Austin theater wrap-up
On Saturday, I headed up to Austin for a theater twofer! First up: the sundry pleasures of EVIL DEAD, THE MUSICAL at the Salvage Vanguard theater. An off-Broadway hit from a few years ago, EVIL DEAD spoofs both the original film and its cult status, with plenty of gore (the first three rows are a…
A li’l Arts News Roundup
First off: Happy Día de los Muertos, San Antonio. Here’s to our departed loved ones. You can read more about some dearly departed in our special feature here. Now, here are a couple of events coming up, and a deadline. More to follow. It’s First Friday this weekend–I’m sure you’re all recovering from Hallowe’en (and…
Texas’s Glasstire takes top Nat’l Summit on Arts Journalism Prize
Congrats to Texas’s homegrown Glasstire, and founder Rainey Knudson — National Arts Journalism Program members and alumni of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts Journalism Institutes awarded it the top, $7,500 prize in a national survey of initiatives. Finalists were featured at the summit earlier this month. Interactive digital magazine FLYP took second, and…
Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
This Is It is just like you’ve seen Michael before, actually, only more so
Spoiler Alert! Anti-nukers threaten to wage rate-hike war (as STP sputters)
Sandra Garcia, youth organizer with Southwest Workers Union, holds the pro-solar, anti-nuclear banner outside today’s City Council meetingâ?¦ where a vote on nuclear was NOT held. Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com At 10 a.m. yesterday, it was still D-Day on the steps of City Hall. Although City and CPS Energy staff were abuzz with news of a…
Live & Local preview: Necurat
Tonight, we’re heading out to see local death metal thrashers Necurat (Romanian for “dirty soul” according to the always reliable urbandictionary.com) play White Rabbit’s Night of Horror. The last time we saw them, lead guitarist Jesse Molov displayed some pretty impressive soloing skills (bonus points for vocalist Matt the Impaler’s windmilling his hair so expertly;…
Suggested Listening: The Misfits â?? Walk Among Us
Everyone, meet lala, if you haven’t already. Sign up is free, and you can listen to any of their vast collection of albums once. I thought we’d use lala as a way to share and discuss some of our favorite albums, and since it’s nearly Halloween, what better way to start than with the Misfits?…
Download Lil Wayne’s new mix tape
You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to respect him. But you really can’t argue with the price. Download Weezy F. Baby’s newest mixtape, No Ceilings, for free at Nah Right, and let us know what you think in the comments section below. I’m a definite fan of Drought 3 but I haven’t…
Show & Prove: Opening Night
The reloaded Spurs took the court last night with a familiar starting lineup that included All-Stars Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Michael Finley, along with sharpshooter Matt Bonner and newcomer Richard Jefferson. Facing Chris Paul and his upstart Hornets, San Antonio seized control of the game at the end of the first quarter thanks in…
We really love you, Backbeat Magazine
Hey guys, It’s recently been called to my attention that maybe some of you would like to rip me a new asshole over my calendar pick this week, and haven’t been able to. Our website isn’t designed to accept comments in the Calendar section (honest, check it our for yourself), and I’m pretty sure it…
Nuke Protest at Noon: Video from Oct. 15 Protest
Maybe the video quality is crap and the text illegible, but the spirit of roughly 100 translates clearly in this short video from the anti-nuke protest of nearly two weeks ago. Another protest today (noon, City Hall) promises more of the same, but with satisfaction of many ‘told-ya-so’s’ after news of a $4-billion cost escalation…
The speeches of Peaches
The Queen of Electrocrap responds to the Current Bryan Rindfuss: First of all, the coolest kids in town are thrilled that San Antonio is on your tour schedule, any particular feelings about Texas? Peaches: It’s big, real big. I’m waiting for the Bush daughters to show up at my show all drunk and horny! BR:…
Remembering Rhonda
Rhonda Kuhlman, wizardess of recycled finery and indie-arts booster nonpareil, has a short write-up in our main Día de los Muertos article, here. But in soliciting quotes from her friends, I got some lovely ones that, unfortunately, we didn’t have time or space for, but that I’d like to be out where folks can read…
47th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour
Release Date: 2009-10-28 The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the second oldest film festival in North America. When it began in 1963 (as the 16mm Film Festival) with the goal of showcasing experimental films, it served as a creative outlet for artists and directors like Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Agnes Varda, and George Lucas. Forty-six…
Backbeat Magazine Release Party w/ A Kid Named Thompson, Yoshimoto, & the Heroine
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2009-10-28 Welcome, Backbeat Magazine, to San Antonio’s high-stakes local-music-coverage game. Folks will call us competitors, but we say you’re really more like our brother in this unforgiving wilderness of cover bands, too-loud sound mixes, and hurtful, hurtful internet comments. You’re a brother we feel a strong sense of rivalry with, perhaps,…
‘Amelia,’ rated
Amelia Director: Mira Nair Screenwriter: Mira Nair Cast: Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: PG Genre: Film The thing, these days, about almost any biopic with a worthy subject and a practicable budget is that it’s probably not gonna suck. Even if you don’t turn a limbic cartwheel over…
Travels with Frenchie
Old place new Face
World Painted Blood
World Painted Blood Composer: Slayer Conductor: Slayer Label: American Recordings Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording A little more than 23 years after their game-changing breakthrough fulfilled its promise to Reign in Blood, and eight years after God Hates Us All was the cruelest-seeming of unfortunate September 11 album releases, thrash gods Slayer are…
The Sound, the Speed, the Light
The Sound, the Speed, the Light Composer: Mission of Burma Conductor: Mission of Burma Label: Matador Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording Is it possible for a band to have a sophomore slump halfway through the third album its second time around? That seems to be the case with Mission of Burma. But the…
Is and Always Was
Is and Always Was Composer: Daniel Johnston Conductor: Daniel Johnston Label: Eternal Yip Eye Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording While he has only experienced brushes with mainstream attention, Daniel Johnston’s impact can be heard way beyond the underground. Without Johnston, who knows if we would have ever heard of Kurt Cobain, Beck, or…
The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Soundtrack
The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Soundtrack Composer: Various Artists Conductor: Various Artists Label: Atlantic Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: NONE Genre: Recording We never thought of Death Cab for Cutie as vampire music, but the band’s maudlin “Meet Me on the Equinox” provides an appropriately dreary intro on this soundtrack to New Moon, the sequel…
Trick ‘r Treat
Critic’s Pick Trick ‘r Treat Director: Michael Dougherty Screenwriter: Michael Dougherty Cast: Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, Leslie Bibb, Monica Delain Release Date: 2009-10-28 Rated: R Genre: Film Our Rating: 3.00 Praised by fans around the world yet still unknown to the masses thanks to a slight from someone up the production line, Trick…
Somers Town
Release Date: 2009-10-28 Director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England) has become famous in his native England for award-winning, gritty, low-budget films that have been described as works of “social realism.” Heartwarming, witty, and beautifully shot are a few descriptions you might read about Somers Town, a (mainly) black-and-white film from 2008 that…
Tracy Lawrence
Release Date: 2009-10-28 A former ironwoker, Texas-born Tracy Lawrence hit the big time with his 1991 debut album Sticks and Stones. The album’s title track snagged the number-one position on the Billboard country charts. Since then, he’s recorded eight studio albums (including a Christian release), received numerous awards (Top New Male Vocalist by Billboard and…
Art opening: El Corazon de la Memoria
Release Date: 2009-10-28 For the second consecutive year, artist David Zamora Casas will astonish and enlighten Main Plaza’s visitors with a larger-than-life (10 foot-tall) Dia de los Muertos altar smack in the middle. The ofrenda will incorporate traditional Day of the Dead elements like marigolds and papel picado as well personal effects and items loved…
Larry the Cable Guy: Tailgate Party Tour
Release Date: 2009-10-28 Given Sarah Palin’s fetish for a mythical, beer-guzzling beast known as “Joe Sixpack,” she must have the hots for Dan Whitney, the trash-talking, perpetually grilling, cut-off-shirt-wearing creator of Blue Collar Comedy known as “Larry the Cable Guy.” Whitney grew up raising pigs on a farm, but eventually adopted his parents’ love for…
Diwali Festival of Lights
Release Date: 2009-10-28 The celebration of Diwali has a variety of meanings in India and Nepal where it originated, among them the triumph of good over evil, the homecoming of various gods returning from battles, and the release of an array of innocent detainees. Being formally celebrated in SA for the first time, Diwali’s simplest…
Dear Uncle Mat
I’m obese. Well, I don’t think I am, but my doctor says that I am. I understand that I’m not the skinniest I’ve been; I’ll admit, I’ve let myself go. But obese?! Come on! I weigh 157 pounds and I’m 5’ 3”. I’ve told my friends that my doctor says I’m obese, and they can’t believe it,…
PERF reforms stalled, Big Tex polluter stonewalls
PERF recidivism A new contract with the police union is cooking and local human-rights activists are steaming over the City’s failure to reform SAPD’s Internal Affairs. A couple of years ago, shootings of unarmed citizens were in the headlines, use of force by San Antonio police had just jumped 20 percent in 2007, and equally…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19):You may be as flooded with briny emotion as a Pisces on a meandering binge. You might be as embedded in a labyrinth of your own creation as the Geminis who verge on being too clever for their own good. You may be as cagey a listener as a Scorpio who’s searching…
That smarts!
hanks to pitiful Mississippi, Texas is usually not first in obesity, high-school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and other barometers of social malaise. And now San Antonio can be grateful to Fresno and Las Vegas for avoiding the title “Stupidest City in the United States.” A ranking of the 55 smartest cities posted earlier this month on…
Peaches in cream
Sometime around the turn of the (most recent) century, Merrill Nisker, a Canadian elementary-school music and drama teacher, decided to quit her job to pursue a music career. Instead of hitting the studio, Nisker embarked on an erotic staycation — lazing around with a joint in one hand, masturbating with the other, and experimenting with…
Monsters are real
Let’s just pretend that Freud’s theories haven’t been discredited, so we can discuss a modern Halloween party in the only terms that make sense: the drives of sex and death. Around October 31, man’s dueling hard-ons for the womb and the tomb become purposely entangled: dudes dressed as celluloid spree-killers and six-foot dongs drink trashcan…
Live & Local
A last-minute venue change takes the Colt of Us from the laid-back, open-air Farm to the claustrophobic, dimly lit Tequila Island, but the swap is probably for the best. Not that this bizarrely named band — it took a few visits to their MySpace page to finally accept that the flyers were right and it’s…
The Sound & The Fury
It’s hard to keep up a solo music career for five years, let alone a band. Los # 3 Dinners have been doing it for three decades, and they’re celebrating Friday night at Sam’s Burger Joint (330 E. Grayson, $7, all ages, 8 p.m., with Soda Pop Social opening the show). Once and for all:…
Beached wail
As much as the Scientists would like to think that our nocturnal experiments help educate San Antonians about where to stay hydrated, Time Lines Nightclub is pretty much critic-proof, for a couple of reasons. 1) There are so many blacklights in the place that whipping out a glowing-blue notepad is as conspicuous as waving around…
What the feh?
What a remarkable, peerless quality the Coen brothers possess. Unmatched by any other writer-directors working today — and possibly only rivaled in the annals of cinema by the likes of Stanley Kubrick, William Wyler, or Alfred Hitchcock – Joel and Ethan Coen have the ability to sit their audience down in front of a black…
The Omniboire
If you look hard, you can still find them: those once-ubiquitous straw-covered bottles of Chianti. I spotted one recently, lurking on a bottom shelf in Central Market’s wine department. Precursors of recycling, they often lived second lives as readymade candelabra. Both the container and the contained have come a long way since those carefree days.…
Roll with the new
Welcome to Media Day, the NBA equivalent of the first day of school, where flashing cameras capture young millionaires while ambivalent sportswriter types mill about. I’m here toda.y to talk with DeJuan Blair, the 6-foot, 8-inch, 265-pound Pittsburgh native who the Spurs selected with the 37 pick in the draft and who my father has…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: For most of my life I was oblivious to the hate that Mexicans have for Salvadorans. I became aware of it when I made the huge mistake of marrying a Salvi. Once I became engaged to my Salvi girlfriend, or whenever I would tell any Mexican that I married a Salvi, I was…
La maravillosa vida literaria de Junot Diaz
Imagine a first novel with a nerdy gordito Dominican-born protagonist who lives in New Jersey and is steeped in the geek speak of genre fiction and untranslated Spanish. A fan boy who dreams of becoming a latterday J.R.R. Tolkien and may wind up a 30-year-old virgin (un pecado mortal si eres dominicano). Add to this…
ARTifacts
What on Earth do you mean, you haven’t got any Hallowe’en plans!? Ohh, very well, then, let us lay it out for you. First off, in the expensivo range, there’s Glamourazzi, Blue Star’s (luxe Savvy brand) vodka-sodden fundraiser. It costs $50 to get in, and you’d best have your Lady Gaga-worthy self together, but it…
The sun’ll come out
With Lyle Kessler’s Orphans, the Vex has mounted a sentimental production of a perverse play, and the evening lumbers under the weight of that fundamental contradiction. In some senses, the play’s potential couldn’t be greater: It originated at the epicenter of American theater in the 1980s — Chicago’s Steppenwolf ensemble — before transferring to New…
Calling All Souls
In keeping with Mexican and Catholic traditions of remembering and honoring the departed, the Current presents our First Annual Día de los Muertos issue, in which we pay tribute to a handful of the individuals who rocked our worlds, changed how we live, made San Antonio a better place to work, play, and raise our…
Nuke Collider: San Antonio delays $400 million nuke bond vote over Toshiba cost surge
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com After what can only be considered a sustained Certified Sales Event by CPS Energy matched by Mammoth Media Buildup, Thursday’s would-have-been $400 million bond vote â?? a vote that, in essence, puts San Antonio on an irreversible date with an estimated $13 billion project â?? has been postponed for January. A new…
Activists urging City to fight police union for Internal Affairs reforms
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com A new contract with the police union is cooking and local human rights activists are steaming over failures to reform the department’s Internal Affairs. Shootings of unarmed citizens were in the headlines, use of force by San Antonio police had just jumped 20 percent in 2007, and behind the scenes almost equally…
