Peace, Love & Power to the little people
As International Day of Peace, officially observed on September 21, passes for another year while struggles around the globe & the Iraq War continues, Colonial Hills Elementary students march on…. Their faces plastered with smiles, their cardboard doves flapping in the wind, the young anti-war protesters, ages 5 to 13, do their part to remind…
Live & Local Preview: Pop Pistol
Tonight, I’ll be headed out to Blue Bubble Ballroom to watch local funk-punkers Pop Pistol perform at the $3 Holler Show. They’re scheduled to take the stage at 11 p.m.) Give their MySpace a listen (if that makes sense), the band has a versatile style incorporating elements of dance (“Angela Awake”), prog metal (“Calm Little…
Pickens play (finally) gets high knock
Sheesh! ‘Member back when we were bitching about Mr. Pickens. That the only media taking cold assessment of what his current “Pickens’ Plan” media campaign all wrapped up in that new-ist brand of patriotic isolationism – the energy one – was Popular Mechanics? Well the corporate raider-slash-John Kerry swiftboater cashbox now being iconized by Texas…
Ex-News lets in token critic
What a chuckle I got this morning, seeing a column in the Express-News written in opposition to the siting of Homeland Security’s germ lab here. I’ve been supremely critical of the paper’s smalltown chamber of commerce functioning on this issue. Consider their coverage and you can’t help but conclude, the editorial content has been spun…
Flash Fiction Submissions
Come one, come all (or something equally ridiculous). This is a call for submissions to a new section in The Current: flash fiction. The first story and a short introduction to the form will be printed in the October 1 issue. I’m looking for fiction approximately 400 words long. The next deadline is October 6th…
On the Street: Canstructivists Unite, The 2nd Munich Agreement, Phoning It In, and Other Important Discussions of Our Time
“There’s no Can in Can’t” Letters (to the On the Street Penthouse Suite) After last week’s cry for help the Gods intevened, the symbolically clouds parted (though meteorlogically they actually closed, which is cool because Summer had been bearing down like a ton of bricks) and in came this glowing letterâ?¦ #1 Hunted, Raised, or…
Doin’ drugs with Jesus
Greg Harman gharman@sacurrent.com So I’m just driving along, loving on my Jesus, my devil, my Obama doll I keep folded up in my back pocket for ethical emergencies, and the ethereal rods and pixies animating the rolling pictures before me, and studying on my malaise. Then I spot Christ Jesus’ telephone number. I had been…
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies Director: Michel Hazanavicius Screenwriter: Michel Hazanavicius Cast: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, Aure Atika, Philippe Lefebvre, Constantin Alexandrov Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NOT RATED Genre: Comedy Apparently it’s possible to be an ugly Frenchman, too. Cold War spy send-up OSS 117 features goofy-grinned Dujardin as the titular secret-agent man, an…
Pinback, Kylesa, Czars, Kotas, & Through Her Vibe
Release Date: 2008-09-17 This staffer spent the greater part of her extra time floating the Comal River one summer, courtesy of good friends who lived just off the public tuber’s exit. That summer our favorite record to slap on the turntable after getting off the river was Blue Screen Life, a piece of avant-pop perfection…
Slam Your Rights
Release Date: 2008-09-17 Fight for your right to vent, swear, and scream what’s on your mind at Slam Your Rights, a poetry slam celebrating sexual freedom, free speech, individuality, and diversity through words and verses. The slam features MC Shaggy and DJ Lenyrd Spinyrd on the mic and turntable, with cash prizes for first, second,…
The 3 Dollar Holler Show w. Sinsa Frick, Montauk, Pop Pistol, & the return of Colleagues
Release Date: 2008-09-17 21inSA has put together a talented local lineup of bands, DJs, and artists, all for a cover that’s cheaper than a gallon of gas. The show features the long awaited return of alt-rockers Colleagues, who’ve been holed up in the studio trying new sounds and finishing up their album Drive By’s to…
Jazz’SAlive
Release Date: 2008-09-17 Celebrate 25 years of live, free jazz in Travis Park with local, national, and international jazz musicians during this two-day festival. Legend Dave Brubeck (above), one of the first musicians to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, headlines at 7:45 p.m. Saturday. Parents, don’t be afraid to bring the…
3rd Annual Feral Hog Roast
Release Date: 2008-09-17 Ranchers of the Hill Country get their revenge on feral hogs with a roast that celebrates the bounty of the Texas Hill Country and benefits the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance. Guests will enjoy the different variations of pork cooked by the region’s top chefs, libations, swimming, a silent auction, and dancing. If…
Showtime Saturdays
Release Date: 2008-09-17 Always a worthy destination for the city’s hip set, Cigar Club beckons to music lovers with Showtime Saturdays, a new opportunity to see Texas’s best artists for only $3. This week it’s an Austin singer/songwriters showcase, featuring Aaron Cuadra, Shane Wallin, and Jennifer Applequist. Cuadra combines melodic guitar rhythms with emotionally rich…
Obituary w. Unleased, Carnifex, & Nonexistence
Critic’s Pick Release Date: 2008-09-17 Apparently there’s a brand of death metal so vicious, so hate-filled, it can only come from a sun-soaked seaside paradise. Consider for a moment San Diego’s Carnifex, a damn heavy band (I’m tempted to write one of the heaviest going, but that only invites a pissing contest and an inbox…
Anti-Sweatshop Film Fest
Release Date: 2008-09-17 The din of cash registers in America often drowns the voices of factory workers across the globe. To highlight the need for a Sweat Free Ordinance in SA, the San Antonio Against Sweatshops Campaign screens four enlightening films. Mardi Gras: Made In China (above) follows teenage workers employed at the largest Mardi…
Good ‘Evening’
August Evening Director: Chris Eska Screenwriter: Chris Eska Cast: Pedro Castaneda, Veronica Loren, Abel Becerra, Walter Perez, Raquel Gavia Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: PG-13 Genre: Drama Jaime (Castañeda) never expected to grow old like this. He thought he’d retire to a large house in Mexico with his wife and his grandchildren crowded around him. Instead…
Acoustic Car Bomb
Release Date: 2008-09-17 21inSA has put together a talented local lineup of bands, DJs, and artists, all for a cover that’s cheaper than a gallon of gas. The show features the long awaited return of alt-rockers Colleagues, who’ve been holed up in the studio trying new sounds and finishing up their album Drive By’s to…
Righteous Kill
Righteous Kill Director: Jon Avnet Screenwriter: Jon Avnet Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, 50 Cent, Donnie Wahlberg, Carla Gugino Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: R Genre: Drama One of my favorite Robert De Niro-with-a-badge movie moments comes courtesy of the 1997 crime drama Cop Land. A pudgy Sylvester Stallone interrupts a moustach’ed De Niro during…
Pop Pistol, Ballroom Catastrophe, Young Machines, & down Stereo
Release Date: 2008-09-17 21inSA has put together a talented local lineup of bands, DJs, and artists, all for a cover that’s cheaper than a gallon of gas. The show features the long awaited return of alt-rockers Colleagues, who’ve been holed up in the studio trying new sounds and finishing up their album Drive By’s to…
The Recession
The Recession Composer: Young Jeezy Label: Def Jam Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Hip Hop/Rap Atlanta’s Jay Jenkins is complicated, a raspy-voiced man of contradictions. Despite his infamous claim that he “fuck`s` with John McCain,” he just as eloquently endorses his opponent: “Y’all better vote for Barack Obama,…
One Last Shot, Hard Luck Heroes, Dick Wiggler and the Cattleguards, & Pavel Demon and the Revenant
Release Date: 2008-09-17 21inSA has put together a talented local lineup of bands, DJs, and artists, all for a cover that’s cheaper than a gallon of gas. The show features the long awaited return of alt-rockers Colleagues, who’ve been holed up in the studio trying new sounds and finishing up their album Drive By’s to…
I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura
I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura Composer: PAS/CAL Label: Le Grand Magistery Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Power pop Only mildly less delayed (if far less famous) than Chinese Democracy, the first full-length record by PAS/CAL arrives six years after their debut EP and at…
Lady Dottie & the Diamonds
Lady Dottie & the Diamonds Composer: Lady Dottie & the Diamonds Label: Hi-Speed Soul Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Electric blues Alabama native turned San Diego mainstay, sexagenarian Dorothy Mae Whitsett — known as Lady Dottie — guides her Diamonds with a smoky, sultry alto through beatific, soulful…
Dreamtime
Dreamtime Composer: Tom Verlaine Label: Collector’s Choice Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Rock/Pop These reissues of Tom Verlaine’s criminally overlooked second and third albums illustrate just how much of Marquee Moon’s ass-rocking inspiration came straight from the former Television frontman’s guitar. Accompanied by guest muscians here, Verlaine misses…
Words From the Front
Words From the Front Composer: Tom Verlaine Label: Collector’s Choice Release Date: 2008-09-17 Rated: NONE Media: CD Length: LP Format: Album Genre: Rock/Pop Words From the Front is something else entirely — a slower, more experimental effort with large guitarless gaps. “Postcards From Waterloo” reveals a twanging pop sensibility while “Clear It Away” leans heavily…
Best buns: Liberty’s sourdough hamburger buns
“I don’t think this is really a recipe for home,” Liberty Bar’s baker, Ron Sutton, said when I called to get instructions for their perfect house buns. Adapted from Nancy Silverton’s Breads From the La Brea Bakery, it takes three days to get from mixer to oven and results in enough buns to serve Sarah…
ARTIFACTS
We trust Tuesday press conferences make sense for some working folk, just as we take it on faith that a “fall fashion collection” has utility in parts farther from the equator. But for Artifacts the former mean “after press deadline,” so you can read more about yesterday’s big Luminaria 2009 conference later this week on…
Top patties: Morton’s meat methods
Top patties: Morton’s meat methods Yeah, at some level it’s unfair to even let a steakhouse compete in the burger issue; they could be tossing a New York strip/filet mignon combo in the hand grinder every time an order comes in. But, as it turns out, the top patty in the Current’s Burger Issue doesn’t…
Empty calories
I am of two minds about themed exhibitions. On the one hand, I can see how they would present an almost-irresistible lure for the curator of contemporary arts; conceptual photography, in particular, can be a tough sell to the general public, and providing a fun, “pop” focal point around which art can be grouped and…
Grain fed
Among the great controversies grinding around inside the growing sin carne community — oh, you troublesome veggies, vegans, and yoga-butt hungerers — is whether true vegetarians should be trying to replicate the experience of devouring a close kin. You know, the whole meat-shaped non-meat thing. These reviews aren’t for those with dilemmas of that sort.…
Shadow puppets and water music
Thankfully, there are no artist or curatorial statements in evidence at the UTSA Satellite Space’s alluring and immersive FOTOSEPTIEMBRE show, “Figure and Illusion: Photography by Susan kae Grant and Kenda North.” The images are eloquent without resorting to textual explanations — there’s lots of thinking room here, with space for fantasy as well as analysis.…
Dear Uncle Mat
For the past four months, I have been waiting for the opportunity to break up with my boyfriend. We have been dating for almost four years. The reason I want to break up is because in one year, our careers will take us to very different places. I’ll be moving to another state for med…
Casualties of war
Jesse Amado’s new show at SalaDiaz is some strong medicine. Most immediately eye-catching in the gallery’s front exhibition room is a neon sign installation, whose elegant white tubes spell “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” You no doubt recognize the phrase from the banner backgrounding President Bush’s now-infamous “aircraft carrier” speech of 2003, but the only letters in Amado’s…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Believe it or not, whatever has been limiting your movement has also been expanding your capacities. It’s true. The pinching sensation you’ve had to endure has been covertly generating psychic fuel that you will soon be able to access. Therefore, Aries, I say unto you: Praise your squelchers and constrictors! Be…
Postmodern gold
How do I begin reviewing a book professing no real beginning and no logical end? A book that eschews chronology? A book that exercises authorial interruption? I decided, in anticipated homage to the promise of a postmodern historic tale of gold in What Men Call Treasure, to search for information on Victorio Peak (where else but Wikipedia?). I…
¡Ask a Mexican!
Special Catholic edition I am a chica struggling with the choice to come out to my parents about my sexual orientation. My family is Catholic, and my parents are old-school. While we are very close, I am scared of how badly this can go. My parents have been living in the U.S. for about 45…
Speechless
To all those who think The Dark Knight was the biggest comics sequel of the summer, I say — well, I say you’re obviously right. The movie’s great and has pushed into the global box-office hall of fame. But the second-biggest sequel might surprise you. Many More Splendid Sundays! is the follow-up to a book…
No alternative
For a brief shining moment, San Antonio was the hotspot for indie music in Texas. It was a glorious time, when local alt-rock fans didn’t have to drive at least an hour to see their favorite bands. That moment amounted to a five-week span in the fall of 2006, when Sunset Station brought in several…
Midwived Texans cast into citizenship ‘black hole’
Were they scared off by the popularity of box-to-belly cesarean slashing and vacuum suction, or were they motivated by poverty or tradition? Whatever the reason some Mexican-American women have for avoiding hospital childbirths, they certainly couldn’t have foreseen the world of confusion their home birth would one day create for their little ones. How could…
THE SOUND & THE FURY
It might not carry the shock value of Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport in 1965, but the news that six-string virtuoso Sergio Lara is now playing electric guitar (with synthesizer capabilities, no less) might surprise some of his old fans. Lara, best known as half of the world-music acoustic duo Lara & Reyes (with…
The QueQue
(Insert war metaphor here) Radio voice proclaimed Monday “D-Day on Wall Street.” So depending on your perspective, we’re either about to be liberated from the chains of the entrenched Corporatocracy or sacked by foreign aggressors in really uncool helmets. Either way, there will be a period of adjustment. With the collapse of the banking titans,…
Search and destroy
South Texas Destroyers’ beginnings come straight from the When Harry Met Sally handbook. Opposites meet and don’t exactly click, but meet again somewhere down the road and forge a relationship. When Harry Met Sally paired a pre-Botox Meg Ryan’s fake multiple orgasms with Billy Crystal’s endless droning about pepper and paprikash; South Texas Destroyers combines…
Sweet home Alabama
Prior to the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a persuasive case could be made that the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil was the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. The bitter racial climate in Alabama at the time made it almost impossible to bring the…
Druggist
The first two bands (local notables the Cartographers and aptly named Tallahassee duo Powerplant) played to maybe a dozen people. The crowd might grow a little, but Druggist begins unloading instruments knowing they’re playing to 20 people at best. The group, recently stripped down to a duo of Blake Cormier and Zach Dunlap, is augmented…
“Synesthesia” — Hyperbubble
The opening synthesizer blips taste of Showbiz Pizza, the only introduction appropriate for vocalist Jess DeCuir’s disassociative color catalogue. “Purple, chrome, neon green,” she logs like the menacing onboard computer foiled in a bad sci-fi movie, instructed to name every possible color before initiating the self-destruct sequence. Jeff DeCuir’s mock-impassioned list of all the studio…
Voice of God
Stuck overseas too long and yearning for anything American, I’d once eschewed the usual tourist traps to catch an overdubbed airing of Star Wars on a television that still had knobs that clacked when turned. I could live with the lines randomly scrolling up the screen in sync with a loud pop, but what unfurled…
S’Nuff Film
Somedays, when I’m staring all puppy-dog-faced at my empty fan mailbox, I remind myself that my countless weeks (six) of unsung heroics as Alamo City’s screens patrolman are merely time killed until my unsold, as-yet-unfinished screenplay about Richard Nixon’s radioactive penis sweeps the Oscars. Then we’ll see who’s really a “disgrace to his or her…
BEEFMASTERS*
Armadillo’s 1423 Mccullough (210) 226-7556 The burger is undressed, and served on a good, crispy bun, with lettuce, tomato, onions, and pickles on the side. “Meat smells good,” said one critic, but everyone agreed it was “over-seasoned.” The bottled beer here is “freezing cold” and comes with a chilled pint glass. Typical roadhouse décor with…
Cinema Obscura
This Huntsville-shot tale of cannibalism is memorable only for its ambiguity and extreme misanthropy. We open on some girl or other getting slaughtered smash cut with a liver-spotted CEO fat cat (Kenneth Russell) munching noisily on suspect meat. Not only does this scene continue for far too long (a recurring theme in a nearly two-and-a-half-hour…
Origin Story: Chris Madrid’s Tostada Burger
San Antonio can claim the Tostada Burger as its own, a culinary creation as singular as the Philly Cheese Steak — often imitated, but less recognizable the farther afield you find it, and equally deserving of 15 minutes of fame on one of those Food Network shows. It’s related to another SA invention (that went…
Power trip
Lord Acton, the bearded Brit historian who probably would have bored us all to tears with his intellect, is the gent whom history credits with coming up with the famous “absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely” bon mot everyone’s reached for at some point. It took only a century for Ronald Reagan’s naval secretary to turn Acton’s quote into a…
Legend: Joe’s Hamburger Place
She’s open from 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, or until she runs out of meat. Which means, I’m happy to report, that your hamburger order is filled with a handful of ground beef, flattened with a spatula as it cooks on the griddle before your eyes; no frozen patties here. Nor modern cash registers. My bill…
A different, and deadly apartheid
While it’s a series of images that could be deemed photojournalism, the power and poignancy of Red Baklava’s The Road to Patrick Chamusso exhibition at the One9Zero6 stays with you long after you’ve left the gallery. The exhibit centers on its title subject, the South African freedom fighter once jailed with Nelson Mandela in the…
