Druggist rocks the roof off ArtPace
Last Friday, the art-rock band Druggist, along with Marcus Rubio and the Gospel Choir of Pillows, put on a free concert on the roof of ArtPace as part of artist Richie Budd’s residency. (Be on the lookout for the Current’s article on Budd and his amazing multi-media creations, which’ll hit stands this Wednesday.) I regrettably…
The Attack That Never Happened
By Gilbert Garcia Regardless of your political bent, the Ashley Todd story is too sad and pathetic to feel anything but depressed about. Todd, a 20-year-old woman from College Station who was working in Pittsburgh as a John McCain campaign volunteer, told authorities that on Wednesday night a large African-American man attacked her at an…
On the Street: On the Trail of Considerant, A Hat Over a Helmet, Inverting Blaxploitation, and Alefest Voyeurism
“Faces in the Crowd” Letters (to the On the Street Penthouse Suite) #1 Fashion + Bicycle Helmets? Lady Vick writes in with this notice from the world of bike fashion (bike fashion!) It’s a HAT over a helmet! (genius). http://www.yakkay.com/cover_oversigt.html #2 San Antonio — A Fount for Socialism? Through an angle that is too convoluted…
Al muro and human rights
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com Sure The Wall is on the ropes in more ways than one here in Texas, and a lot rides on the presidential election now underway. However, the Homeland Security endeavor is far from dead. So here’s your reminder to tune in for what is sure to be an interesting discussion on the…
W.
Critic’s Pick W. Director: Oliver Stone Screenwriter: Oliver Stone Cast: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: R Genre: Film Dubya. Stone. Let’s do this. Surely, given even a moment’s consideration, it comes as little surprise that the ever-provocative director of Nixon and JFK would set his distinctive…
The American Idol Anything Goes Halloween Bash
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Cussing and screaming can make any poetry slam a bit more interesting — throw in costumes, props, air-guitar solos, and animal acts, and youÕve got the pre-Halloween Anything Goes PuroSlam Spectacular. Following the American Idol format, three judges will evaluate and criticize poets during their three minutes of slam. Anyone can show…
Skeletal Lamping
Skeletal Lamping Composer: Of Montreal Label: Polyvinyl Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Of Montreal, with frontman Kevin Barnes’ eccentricities and glam-rock alter ego, is too strange to ever be fully accepted by the mainstream. And, for those who don’t consider Of Montreal a personal favorite by now, Skeletal Lamping isn’t likely to change…
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed Composer: Los Campesinos! Label: Wichita Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Only eight months removed from the release of the most infectious record you didn’t hear this year, Hold On Now, Youngster…, the Cardiff, Wales seven-piece Los Campesinos! one-up their early-2008 output with We Are Beautiful, We Are…
Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse
Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse Composer: Lou Reed Label: Matador Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Although the 1973 release of Berlin was not an all-out success, Lou Reed, inimitable rock singer-songwriter and co-founder of the legendary Velvet Underground, has breathed new life into the record. In 2006, he performed Berlin at St.…
By Definition
By Definition Composer: Groove Movement Label: Move Your Groove Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording With the force of a freight train, the Groove Movement combines soul, funk, rock, and jazz, rarely descending from an elevated sense of enthusiasm on their latest album. Tracks such as “Classy Vibes,” a typical male conversation centered around…
Nine Inch Nails
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Returning member Robin Finck and new addition Justin Meldal-Johnson will join Trent Reznor, Alessandro Cortini, and Josh Freese for Nine Inch Nails’ Lights In The Sky fall tour. This is the last time for fans to see Freese behind the kit, though — the drummer has confirmed he’s leaving the band after…
Druggist w. Marcus Rubio and the Gospel Choir of Pillows
Release Date: 2008-10-22 ArtPace hosts a rare rooftop performance Friday, featuring dynamic indie rockers Druggist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Rubio and the Gospel Choir of Pillows in a show that coincides with the residency of artist Richie Budd. Budd, a multi-media sculptor, invited the bands to join in on his ArtPace residency for the show, during…
tenerifedanzalab
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Marvel in the fusion of Asian dancers and those from Tenerife in Mizu no Yukue, temerifedanzalab’s first collaboration with Asian-style movement. The group resides on the island of Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands in the Atlantic, which still has strong cultural roots in San Antonio. The contemporary dance laboratory…
The Most Interesting Show In The World
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Dos Equis brings its self-proclaimed Most Interesting Show in the World to San Antonio, featuring a menagerie of entertainers from around the world, including aerial performers, Japanese robotic dancers, acrobats, fire jugglers, Russian dancers, and French burlesque singers. Jim Rose, the famed emcee of “The Jim Rose Circus” sideshow and a man…
SAMA Soirée: Party on the Nile
Release Date: 2008-10-22 If you can’t go to the Nile for Halloween, partake in festivities Cleopatra would have enjoyed at SAMA’s pre-Halloween, Egyptian-themed soiree for Say-Town’s young professionals. Walk like an Egyptian with pyramid building, henna tattoos, Egyptian makeovers, a film screening, and a scavenger hunt through the galleries. Complimentary food and drinks with Middle-Eastern…
Cypress Hill’s B-Real and Psycho Realm
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Here is something you can’t understand — B-Real is coming, man! Yes indeed, the pot-smoking legend from Cypress Hill is returning to San Antonio with his hardcore gangsta side project The Psycho Realm and special guest The Flu. Sen Dog is absent on this one but B-Real has ensured fans that all…
Horrorpops, Beat Union, & 7 Shot Screamers
Release Date: 2008-10-22 Just in time for All Hallows Eve, Copenhagen-born, Los Angeles-based trio HorrorPops bring their poppy, new-wave, psychobilly extravaganza to the White Rabbit on October 26. Swelling to a quintet for live shows, they’ll be accompanied by ghoulish go-go dancers Tweek and Rita-tah, who should accent bassist-vocalist Patricia Day’s lascivious, badass glory with…
Andrew Porter
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2008-10-22 Heralded by critical praise and good WOM (i.e. a Sunday-morning Facebook recommendation), Trinity prof Andrew Porter’s collection of short stories makes its public Say-Town debut this Thursday. Porter, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum, will read from and sign copies of The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007…
The queen of Siam
A Thai restaurant worthy of a crown of laurels
A Crushing Love
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2008-10-22 Filmmaker Sylvia Morales, right, has devoted her work to celebrating the women who worked in the Movimiento alongside César Chávez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, and Ruben Salazar. Morales’s Chicana, a groundbreaking flim made in 1979, centers on women’s involvement in the Chicano movement, and her latest work-in-progress, A Crushing Love, celebrates…
Waiter in the soup
I Served the King of England Director: Jiri Menzel Screenwriter: Jiri Menzel Cast: Julia Jentsch, Oldrich Kaiser, Milan Lasica, Marian Labuda, Josef Abrham (II) Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: R Genre: Film Czech film flowered during the 1960s, before the Kremlin cracked down on creativity. Though he made Larks on a String in 1969, Jirí Menzel…
B & D Ice House
Release Date: 2008-10-22 The bar review is partially a place for us men to attempt to answer that eternal question of masculinity: Who can drink more? Well, I’ll just come out and say it: I can. Proof? How about my Tuesday-morning hangover? Or the fact that my recycle bin is always full? Maybe it’s the…
Year of the Fish
Year of the Fish Director: David Kaplan Screenwriter: David Kaplan Cast: Tsai Chin, An Nguyen, Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung Release Date: 2008-10-22 Rated: NOT RATED Genre: Film Cinderella didn’t know how good she had it. Scrubbing floors in a fancy castle with the help of cheerful singing mice — Chinese immigrant Ye…
Jackie Bristow
Release Date: 2008-10-22 New Zealand’s Jackie Bristow brings her sophisticated and soulful sound through Texas as part of her artist residency in Austin through mid-November. An impressive indie hit from down under, Jackie started out as part of The Bristow Sisters and has now been touring the world for more than a decade. Her new…
Spiegelman, before and after the Holocaust
Creating an apex of expression in a given art form has to take a lot out of a guy. So it’s little surprise (though it is a disappointment) that we haven’t seen more major work out of Art Spiegelman since his Pulitzer-winning Maus was completed in 1991. Yes, there have been random strips, New Yorker…
Out standing in their Fields
The VW bus parks underneath I-35, and the members of Fields of Forel begin unloading their instruments. Though their equipment includes an electric guitar, a bass, an organ, and a heavy-looking upright piano, they’re tuning up within five minutes. Minimalist post-rock soon swells to fill the dark overpass. Splashing runoff from an early evening rainstorm…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
You only have to watch Mark Rubin rock his standup bass (or his tuba, for that matter) once to determine that the man is one of the great unsung gods of Lone Star music. It’s not often that virtuosity, impeccable taste, a rebel attitude, and a musicologist’s grasp of history come together in one mammoth…
Not only the lonely
Car Alarm Sea & Cake (Thrill Jockey) New in stores this week is Car Alarm (Thrill Jockey), which is sorta big news if you’re a Sea & Cake fan — a breed that has grown accustomed to three- or four-year delays between discs while the sometime bandmates go off to their assorted extracurricular ventures. (Some…
Hyperbubble
In 2008, the machine has become self-aware. Synth-and-keys duo Hyperbubble partially assembles its songs in the proud tradition, passed from Kraftwerk to Daft Punk, of musicians pretending to be robots. Unlike many of those bands, however, Hyperbubble’s Jess and Jeff DeCuir seem to be in on the joke, taking the android artifice to intentionally over-the-top…
Dear Uncle Mat
I’ve got a bit of a dilemma. Though I’m only 16 years old, I feel so much older and more mature than most my age (I’ve got a friend getting married!). But that is beside the point. As most young people my age, I’m oh-so-curious about my sexual orientation. A lot of my friends who…
“Hellbent” — Pack of Wolves
Pack of Wolves attack the track like, well, some sort of large grouping of predatory mammals, perhaps — say, a herd of rambunctious raccoons. “I am a warrior bent on destruction,” vocalist-guitarist Trey Ramirez snarls like a rabid ring-tailed robber. “I’ll leave your rotting, burning corpse in my wake.” But the rusty-nail guitar riffs are…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: One of our Arizona politicians once said on the PBS show Horizonte that the “crime” of being undocumented in this country is equivalent legally to that of a parking ticket. Do you know where I can verify this statement? So often in the argument over immigration the bottom line for those who are…
Occult energy futures
In Tarot, the Wheel of Fortune card often signifies sudden or random events. It is the unexpected, the beginning or end of cycles, even opportunity. As never before in human history, we’re finding ourselves firmly strapped to the cosmic Wheel, with each jolt and revolt reverberating on a planetary scale. Just look to our conjoined…
Amuse-BOUCHE
SA native Randy Schulze landed the grand prize — five acres of hilltop near Llano — in the Lone Star Beer Landowner’s Challenge this past weekend, beating out contestants from Houston and Schulenberg in a series of challenges that included an impromptu barbecue. Schulze won the washer toss, although not the unexpected washer quiz that…
Drilling rhetoric
“Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” — Vice President Dick Cheney “Conservation” virtually snowballs negative connotations these days. From eye or ear through my kinked brain cord, the word is rooted tenderly with Woodsy Owl’s “Give a Hoot” campaign,…
Horror Props
Sheer Bloody Lunacy’s brief and none-too-subtle ode to The Rocky Horror Picture Show makes perfect sense, despite the fact that — in the context of the actual production — it makes no sense at all. In addition to delivering a humorous twist on the horror genre and a quick tribute to that deathless object of…
The QueQue
Smokescreen and the bandit The increasingly (in)famous Sculley streamlining profit-making machine that’s rolled through our municipal golf courses and Park Police has yet to hit the City’s Code Compliance division, which can’t even remember to fine the citizens whose political placards it seizes and destroys without notice. Beacon Hill resident and Obama supporter Shelley Blagg…
Jigsaw puzzle
Not that long ago, Tobin Bell escorted his 12-year-old daughter on a school field trip. Upon joining his daughter and her classmates, Bell was overrun by a bevy of pre-teen girls, all anxious to meet the notable actor. “You’re that guy,” the girls stammered, “that guy …” Yes, thought Bell, known primarily as the nefarious…
Big-game hunters
What if the Illinois Republican Party had been able to knock off Barack Obama in 1998, the first time he sought reelection to the state senate? How many political headaches would it have spared the party down the line? That question comes to mind when considering the case of Texas Representative Juan Garcia (D-Corpus Christi),…
S’Nuff film
Slab Cinema will continue its month-long series of free horror film screenings with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 23, at HemisFair Park (200 S Alamo). Go to slabcinema.com for more info, and keep your head covered. If you’d prefer something more uplifting than Tippi Hedren getting pecked to death, try “Hope,” a…
Blitz: The League 2
Blitz: The League 2 Midway Xbox 360 $59.99 I’m going to expose myself as the low-brow gore geek I truly am right up front by admitting that I enjoy this year’s Blitz a hell of a lot more than this year’s Madden. Where the Madden series has grown staler with each year of its exclusive…
The XXX-files
“Oh, gaaawwd,” I thought, watching my favorite FBI agent engage in a sloppy three-way with some blonde and Charlotte’s turtle-headed husband from Sex and the City, “Mulder’s a freak.” Worse, I thought, “he’s totally killing his chances of marrying not-Scully.” Perception is a strange thing. Despite his narration of Showtime’s softcore Red Shoe Diaries series,…
LittleBigPlanet
LittleBigPlanet Sony PlayStation 3 $59.99 Add LittleBigPlanet to the short list of modern video games (Halo, World of Warcraft, Rock Band) that start a subculture. As a platformer (a genre always threatening to die out) is challenged in the current generation only by Mario Galaxy, offering some beautiful graphics and a gravity-based physics engine…
Cinema Obscura
The credits claim The Monster Squad was written by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and director Fred Dekker (RoboCop 3), but I’m totally calling bullshit. (A writing team of Black and Dekker, seriously? Was this film sponsored by Sears’ hardware department?) The kids starring obviously directed, built the sets, and wrote this…
Nine Inch Nails
At 16, I found myself a victim of censorship for the first time. Walking up to the counter at Blockbuster Music (remember those?) with a copy of the newest Nine Inch Nails album, The Downward Spiral, the clerk informed me that I was too young to purchase the disc. He pointed to the PARENTAL ADVISORY…
Land of entrapment
A conversation with Charles Bowden — sometimes-controversial chronicler of late-empire shortsightedness and distemper — is a stone-cold reminder that the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are the great deprogrammer. They will strip first your comfortable white-people assumptions about the difference between cops and criminals, armies and gangs. And then, if you’re really paying attention — observing and listening…
ARTIFACTS
Looking forward to the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse? (Sort of like the tattooed, facially pierced peeps’ answer to the Rapture.) Artist Jar Schepers seems fully prepared, with a current show at Neal Henderson’s Long Hall Gallery entitled The Last Few Years. According to the invite, it features “an extensive collection of sculptures and paintings revolving around…
Beginning times
I had some assumptions about historical fiction before I even picked up a copy of The Whiskey Rebels by San Antonio author David Liss — and some of them, it turns out, were not unfounded. The story is set in post-Revolution United States, and the main characters, a down-on-his-luck ex-spy named Ethan Saunders and an…
Pick a mountain, any mountain
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com As my story on energy, climate, and misery winds its way to the printers this week, I am stung by how many things keep getting worse. The pace of carbon dioxide emissions increasing over last decade’s; scientists slack-jawed at the potential carbon-fueled demise of our oceans, and the son-of-a-Bush that just won’t…
