San Antonio producer Seven-One features a healthy line of what I’m assuming is refined flour on its cover, but Bumps is really no more concerned with the devil powder than the bulk of modern-day hip-hop.…
The new Republic
Release Date: 2009-10-21 When Mike and Millie Van Steenburg bought the fairly nondescript restaurant the Hungry Horse, they had a specific plan in mind. The goal was to redesign the space as an artist-friendly supper club that would showcase original singer-songwriters. Their go-to guy for the project was Matt McCormack, a musician from Tennessee with…
Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel
Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Ever since her rebirth a few years ago, Mariah Carey has been on a roll. Once destined as a pop-star-flameout punch line (she started the decade with the nearly career-killing Glitter), Carey has spent the past four years and three albums renovating her…
Dead Man’s Bones
Dead Man’s Bones Composer: Dead Man’s Bones Conductor: Dead Man’s Bones Label: Anti- Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Something compels me to tell you, before I describe any aspect of this album, that it is not the leaky turd pile you probably think it is. With that in mind, Dead Man’s Bones is…
Goodnight Unknown
Goodnight Unknown Composer: Lou Barlow Conductor: Lou Barlow Label: Merge Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording In the ever-shifting spheres of indie and (semi-) popular music, today’s It Boy/Girl is destined to be tomorrow’s has-been. Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow doesn’t have to worry about such petty things. Goodnight Unknown finds him aging…
The Boys Are Back
Critic’s Pick The Boys Are Back Director: Scott Hicks Screenwriter: Scott Hicks Cast: Clive Owen, Laura Fraser, Emma Booth, George MacKay, Nicolas McAnulty Release Date: 2009-10-21 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Film Our Rating: 4.00 It’s funny how the movies will change a person. Consider Simon Carr, a political columnist for Britain’s The Independent, whom former Prime…
Art opening: Broken Brushes: German Art From the Kaiser to Hitler
Release Date: 2009-10-21 v class=”story”> Curator Gus Kopriva zones in on German works on paper from 1872 to 1945. An art-history lesson of sorts, Broken Brushes highlights a broad range of genres, including traditional portraiture, political commentary, and abstract-expressionist experimentation. Works from members of Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider),…
Screening: Martyrs
Release Date: 2009-10-21 Just in time to give you a wicked case of pre-Halloween nightmares, Fangoria Entertainment presents a free Midnight screening of Martyrs, a 2008 French gore flick, which has never been shown in SA. A blood-thirsty secret society led by an elderly woman known as “Mademoiselle” researches the concepts of martyrdom and the…
Bling Bling Fling
Release Date: 2009-10-21 To celebrate 10 years of helping women in need, the Martinez Street Women’s Center will host the Sixth Annual Bling-Bling Fling at Artpace, with our very own Sarah Fisch as emcee along with Quinn from 99.5 KISS, DJs John Mata and JJ Lopez, magic tricks, tarot readings, and a top-notch silent art…
Clogged Caps Meet & Greet
Release Date: 2009-10-21 Clogged Caps is a unique opportunity to see some of the world’s most talented aerosol artists in action. Considered the South’s largest live mural festival, Clogged Caps attracts artists from all over Europe to create (legal) graffiti art in SA. This year, Ma’Claim Crew, a progressive art collective from East Germany, will…
Cinemundo: Noseratu
Release Date: 2009-10-21 Shot in Germany in 1921, Nosferatu (“A Symphony of Horror”) is essentially an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As a precaution, director F.W. Murnau changed the characters’ names, but the story remains the same. Realtor Thomas Hutter travels to Transylvania to sell the vampirish Count Orlock a house in Germany. Upon…
Home On the Range: Dig if you will a picture
I recently read about a New York-based photo studio called Stomping Ground, which boldly claims to have “successfully reinvented the school portrait.” The portfolio on its website certainly delivers on that promise: No formal poses or cheesy backgrounds, the pictures crackle with energy, featuring exuberantly hip children, some in costume, striking a range of impish…
Guided by voces
Mario Bósquez’s bio reads like a screenplay: The playwright of Los Duendes grew up Tejano in tiny Alice, Texas. He reported on-air for KSAT in San Antonio, and co-hosted our chapter of P.M. Magazine for seven-and-a-half years. Next, the smart, handsome joven headed for la Gran Manzana, where he worked as an on-camera reporter for…
Ask A Mexican!
Dear Mexican: As teachers, we’ve been exhorted to expand our efforts in closing the achievement gap between majority and minority students (read: Anglos and Mexicans). I teach all of my students in the best ways that I can determine for each individual student, within the constraints of a classroom of 20 or more. In my…
The scourge of the Lege
Though she dubbed him Shrub and persistently ridiculed him as “just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he’s tough,” Molly Ivins and George W. Bush grew up in the same ’hood. River Oaks was Houston’s toniest address, and their families mingled with other members of the petroleum plutocracy at the nearby country club. Both…
Script doctor
Ethan Canin burst onto the literary scene in 1988 with Emperor of the Air, a short-fiction collection that he wrote while attending Harvard Medical School. The late Walker Percy hailed the work as “dazzling, at times breathtaking, at other times heartbreaking.” For a while, Canin divided his time between writing and practicing medicine. Writing ultimately…
Tilt or I remember the Parrot but not the Spiders
The colors in South Texas and Mexico are brilliant, the history rich, the stories deep and poetic. These are reasons I love it down here. One nearly ubiquitous emanation of local tradition are Lotería cards. This summer I taught a flash-fiction class at Gemini Ink and gave each of my students one of these cards…
ARTifacts
It’s not often that you get to gussy yerself up in punk-meets-Marie Antoinette finery and a tricked-out mask and go swanning ’round a jumping par-tay for a truly deserving cause. Actually, there are a couple of upcoming events where you can do all that. Masquerade balls: Trend alert? Exhibit A: This Saturday, the Sixth Annual…
Jar heads
You can buy almost any food in a can, from pineapple slices to ravioli to Spam. While most canning that’s done at home is done with glass jars, not metal cans, the verb that describes the process remains “can.” But language is dynamic, constantly evolving to keep pace with the changing meanings it conveys. And…
25th-century ‘Boy’
There’s a certain kind of grumbly 40-something fan-child who goes to the movie adaptations of those comic books, mangas, etc. he loves with a list of unrealistic demands — aspects of the source material either so ridiculous or risky, their inclusion in the movie could quite easily ruin the film within its first few minutes.…
Under Pressure
It’s a misty afternoon in San Antonio, and the crows are circling. Notorious Alamo City graffiti writer Supher is snacking on seafood and reflecting on his brainchild, the Clogged Caps Aerosol Art Festival, which turns 6 this weekend. Although he cites key figures in the graf community — including Duo, Cien, Soup, and Shek —…
Drum addicts
Nothing More is a cool-sounding but ill-fitting name for this San Antonio rock band. The word “nothing” in a band name pretty much implies metal, and adding “more” damn near makes it a Poe reference. But though NM plays an energized, moderately loud brand of rock ’n’ roll that’s aggressive, angry, or sad when it…
Live & Local
The tweens are out in full-on prepubescent rage Saturday night at the White Rabbit. Locals Starluck headline a bill packed with 20 other bands for the Come and Take It compilation release. Awash in a sea of faux-hawks, I drift to the stage and find a clear observation spot. Let me tell you, this is…
The Sound & The Fury
Hey, you! Yes, you. Right there, pretending to read this so you don’t have to make eye contact with the stinky man on the bus. And you, stinky man, scanning the page for secret messages from the ghost of Frank Zappa. You shouldn’t be doing that. Quit reading this immediately and get on the nearest…
Food Stamp shortage, imminent eminent domain reform
Stamp collection Our current scrambling over the food-stamp program didn’t come out of nowhere. Yet here in the state with some of the highest hunger rates and “food insecure” households in the nation, officials continue to blame the national recession for their backlogged and error-riddled system. In a recent interview with the Austin American-Statesman, William…
Censored
Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored for 13 years, says he’s finished with reform. It’s impossible, he says in a recent interview, to try to get major news media outlets to deliver relevant news stories that serve to strengthen democracy. “I really think we’re beyond reforming corporate media,” says Phillips, a professor of sociology at…
Dear Uncle Mat
Lately I’ve been so lost I have no idea what to do. I’m a college student with a baby boy and a baby’s daddy. But I’m still not happy. I want to do things for myself and not have to depend on him or anyone else. I have a great personality and I want to…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “The clouds are the most fertile part of the sky,” writes Guy Murchie in his book The Seven Mysteries of Life. Microbes with short life cycles live there in abundance, “eating, breathing, excreting, floating, swimming, competing, reproducing.” Next time you look up at a puffy cumulus, see it as a large…
San Anto organizer/gardener/enviro superstar honored
Lopez calling after CPS executives at an anti-nuclear protest earlier this year. Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com As a child, she playing in Leon Creek, a meandering stream that crosses Kelly Air Force Base in the southwest side of the city. But as Diane Lopez grew up, she become keenly aware how the specter of contamination at…
Food Stamp Stump: Another shining example of how outsourcing screws the poor, just as it’s supposed to
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Scrambling over the food-stamp program didn’t come out of nowhere. Yet here in the state with some of the highest hunger rates and “food insecure” households in the nation, state officials continue to blame the national recession for their backlogged and error-riddled food-stamp system. In a recent interview with the Austin American-Statesman,…
