Melt down at CPS nuke vote
“Hey hey! Ho ho! We want clean energy and we want it today!” It was made-for-TV outside and in CPS Energy’s downtown offices as dozens of protestors from Austin to Kingsville pumped up and down the street chanting, waving signs. They drew many honks of support from passing motorists and guarded stares from commuters at…
Melt down at CPS nuke vote
“Hey hey! Ho ho! We want clean energy and we want it today!” It was made-for-TV outside and in CPS Energy’s downtown offices as dozens of protestors from Austin to Kingsville pumped up and down the street chanting, waving signs. They drew many honks of support from passing motorists and guarded stares from commuters at…
Photography as an art form?
The other day I took part in a one-sided conversation, where I was the one doing the listening while he did the talking … as usual. But I digress; anyhow the topic was whether or not photography is considered a true art form. He concluded that it was not entirely an art form but provided…
Fire falling on CPS
So, outrage over CPS’s bass-ackward plan (read: CPS Must Die) for new nuke plants in Texas may have been slow to catch on, but it’s starting scorch a bit — in town and out. Tomorrow morning Austin City Council member Jennifer Kim is holding a press conference at Austin City Hall urging San Antonio’s leaders…
Photography as an art form?
The other day I took part in a one-sided conversation, where I was the one doing the listening while he did the talking … as usual. But I digress; anyhow the topic was whether or not photography is considered a true art form. He concluded that it was not entirely an art form but provided…
Fire falling on CPS
So, outrage over CPS’s bass-ackward plan (read: CPS Must Die) for new nuke plants in Texas may have been slow to catch on, but it’s starting scorch a bit — in town and out. Tomorrow morning Austin City Council member Jennifer Kim is holding a press conference at Austin City Hall urging San Antonio’s leaders…
Nosferatu at The Slab
Release Date: 2007-10-24 The Slab Cinema season comes to an end on the day between Halloween and Dia de los Muertos with the silent and sinister 1922 film Nosferatu, with live accompaniment by Mombassa Code. The earliest surviving screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, the film has had a long and dangerous life of…
Casket Salesman, Mythmaker, You’re Done For, Valleta, Egshan, & more
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Casket Salesmen hit the Rabbit in a pre-Halloween show with traces of experimental, post-hardcore, and prog-rock prowess. Featuring ex-A Static Lullaby members Phil Pirrone and Nate Lindeman, the band is currently on a full U.S. tour and has begun working on their second full-length album, the follow up to 2006’s Sleeping Giants.…
The Rocky Horror Experience
Release Date: 2007-10-24 All the songs and all your favorite actors (including Lee Marshall direct from LA as Dr. Frank-N-Furter!) performing concert-style on stage with an extended costume party, cash prizes, a singing bee, virgin sacrifices, and much more. Limited number of VIP tickets available for cast party after Friday’s performance. $20/25, 10:15pm Fri &…
Halloween Bash 2007
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Hot Tin Roof is the Halloween party destination for showing off risqué or freakishly haunting costumes while you get your dance on. Savant Entertainment hosts the bash, sporting hot drink specials all night and prizes for best costume. Wave your paws, hoofs, fangs, and tails in the air with tunes by DJ…
Bike Gang Summit II: Halloween “The Reclamation!”
Release Date: 2007-10-24 The Bike Gang Summit rides again, and it must be stopped! But if you’re part of its secret riding society, form a bike gang and join for a costumed evening cruise of city streets. It’ll be a night of riding, drinking, and dancing. Meet at the field next to Pig Stand on…
The Recipe
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Hot Tin Roof is the Halloween party destination for showing off risqué or freakishly haunting costumes while you get your dance on. Savant Entertainment hosts the bash, sporting hot drink specials all night and prizes for best costume. Wave your paws, hoofs, fangs, and tails in the air with tunes by DJ…
Dia de los Muertos Festival
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Celebrate “the Art of the Day of the Dead” with traditional altars paying homage to many individuals who helped maintain La Villita as an arts community in the heart of downtown. Festivities begin Sunday at 5pm with a dance procession by Las Monas and an explanation of the cultural holiday. Free, Oct…
Zoo Boo
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Join the animals for some spooktacular fun for all ages at the San Antonio Zoo. The family-oriented Halloween event includes safe trick-or-treating, face-painting, rub-on tattoos, games, and more. Costumed visitors are encouraged, and children can compete in a costume contest. $5 advance, $6 at gate, 6-9pm Oct 30 & 31, San Antonio…
Return of the Son of the Anything Goes Slam
Release Date: 2007-10-24 Rules be gone! It’s costumes, music, props, animal acts, ventriloquism, cover poems, and if history teaches us anything, singing nuns, at PuroSlam. Three rounds of competition, eating, and costume contests, DJ Donnie Dee dropping spooky beats, and a rowdy slam crowd are guaranteed. Poets compete for $50 and prizes by ignoring all…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
Indie hip-hop is alive and well in San Antonio, and flourishing at The Yard. This retail shop/music venue, owned by Mic Dagger and co-operated by Dagger and the Prhymemates Collective, has quickly become a local mecca for the four elements. Last week, The Yard welcomed hip-hop journeymen Mestizo, Rheteric, and Qwel, along with San Antonio…
Amuse-Bouche
Fleeing the endless live auction at last weekend’s Cattle Barons Ball — the annual American Cancer Society fundraiser held this year at Rio Cibolo Ranch — a crew of Say-Towners in all their denim-and-diamonds finery landed at the Double Ringer, a bit of bar heaven near Seguin. The cozy outside porch featured pickin’ and singin’,…
Jazz and pop, but no pop jazz
The Complete On the Corner Sessions Miles Davis (Columbia) Columbia’s epic series of “metal spine” Miles Davis reissues — a magnet for accolades since the Davis/Gil Evans box set over a decade ago — concludes with The Complete On the Corner Sessions, more than six hours’ worth of fuzzy-guitar jams, African rhythms, and streetwise grooves…
Steaks, downhome and serenaded in Welfare
All that was missing were the fireflies. But the bare bulbs strung between mossy oaks behind the Waring General Store did a good job of scattering pinpoints of light over picnic tables crowded with families enjoying the evening, the suggestion of a breeze, and the music of Jay Boy Adams and the Roadhouse Scholars. Men…
aural pleasure
In Rainbows Radiohead (Self-released) It’s kind of funny that every Radiohead album released post-Kid A has been heralded as the group’s “return to rock” — as though Thom Yorke’s dips into electronic music and jazz have only delayed what we really want to hear: more versions of “High and Dry.” Held against that invisible yardstick…
A good pop ruined
Cockiness is abetted by a full bottle of champagne in the fridge. Fortune must be smiling if you haven’t drained your complete stock of fizzy decadence. Even better if the champagne was a gift from a thoughtful friend. You’re awash in life’s great pleasures; stoke the boilers and full steam ahead! In this spirit, I…
On the Street
On the Street: Ale, Free Running, Zombies Beer! Alefest at Hemisfair Park brought out several, several hundred people. This might be the only angle I’ve seen yet where the new hotel in the background adds order to the San Antonio skyline. Build it and they will come. How many times have we heard that line…
Playback
It’s hard to remember now, but Bobby Brown used to be a big deal. Before he was old enough to drink legally (not that the law ever got in his way), he established himself as the King of New Jack Swing, a sound that brought hip-hop’s big beats and bigger attitude into the realm of…
CPS must die
Screaming temps and cranked ACs in April ’06 caught state utilities with their plants down. Several units were offline for maintenance when boiling mercury unexpectedly reached a record-setting 101. Others flat-out failed. In Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio, utilities started rolling timed blackouts to keep the power grid from scorching. Police hit the street…
On the Street
On the Street: Ale, Free Running, Zombies Beer! Alefest at Hemisfair Park brought out several, several hundred people. This might be the only angle I’ve seen yet where the new hotel in the background adds order to the San Antonio skyline. Build it and they will come. How many times have we heard that line…
Revealing briefs
SAN ANTONIO — Mikal Watts, the San Antonio trial lawyer vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate against Rick Noriega, departed the race abruptly on Tuesday citing family reasons. The announcement came days after a less-than-stellar showing in third-quarter fund-raising and media accounts that tied him to Mario Celis, a Corpus Christi man…
Break-dancing saves
Jazzy hip-hop dance beats echoed back and forth off the stone walls of the courtyard as I made my way to the gym at Zion Lutheran Church off Cincinnati Street, approaching the West Side of San Antonio. Entering the gym, I immediately realized I would need a lot more than rhythm to hang with this…
From India, with quirk
There are few directors who can polarize movie-goers and critics like Wes Anderson, whose films, from Rushmore to The Royal Tenenbaums to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, play out like modern French New Wave fairy tales and star a rotating cast of friends such as Owen and Luke Wilson, Anjelica Huston, and Anderson’s muse,…
ARTFACTS
It’s that time again. Time to take out the fishnets, cake on some makeup, and brush up your “Time Warp” dancing skills — the Cameo Theatre will be hosting The Rocky Horror Experience, a concert performance, on Friday and Saturday starting at 10:15 p.m. A costume party with cash prizes, a singing bee, and more…
CRITICAL Darling
Critical Darling is so weary of the law only applying to us commoners, and therefore suggests — after reading the Current from cover to cover, of course — a trip over to Glenn Greenwald’s Salon.com blog to get schooled on the telecom amnesty situation. Looks like hopeful presidential candidate Senator Chris Dodd has resolved to…
The Vex rocks an updated Ovid
After 9/11, Manhattan was less an isle of joy than ash. The debris from the attacks on the World Trade Center fell everywhere; for days the dominant feature of the cityscape was cinder and dust: a topsy-turvy world in which clouds were now curbside, and the heavens rained only earth. Unsurprisingly, the effect on Manhattan’s…
Halle-lujah! Berry’s back
“I’m one who chooses roles based on what I am most needing and wanting to express in my real life somehow,” said Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry while in New York City promoting her new film Things We Lost in the Fire. “I don’t purposely do that, but halfway through making a movie I go,…
It takes a (Mexican) village
Will the new critical biography of Josefina Niggli compel Chicana and Chicano writers to embrace her as their literary madrina? That remains to be seen. (Late in life, Niggli, in characteristically self-possessed fashion, said to an interviewer: “I think it was when I started doing my thing that the door opened for Chicano literature.” Not…
Best western
It’s funny. sometimes, the ones that end up being divisive. Sure, some of ’em you see coming. Sicko. Live Free or Die Hard. Grindhouse. Still, every so often, I find myself wholly unprepared for how very passionately folks manage to disagree on art. As the lights came up and the closing crawl began in our…
Fantasies, wholesome and otherwise
Over a year ago, this column highlighted an anthology of vintage oddities, called Art Out of Time, in which little was odder than the awkward sci-fi of Fletcher Hanks. Readers who found Hanks’s bizarre draftsmanship and clumsy exposition charming can now get a hefty dose in I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets! (Fantagraphics), which…
Armchair Cinephile
PICK OF THE WEEK: Breathless (Criterion) Movies don’t get much more influential than Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark, which put the French New Wave on the map. And influential films don’t get much more fun than Breathless, which oozes good-humored cool and self-conscious sex appeal in the form of leads Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Days of…
Life flight
José “Joe” Rios, 45, is a veteran flight nurse for San Antonio AirLife, the emergency response helicopter system that responds to accidents within a 150-mile radius of the city. Under special circumstances, AirLife will rescue patients outside its jurisdiction, such as during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Born and raised in Del Rio, Rios attended the…
STEP IT UP: HOLD POLITICIANS’ FEET TO THE FIRE
Fires rage through Southern California. Massive rainstorms drench New Orleans. The Southeast U.S., stretching from Tennessee across the Carolinas and into Georgia, is in the midst of what could be the worst drought on record there. Atlanta could run out of water. While the press does an admirable job bringing us live images…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: Why do so many of my peers assume I must have low self-esteem just because I’m dating a Mexican guy? I finally found someone with my same values and who treats me way better than any gringo I ever dated. The same women who complain about “sleazy” Mexican men go to France and…
Great pumpkins
Unlike the rest of the gaming world. which begins to focus on the holiday season around well, August, I like to lock my greedy eyes in on something a little more immediate — Halloween. Scary video games pack so much more visceral, immediate punch than their cinematic counterparts. Instead of watching some poor schlep being…
Clothes-minded
It’s the little black batwing. Much as the fashion magazines are pushing tailored, retro femininity this season, some just aren’t that kind of girl. For these, local designers Herff Chistiansen created a mini “style staples” collection of basic black pieces that cover the effortlessly chic crowd, as well as those who can rock a slight…
Dear Uncle Mat
Do you give feline advice? My cat is a little OCD and is pulling out chunks of fur … any advice? — Crazy Cat House Mom Dear Madam, I know very little about felines, but that’s why I have a Cabinet. I took counsel with my BFF and Lesbian in Chief, Lisa, as well as…
Prevention first
Jeffrey Hons, executive director of Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas, began his career at the family-planing organization 13 years ago as an educator, which might explain his ability to advocate equally passionately for practical details and intangible philosophical issues. As for his persistence in a state that continues to embrace abstinence-only…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): For all we know, in your past life you were a virgin who was thrown into a volcano to appease a fire deity. But whether or not that’s an actual fact, we can say this with certainty: At some time in your current life, you made a great sacrifice in an…
Barrio brigade
Robert Livar’s son, Manu, was born in September 2003, three months after the Spurs won their second NBA championship. So, naturally, all of Livar’s friends in the Alamo City instantly assumed the baby’s name was an homage to the court artistry of Spurs guard Manu Ginobili. It was a logical assumption, but an erroneous one.…
Like pigs for water
In Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, CIA Agent Sands, played by Johnny Depp, is obsessed with cochinita pibil. His passion runs so deep that he’ll murder any cook who makes the Mexican slow-roasted pork dish too well, in order to preserve balance in the country. Word on the street is that cochinita…
Survival, post-CPS
Okay, we sound our guns this week on CPS’s absurd plan for nuclear expansion to the detriment of sustainable development. I, for one, would be more encouraged about finding our way forward without CPS if there had of been more than three of us to greet Greg Pahl when he came to the San Antonio…
Survival, post-CPS
Okay, we sound our guns this week on CPS’s absurd plan for nuclear expansion to the detriment of sustainable development. I, for one, would be more encouraged about finding our way forward without CPS if there had of been more than three of us to greet Greg Pahl when he came to the San Antonio…
