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Table Talk
Chatting with a chef and forager
Remastered, Reunited Innovative San Antonio-born band Glorium will return this weekend after years-long hiatus
Critics’ Picks
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On the Cover: Many fruits and vegetables are available to those who know how to forage in San Antonio and South Texas.
1 ½ OZ TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA
1 ½ OZ SPARKLING WATER
¾ OZ FRESH LIME JUICE
2 TSP SUGAR
6-10 MINT LEAVES
5 FRESH STRAWBERRIES, MUDDLED
Gently muddle mint leaves and strawberries in a shaker. Add Tito’s Handmade Vodka, fresh lime juice, sugar, and ice. Shake well and pour everything into a glass. Top with sparkling water and garnish with a mint sprig and strawberry slice.
Friday, April 21 | 1 - 3 p.m.
Receive our beautiful 2023 Fiesta Medal with your same-day purchases totaling $50 or more from Alamo Quarry Market stores or restaurants. Bring receipts to the pop-up display located near Regal Cinemas. Plus, enter for a chance to win a $100 Alamo Quarry Market gift card.
*One per customer, while supplies last. Employees of Alamo Quarry Market and all of its tenants are not eligible.
HA final Texas House vote on a bill introduced by Texas State Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, that would bar the state from using the death penalty on people with severe mental illness has been delayed after tentative passage last week. Conservative lawmakers argue the proposal would allow killers to fake mental illness to avoid lethal injection.
Legislation that would expand Texans’ access to medical marijuana and increase its allowable potency is moving forward in the state’s House of Representatives. The Public Health Subcommittee unanimously approved a bill for full debate that would let physicians prescribe medical weed to patients suffering from chronic pain for which they would otherwise be given opioids.
HU.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth last week struck down a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to offer preventive services such as cancer screenings free of charge. The Biden White House is expected to appeal the ruling, which affects more than 150 million U.S. residents.
The child critically injured by a falling tree branch at the San Antonio Zoo earlier this month was released from the hospital last week. Jordyn Rodriguez was one of seven people injured when the branch collapsed near the zoo’s aviary section on March 15. The remaining six were treated on-site. — Sanford Nowlin
Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
With the Texas Republican Party seemingly intent on trolling the state by fighting culture wars instead of passing meaningful legislation, it’s always fun to see the tables turned. As happened last week to Texas Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano.
A Twitter video shared by veteran Texas Capitol journalist Scott Braddock and first reported on by the Dallas Observer captures the lawmaker calling out the made-up names of people scheduled to speak at a hearing on one the Lege’s many GOP-backed bills designed to punish transgender Texans.
“Is there a Connie Lingus here?” Leach inquires in the clip. “What about Anita Dickinme? Or Holden ... Holden Midick?”
Leach continues calling the names even after a woman seated in the gallery repeatedly giggles at the series of monikers right out of a middle-school prankster’s playbook.
“OK, are any three of those people here?” Leach asks, apparently still not catching on.
Finally, once the woman’s giggles reach a crescendo, her shoulders shaking, the lawmaker adopts a scolding tone.
“You got your — you got your — you got your moment,” Leach says. “I hope you enjoy it.”
While Leach handled things as well as could be expected, we’re still not above a little assclown schadenfreude. After all, the Plano Republican has shown his red rubber nose and floppy shoes plenty of times. Among other things, he’s co-sponsored anti-trans legislation
and bragged on his website about his role in passing last session’s bill aimed at making it harder for Texans to vote.
So, yeah, Jeff, we did enjoy it. Immenselly. —
Sanford Nowlin
Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas Senate, are once again at odds — this time over how to lower the state’s property taxes. Patrick wants to raise the homestead exemption, while Phelan wants to cap the amount home appraisals can go up annually, the Texas Tribune reports. The two Republicans are now sniping at each other over their conflicting views. Stay tuned. It can only get more interesting as the clock winds down on the session.
Paul Rusesabagina — the inspiration for the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda — was returned to his home in San Antonio after nearly two years of being held as a political prisoner in the East African nation of Rwanda. After his release, he was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center for a health check. — Sanford Nowlin
Brennan High School teacherto the Northside ISD board after a series of SanAntonio campus lockdowns and last week’s school shooting in Nashville.
Using recently released U.S. Census data, the chief economist for housing market research firm Zonda predicted that forthcoming numbers from the federal government will show that San Antonio was the nation’s fourth fastest-growing metro area in 2022.
YOU SAID IT!
“I am terrified to go to work in my school right now. I have rearranged my classroom so that I have my bookshelf so that I can jam it up against the door during a lockdown next time.”
— Rachel Brantley
BY KEVIN SANCHEZ
Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and their educational level is actually lower than that of elementary schools. It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education they deserve.” — George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” 1941
Unless he starts calling multiple legislative sessions, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has until June 18 to sign a school voucher bill into law — and he’s clearly hellbent on doing so.
But one need not be a data scientist like Matt Worthington, who sits on the Del Valle ISD Board of Trustees, to stumble upon an inconvenient detail Worthington recently published in an Express-News op-ed, which is that there are no private schools in a majority of Texas counties.
So, where exactly does Abbott’s much-touted “school choice” come in?
According to the research firm General Academics, the average cost for attending a private school last year was almost $24,000. Yet the proposed bills in the Lege would funnel a measly $8,000 to parents to pay for tuition.
Indeed, the Texas Education Agency’s deputy commissioner recently let the jaguar out of the trick-bag when he admitted during a taped phone conversation that voucher programs in other states showed that “yes, traditional public school districts are getting less money.” That, in turn, would necessitate the firing of teachers.
That official was later reprimanded for stating facts.
That two right-wing activists broke the story is not only a delicious irony but something that signals the strange bed-fellowship between Democrats
and rural, religious Republicans on this issue.
The ever-tireless Mothers Against Greg Abbott took out billboards declaring that education savings accounts “will turn off your Friday lights,” referring to affluent private teams dominating scholastic championships in voucher-beset states like Florida. Once you start messing with high school football, the fists of Texans across the political spectrum clench in unison.
Talk of diverting funding from public schools could not arrive at a worse time, what with a raft of recent school closures and teacher vacancies.
“A state-backed program that for decades has helped districts keep their credit scores high has reached its debt limit ... resulting in more than $6.87 billion in unguaranteed bonds,” the Texas Tribune documented in February.
And there’s more. “Since the end of pandemic-era federal waivers that offered free lunch to 50 million kids nationwide, school meal programs face rising food costs, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and a growing pile of unpaid debt,” Brandon Rodriquez reported in the Current’s previous cover story.
Though the Texas GOP prides itself on cutting red tape, it still forces financially struggling families to fill out a bunch of paperwork — meal application forms, income verification, Social Security numbers — just to keep their kids well-fed enough to learn.
In this year’s State of the State address, Abbott touted Texas as “number one for National Blue Ribbon Schools.” He neglected to mention our state ranks 44th in the nation in per-pupil education spending.
This broaches a fundamental disagreement over the ideal of what equal access to education means. For many on the right, equality simply means meritocracy or “equality of opportunity.” In other words, everybody begins
at the same starting line, and to the winner go the spoils.
Moderates and liberals alike are content to criticize the real-world implementation of that philosophy by noting, given inherited wealth and various kinds of unearned privilege, some runners start meters ahead of the rest. Status has an uncanny way of getting recycled into merit. This argues for intervening to reset the starting line — or what’s annoyingly called “equity.”
There is, however, a more damning criticism of meritocracy dating back to at least Abraham Lincoln’s speech at the Wisconsin State Fair, and in popular parlance, it’s called “the American Dream.” In any classroom, there are a few A students and a few F students, but most of us land somewhere in the middle.
What about the person who works hard all their life and can’t afford to retire with dignity? What about the kid who earned a college degree and is now carrying around boulders of debt? What about those in the middle of the pack who are trying their best? If not a mansion, much less a yacht, don’t they at least deserve their own version of the white picket fence?
Funnily enough, the word “meritocracy” was coined in the 1950s by a British sociologist who intended to describe a Gattaca-like dystopia where the majority is ruled by unaccountable experts. In everyday terms, when one hires a plumber, one doesn’t need the Albert Einstein of plumbing, one just needs someone willing to get their hands dirty and knows which end of a pipe is which. Competence and grit, in
lieu of excellence and spotless credentials, often enough get the job done. At its core, “equality of opportunity” both whitewashes and devolves into smug elitism.
All this to say, the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses of the universe are going to be fine whether they attend private schools or drop out, whether taxes on the top bracket are 5% or 50%, whether they chose to remain on our humble planet or shuttle off to gentrify Mars.
But not everything in life needs to be a competitive sport, much less a rat race. Rather than coddling the strongest and fastest, we need to build and maintain public institutions — schools included — that not only provide a safety net for those who fall behind but do right by the workaday joggers.
That’s the American Dream. Not billionaires buying elections, manipulating the democratic conversation and duping gullible conservatives into privatizing essential services that we the people rely on.
The news is not all bleak in that regard. Two weeks ago, after a three-day strike that shut down the country’s second-largest school system, the Service Employees International Union, Local 99, reached a deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District on pay raises for its bus drivers, custodians and other support staff. That $22.52 an hour is a far cry from what the minimum wage would be had it kept up with worker productivity over the past half century. But we can dream.
Albert Einstein was a socialist, by the way, and generally a poor student.
Last week, Senate Bill 8, a proposal that would let Lone Star State families use taxpayer money to send their kids to private school, made it out of the Texas Senate’s Education Committee, clearing it for a vote by the full body.
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has crisscrossed the state in recent weeks isell the idea that the bill — which faces a far rockier road in the House — would let Texas parents choose how to best educate their kids.
However, education experts said Abbott’s promises are misleading at best. SB 8 will likely lead to lower test scores, a deterioration of public schools and a rise in non-accredited private ones, they argue.
For all of the Republican governor’s suggestions that middle-class and lower-income Texans would be able to afford elite educations for their kids, critics say that’s far from the truth.
Few additional San Antonio families would be able to send their kids off to Central Catholic High School, for example, experts said, noting that instead they’re far more likely to end up at ill-equipped and underfunded campuses that pop up in the wake of the bill’s passage.
“It’s not the elite private schools that are doing really well and have endowments and are propped up by a Catholic Church diocese or wealthy alumni and
have waiting lists,” said Michigan State University education policy professor Joshua Cowen, who’s spent years studying vouchers across the country. “Those are not the schools that participate in school voucher programs. They don’t want anything to do with it.”
If passed, SB 8 would provide parents who pull their children out of public school an $8,000 annual check, known as an “educational savings account.” That money could fund tuition at a private school or help cover homeschooling expenses. Families with kids already enrolled in private school or being homeschooled won’t be eligible.
Advocates for SB 8 argue that vouchers will increase the competitiveness of Texas’ public schools, forcing them to cut what conservatives characterize as bloated school district bureaucracies.
However, Cowen warns he program being pushed by Abbott would slash funding for existing public schools fwhile failing to deliver on the school choice that voucher advocates trumpet.
While San Antonio boasts elite private campuses, including Keystone Private School, Texas Military Institute and the aforementioned Central Catholic, Cowen said most residents who tap into the program wouldn’t be able to send their children to any of them.
Instead, if Senate Bill 8 passes, the state is likely to
see a gold rush of what Cowen describes as “subprime” or “pop-up” private schools — campuses run out of church basements or established by nonprofits to make money on the side.
After Wisconsin passed its “school choice” program in 2013, around 120 pop-up private schools appeared — some almost out of thin air — to accept parents’ vouchers. The average shelf life of those campuses was four years, according to Cowen’s research. Some 40% of all private schools in Wisconsin have closed since the state launched its program.
Many of the pop-ups were never accredited, Cowen said. Further, since a large share were set up as money-making ventures, many drastically slashed services to stay open.
“[Every] dollar that gets spent is a dollar out of [the school operator’s] wallet,” he added. “And so, the incentive is to try and save every penny and to cut corners.”
The state of Texas spent, on average, $9,900 per student on education during its 2022 fiscal year, according to the Education Data Initiative. If a private school sets its tuition at $8,000 — the maximum amount of a voucher under SB 8 — that enterprise would be spending less money per student than what public districts already spend.
Combine that lower spending with an incentive to cut corners, and the quality of that education declines considerably, according to Cowen.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher plan may win with some GOP voters, but experts say it’s a loser for Texas students
What’s more, in states with voucher programs — including Ohio, Indiana and Louisiana — test scores fell dramatically after the measures’ passage, largely due to the substandard education offered by pop-up schools, according to the professor.
“Those impacts on test scores in Louisiana and Ohio had roughly twice the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores and about the same size of what Hurricane Katrina did to test scores in Louisiana,” Cowen said.
Just as voucher programs tend to diminish education outcomes for participating students, they also pose serious risks students who remain in public schools, especially those in rural districts.
Parents who sent their children to a substandard pop-up school are likely to find the district they left is now struggling financially because public education money was drained to fund vouchers, said Aaron Hood, superintendent of Robert Lee ISD and president of the Texas Association of Rural Schools Districts.
Further, those returning students are likely to bring the baggage of their time at a substandard pop-up back to the public campus.
“Let’s say they’re gone for three-quarters of the school year, but they’re having trouble at their new school — let’s say for behavioral problems — and that school says, ‘We’re no longer taking you,’” Hood hypothesized. “They’re fixing to be wrapped back into the school district that’s mandated to take them back, and that public school is going to be held accountable for their testing scores — and they weren’t even being taught in that school district.”
Hood isn’t alone in his concerns about the financial drain SB 8 would have on the state’s many rural districts. Rural Republicans in the Texas House have spoken loudly and decisively against vouchers.
Most rural Texans live around 20 miles from the nearest private school, meaning even if vouchers pass, they’re not left with many options beyond a public campus. Many parents in those areas recognize that, if vouchers pass, their tax dollars would end up subsidizing the private educations of children who live miles away, Hood said.
Despite Abbott’s effort to paint vouchers as a win for conservative Tex-
ans, many rural Republicans oppose the idea. A similar school voucher bill rammed through the Texas Senate in 2017 failed miserably once it reached the House.
The governor’s voucher push also comes amid growing evidence of similar programs failure in other states. So, why is it among his top priorities this legislative session?
Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson blames the Republican zeitgeist.
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory during Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign energized Republican strategists around the notion that they could win on a platform of fighting “wokeism” in schools. Such parental grievances were exacerbated by school lockdowns and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think Republicans and conservatives generally saw Youngkin be able to use these education issues to win the governorship in Virginia,” Jillson said. “And a bunch of other Republicans running for statewide offices saw the effectiveness of these parental rights educational opportunity issues and decided to use them themselves, particularly in Florida and Texas.”
Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential contender, signed into law one of the nation’s largest private school voucher expansions. Similar to what’s being proposed in Texas, that measure would award families who pull their kids out of public schools roughly $8,500.
GOP strategists view the passage of voucher bills as ammunition for winning statewide and even national elections, according to Jillson.
“Someone like DeSantis would run for president on their successes in reforming public schools in their state and empowering parents knowing that at least conservative voters liked the idea,” he said.
But Jillson added that Republicans’ fixation with vouchers has more to do with partisan victories than ensuring real educational improvements for parents and students.
“All these school voucher programs talk about parents empowerment,” education scholar Cowen said. “But they ignore the idea that it’s the schools getting the money and making the decision about who they select.”
The General Manager of the Edwards Aquifer Authority (“EAA”) proposes to grant applications to convert Base Irrigation Groundwater to Unrestricted Irrigation Groundwater under § 711.342(c) of the EAA’s Rules. A copy of the applications, the technical summaries, the General Manager’s proposed actions, and the proposed amended regular permits are available for public inspection at the EAA’s offices at 900 E. Quincy Street, San Antonio, Texas Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Electronic copies may also be obtained by request to Jennifer Wong-Esparza at jesparza@edwardsaquifer.org or (210) 222-2204.
The General Manager proposes to approve the following applications to convert Base Irrigation Groundwater to Unrestricted Irrigation Groundwater under § 711.342(c) of the EAA’s Rules:
LGI Homes - Texas, LLC – Filed application on September 12, 2022. The application seeks to convert 82.146 acre-feet of Base Irrigation Groundwater to Unrestricted Irrigation Groundwater based on the development of the Historically Irrigated Acres (HIA).
Wal-Mart Real Estate Business Trust – Filed application on January 31, 2023. The application seeks to convert 18.326 acre-feet of Base Irrigation Groundwater to Unrestricted Irrigation Groundwater based on the development of the Historically Irrigated Acres (HIA).
The applicants or any other Edwards Aquifer permit holder may file a written request for a contested case hearing on the proposed action with the EAA by no later than May 5, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. in accordance with § 707.603 of the EAA’s Rules. The EAA’s Board of Directors will consider approval of the applications and issuance of the proposed amended regular permits within 60 days of publication of this notice unless a request for contested case hearing is timely filed. If no timely requests for contested case hearing are filed, the applications will be presented to the EAA’s Board on the date of the hearing for final action.
This notice is issued pursuant to § 707.525 of the EAA’s Rules.
ISSUED THIS 5th DAY OF APRIL, 2023
Amy Cutler is known for her surreal paintings, prints and drawings of women engaged in mysterious and magical tasks. However, this exhibition from the New York artist centers on a piece that serves as a three-dimensional representation of what she usually conveys through paper — a multimedia installation of a room with patterned wallpaper, with a knot of hundreds of feet of human and synthetic hair in the middle. Called Fossa, the installation contains textiles and objects wrapped within the hair “hive.” What’s more, some 800 feet of braided hair will hang from the ceiling throughout the space. Viewers are provided headphones through which they can hear breathy clips of audio drawn from intimate conversations. Made in collaboration with musician Emily Wells and hair stylist Adriana Papaleo, Fossa is an auditory, visual and tactile experience. Also featured in the exhibition is Cutler’s drawing of the same name, acquired by Ruby City earlier this year. The illustration shows a collection of tree trunks entwined with lengths of hair and features women engaged in various tasks within platforms inside the trunks. In addition to the pieces in Ruby City’s collection, “Past, Present, Progress” also features loaned works from two other series by the artist. Free, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Thursday-Sunday, April 6-February 25, 2024, Studio, Ruby City, 111 Camp St., (210) 227-8400, rubycity.org. — Dalia Gulca
SPECIAL EVENT STOMP
STOMP’s exciting and loud eight-person percussion ensemble is known for being anything but traditional. Trash cans, brooms, newspapers and even toilet plungers have their place both on the stage and in the setlist, where everyday items — including objects that many consider garbage — are used to create captivating rhythms and entirely unique music pieces. It’s a performance that both starts and ends with a bang — and includes plenty more banging in between. The STOMP company had its last New York East Village show in January after a famed 29-year run, but the touring troupe is far from done. San Antonio is one of more than a dozen stops across the Northeastern and Southern U.S. this spring for STOMP, whose performances have prevailed as an international phenomenon. $27.60-$79.50, 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, H-E-B Performance Hall, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle, (210) 223-8624, tobincenter.org.— Dana Nichols
The XFL’s Brahmas will return home for a battle for the Lone Star State as they take on the Houston Roughnecks. The San Antonio team has struggled in its inaugural season, racking up a lackluster 2-5 record so far. However, things could be looking up for the semi-pro football team after a decisive victory against the Arlington Renegades in Week 6. A win against the No. 1 seed Roughnecks could give the Brahmas the boost they need to make a playoff run. $20 and up, 2 p.m., Alamodome, 100 Montana St., (210) 207-3663, alamodome.com. — Michael Karlis
Although live events have returned, the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Check with venues to make sure scheduled events are still happening, and please follow all health and safety guidelines.
FRI | 04.14
FILM ENCANTO
The 2021 animated film Encanto tells the story of Colombian family the Madrigals, all of whom possess mystical powers gifted to them by the magic of their home, the Casita — that is, everyone except 15-year-old Mirabel. However, when Mirabel finds out members of her family are losing their magic, she sets out to discover what’s happening and save the day. The movie will be screened on a 32-foot LED video wall as part of the Tobin Center’s H-E-B Cinema on Will’s Plaza series. Full concessions and bar will be available at the event. Attendees may bring their own lawn chairs and blankets or make use of available seating. Free, 8 p.m., Will Naylor Smith River Walk Plaza, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle, (210) 223-8624, tobincenter.org. — DG
One of Broadway’s longest-running musicals, Chicago tells the story of two rival vaudeville performers, starlet Velma Kelly and chorus girl Roxie Hart. When Velma and Roxie are each arrested for murdering their romantic partners, they must trade in their shimmery leotards and hotel rooms for prison uniforms and neighboring cells at the Cook County Jail. It’s bad enough that Velma and Roxie have been torn away from their glamorous showbiz lifestyles, but tensions rise further when the two develop a seething dislike for one another. Things eventually look up for Roxie when she learns that one of the prison guards, Matron “Mama” Morton, has connections to local media. Mama begins accepting bribes from Roxie in exchange for press coverage to bolster her eventual vaudeville comeback, but Velma is also in on the action, creating an all-out media circus. A showstopping lineup of musical numbers, including the Broadway classic “All That Jazz,” combines with energetic choreography and a dramatic storyline to make Chicago a humorous and thought-provoking account of the crime and corruption underlying celebrity during the Roaring ’20s. $35 and up, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston St., (210) 226-3333, majesticempire.com.— Caroline Wolff
FRI | 04.14 -
SUN | 04.16
SPECIAL EVENT
Max Booth III and Lori Michelle’s indie horror press Ghoulish Books is living up to its name with its frighteningly fast growth. After a success-
ful Kickstarter, the press opened a horror bookstore and launched a new literary magazine. Booth and Michelle are now back with the second annual Ghoulish Book Fest, a weekend celebrating literary horror with vendors, panels and guest authors and artists. This year’s guests of honor include V. Castro, a Mexican American author from San Antonio known for her novels Mestiza Blood and The Queen of the Cicadas; Johnny Compton, an Alamo City-based author who recently published his debut novel The Spite House; and Trevor Henderson, a Canadian writer and illustrator known for creating iconic creatures such as Siren Head. $75, 1-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday, Historic Hermann Sons Building, 525 S. St. Mary’s St., ghoulishbookfest.com.
— Christianna DaviesFRI | 04.14 -
SUN | 04.16
The Poteet Strawberry festival is back for its 76th year, drawing visitors to the small town south of San Antonio for carnival rides, live music and a smorgasbord of strawberry products. The festival is a celebration of Poteet’s home-grown strawberries, a crop endangered by recent drought conditions across the state. Aside from enjoying berries by the handful, guests can try goods ranging from artisan jams to baked treats. This year’s live entertainment includes Conjunto Cats, Gary Hobbs, Giovannie & The Hired Guns, David Lee Garza, Kolby Cooper, Velvet, Kevin Fowler and more. The fruit-themed celebration has grown
tremendously from its humble beginnings in downtown Poteet in 1948. The event now draws more than 100,000 guests annually, funding some 30 scholarships for local students and providing income for local strawberry farmers. Tickets are available online for $10-$20 per person or at the gate for $15-$25 per person. Weekend passes run $45. $10-$45, 6 p.m.-midnight Friday, 10 a.m.-1 a.m. Saturday, and 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday, Poteet Festival Grounds, 9199 N. State Highway 16, Poteet, (830) 276-3323, strawberryfestival.com. — Macks Cook
Created by San Antonio Sports, the annual Fiesta FitFest celebrates fitness, fun and, obviously, Fiesta. Held the weekend before the kickoff to San Antonio’s annual citywide party, the event lets participants engage in fitness-related training and activities ranging from line-dancing classes to Orangetheory workouts. The weekend’s highlight is the L’Étape San Antonio by Tour de France, a cycling race in which Tour de France experts have designed a course enabling amateur cyclists to experience the feel of the famed sporting event. Riders can participate in courses that range from 10 miles to 100 miles. While many of the weekend’s events are free and require no reservation, L’Étape San Antonio, the Boots & Brews Beer Mile and the SATX 5K and 10K are reservation-only and include entry fees.
SPECIAL EVENT
The city’s premier annual literary event will draw 100 authors, both emerging and established, to the Alamo City for presentations, panel discussions, book sales and signings. The Only Good Indians author Stephen Graham Jones will be in attendance to promote his new thriller Don’t Fear the Reaper, while Rebecca Makkai, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, will highlight her literary mystery I Have Some Questions for You, and Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted, will discuss his new nonfiction book Poverty, By America. Longtime festival participant and San Antonio literary treasure Sandra Cisneros will be back with a new collection of poems, Woman Without Shame / Mujer Sin Vergüenza. Kids’ theater performances, a technology area and interactive art and play stations will provide family entertainment to festivalgoers, and food trucks will be on hand to offer sustenance. Free, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Central Library and UTSA Southwest Campus, 600 Soledad St. and 300 Augusta St., (210) 750-8951, sabookfestival.org. — CD
APRIL 20, 2023
4 – 10 PM
Fiesta® San Antonio #VivaFiestaSA2023 fiestasanantonio.org
April 20 - 30
Even a month after the funeral mass of Jesse Treviño, San Antonio is still lamenting the loss of the beloved and influential visual artist known for his photorealistic paintings and largescale public art projects.
Friends and associates of the late Treviño, who died Feb. 13 at age 76 after a battle with cancer, said he had an outsize impact on the San Antonio community because he was part of the community. His legacy is that of an icon, a mentor and a creator of work that spoke to a public broader than just those who visited galleries or collected his work.
Treviño lost his right arm while serving in the Vietnam conflict. While face-down in a rice paddy, he vowed to return to his hometown and paint those dearest to him. Once he returned to San Antonio, he began painting with his left hand despite facing tremendous hurdles.
Among Treviño’s best known work is The
Spirit of Healing, a 93-foot mosaic mural on the facade of the Christus Santa Rosa Hospital, which he completed in 1997. His La Veladora of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a four-story, three-dimensional ceramic mural at the Guadalupe Theatre become a celebrated West Side landmark after its 2003 completion.
Although several of Treviño’s works have been acquired by the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, those close to him said his deepest impact remains in the community in which he grew up — a community with whom he continues to resonate as an artist, individual and eager teacher.
“He was really regarded as a hometown hero,” said Ruben C. Cordova, who curated the first comprehensive retrospective for Treviño at the Museo Alameda in 2009.
“He wanted to paint photorealistically, because people could understand that; people could relate to it,” Cordova continued. “And because he could really render what he saw
in a photograph, people marveled at that. To think he had begun as a right-hand painter and then started painting with his left hand, that’s even harder to believe.”
In preparation for the 2009 retrospective, Cordova remembers Treviño as being reluctant to talk about his work. With days ticking down before its opening, the curator finally corralled him, forced him to sit down and open up about his creative process.
Far from being unable to articulate his work process, it became clear Treviño remembered every detail of every work that he made. Cordova described the painter as being “very precise” and possessing a “sharp mind.”
Among the most astonishing works in the Museo Alameda’s retrospective was a largescale painting of the artist’s mother titled Señora Dolores Treviño. In it, Treviño depicts the family matriarch as she holds a basket full of laundry in the backyard of her modest home. The painting’s grand scale 25
23 appears to elevate the status of a domestic worker.
“I think what he wanted to do was capture the lived experience of his mother,” Cordova said. “It was important to him to paint her daily life.”
Cordova said depicting daily life is a tradition that could be traced back to French 19th century painting, when artists such as Jean Désiré Corbet began breaking away from conventions and academic painting to forge the Realism movement. Later, the Chicano movement created demand for dignified images of Latinos in which they could be seen taking pride in the work they conducted.
Despite Alamo City art lovers’ appreciation of Treviño, he still hasn’t received the credit he’s due, Cordova said.
“He is a cultural hero in San Antonio but not as well known outside of San Antonio,” he added. “He really should be in local and national museums.”
Jimmy Leflore managed the City of San Antonio Public Arts Programs for more than 20 years.
One of the first major projects he remembers working on was Treviño’s Veladora sculpture at the Guadalupe Theater. When it was approved in the early 2000s, city officials were just starting to recognize the positive community impact of public art, Leflore said. For years prior, it had also been difficult to win city approval for the use of religious iconography on public buildings.
In that way, Treviño’s creation broke ground on two fronts.
“I don’t think that was lost on Jesse,” Leflore said. “I think he understood this was a bold statement he was making.”
Along with the city’s eventual backing of the project came the approval of the surrounding West Side, community that still hadn’t begun to get its full recognition as a significant cultural center of San Antonio.
“That project was a major milestone in helping establish the West Side culture as part of the San Antonio brand,” Leflore added. “People from all over go out of their way to see that sculpture.”
Leflore says he was impressed by Treviño’s ability to execute at such a grand scale, whether it be with paint brush or ceramic tile.
“I immediately understood his vision was at the level of a master artist,” Laflore said. “He loved his family, and he loved his hometown. He saw the beauty of Chicano people, and he was able to communicate that so that his own people and others could see it.”
Joe Lopez, known for his paintings of Mexican Americans and roosters, a symbol of strength in Mexican American culture, sees Treviño’s significance as that of a mentor — not just to him but an entire community.
For years, Lopez owned the Gallista Gallery on South Flores Street, a spot that showcased his own work as well as that of emerging San Antonio artists.
He frequented the same frame shop as Treviño and eventually befriended the revered painter.
Lopez was born with only one arm and saw Treviño as an inspiration for his ability to overcome obstacles.
“But besides that, he was painting about La Raza,” Lopez said. “When you see something that you can relate to, it makes you feel good. We were so proud of him that he wasn’t ashamed of painting these things. It was like saying, ‘Don’t forget where you came from.’”
Lopez credits Treviño for teaching him how to hang a painting properly and helping him to develop professionally.
“I started poniendole mas, and I became more professional,” Lopez said.
Lopez he also appreciated Treviño’s ability to adopt a sense of humor even when facing adversity — something he’s tried to channel. Lopez said he and his mentor often joked that they could save money if they bought gloves together.
Lopez points out that those who look closely enough at Treviño’s painting of his mother will see that she actually holds a large fruit basket rather than a laundry basket.
“People who have lived through humble times will recognize these small details,” he said.
Although painter Vincent Valdez now resides in Houston, he remains one of the Alamo City’s
most-recognizable visual artists. He credits Treviño’s work for inspiring his own. Further, representation was a key part of that influence.
“As a child, I kept a scrapbook filled with local newspaper clippings of works by Cesar Martinez and Jesse Treviño,” Valdez said. “Their works were the very first time I saw familiar faces and communities like my own represented as American painting. Their works filled the void and carried me through childhood in ways that European and American art history books could not.”
Martinez, Valdez’s aforementioned inspiration, met Treviño in 1971. He remembers the painter’s masterful use of tools and described him a disciplined master whose creations were “very well calculated.”
Although Treviño’s work depicted Mexican Americans and Mexican American culture, perhaps one of the most significant aspects of it is that it can viewed as universal, Martinez said, unlocking perhaps one of the most vital clues as to why he remains a beloved San Antonio icon.
“We all work from a cultural viewpoint, but all cultures have parallels.” Martinez said. “I think Jesse was able to parlay that into a universal understanding of his work but also of our own culture.”
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When actor and one-time San Antonio resident Brian Villalobos got a call from director Patrick William Smith a couple years ago asking him if he would be interested in auditioning for a TV series he was making, the pitch included a description of the show as “Indiana Jones meets The Office.”
If that wasn’t intriguing enough, Smith told him they would be shooting in Ireland.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means, and it sort of makes my brain short circuit, but that sounds incredible,’” Villalobos, 42, told the Current during a recent interview.
“Also, did you say Ireland?”
So began Villalobos’ involvement in the comedy mockumentary series Groundbreaking. It follows a team of “astoundingly unsuccessful archaeologists” who travel to the fictional Irish town of St. Quinn, where they’re hired by a developer to survey the land to make sure a construction project won’t destroy anything historic buried in the area.
During their excavation, the team, which includes Villalobos’ character Goose, inadvertently discover an ancient Celtic secret that triggers a series of mysterious events.
“When I read the script, it felt like a throwback to those ’80s and ’90s adventure stories with a lot of heart,” Villalobos said. “I hesitate to say Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner and The Goonies, but it was that kind of feeling.”
Groundbreaking will make its world premiere on April 18 at the Cannes International
Series Festival, aka Canneseries, in Cannes, France, which runs separately from the Cannes Film Festival. The first episode will screen in the short form competition.
Villalobos is a graduate of Saint Mary’s Hall and is currently living in the Austin area. Full disclosure: He was also a writer and associate editor at the Current from 2005 to 2012.
Once Villalobos auditioned and landed the role, he packed his bags in summer of 2021 and made the trip to Connemara, a region in Western Ireland. The cast and production team finished filming the first full season in a month’s time. Now, they’re hoping Canneseries screening can land a distributor.
During our interview, Villalobos talked about his character’s role on the archaeology team and the most challenging aspect of shooting outdoors in Ireland. He also explained the significance of a landmark in the series dubbed Sex Tree.
Tell me about your character, Goose. The way Goose was described to me was that he’s like your favorite history teacher from high school. He’s the historian of the team. When [the team] gets to a dig, he’s the one that knows all the background. He also has a caretaker role and wants to make sure everyone is happy. The team has a lot of passion, and they love what they do, but they just haven’t found anything yet.
You say they haven’t found anything, but in the trailer, Goose is seen very proudly unearthing a lot of used condoms.
(Laughs.) Yes, in his desperate search for something of note, he finds a tree and starts digging around it and unearths decades of used condoms. Ever the optimist, he’s like, “Well, there’s a story here.” There’s been a lot of condom activity at that tree, which he immediately dubs Sex Tree. Goose is also a cartographer, so he makes a map that looks like one you would see in The Lord of the Rings or at the beginning of an A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh book. The map he makes has all these landmarks that are significant to the story, and then right in the middle of it is Sex Tree.
The series features an international cast, but you’re the only American actor, correct?
Yeah, I’m the only American in the cast. Going into [production], I was like, “By default, I’m the most boring person here.” I waltzed into [the audition] and was like, “What accent do you want me to use?” Patrick was like, “No, you’re American.” I was like, “Oh, OK. Cool.”
What was it like shooting in Ireland?
It was breathtaking. The Irish countryside is mindbogglingly beautiful. There’s just so much history. At the same time, we lost so many production days to rain. I want to stress that Ireland is amazing beyond description, but there are also these things — these small, Irish mosquito-gnats — called midges. During one scene, these midges were just bouncing off our faces. I could hear them thwacking on the camera lens. It got so bad, we had to call it a day. We were rained out, and we were midged out.
Will you be in Cannes for the festival?
My wife and my kids, we’re all going. I went to Ireland to shoot [Groundbreaking] and couldn’t take them. I don’t think it would’ve gone over well if I was like, “See you later! I’m going to the French Riviera!”
San Antonio celebrates stories of its past, from the struggle at the Alamo to the many cultures who carved out settlements along the bank of the Yanaguana.
Even so, we don’t always think about how food played into the lives of the people who occupied this area going back centuries.
Edible plants abound within the San Antonio city limits, some of them indigenous to the area, others imported centuries ago by outsiders. Those plants can help us understand who we were in the past while being easier to find today than many think. Indeed, one need only glance to the side of the road for an eyeful of that unexpected bounty, say culinary experts.
If you’ve ever picked pecans up from the ground at Brackenridge Park or pulled a lime off of a tree in your backyard, you’ve inadvertently taken part in urban foraging — the practice of identifying and collecting the wild foods such as tree nuts, plant roots, mushrooms and flowers growing freely around your city. If urban foraging is new to you, getting started could be as simple as taking a walk.
“I think if San Antonians were to look around where they walk, where they ride their bike, they would reconnect with what our ancestors knew as not just sustenance, but as relatives, because they are so close to us,” chef, author and filmmaker Adán Medrano told the Current. “And that raises a question: where do we want to go in the future? It’s an aspiration, wanting to be in a future that is thriving, joyful, sustainable, a true community. The plants help us do that.”
Medrano, who created Truly Texas Mexican, a 2021 documentary that shares the stories and cultural evolution of Texas Mexican food, is an expert on the subject of recognizing edible plants and their significance in South Texas. Medrano spent 23 years working throughout Latin America, Europe and Asia, focusing on the importance of their food and culinary traditions. He also founded San Antonio CineFestival, the first and longest-running U.S. Latino film festival.
“I think, if you begin to respect the fact that these beings, our relatives, had a very beautiful bond with the plants we see every day, we might have more respect for them,” Medrano said. “We would pick them when it was harvesting time. And during the winters, we would let them grow so that they would create fats, minerals and vitamins when they were under the earth. And when spring emerges, they would come up and feed us. This is mother nature.”
Medrano isn’t the only one who believes getting back to the earth — including sampling what grows
in its urban settings — is vital for society’s sanity.
During a talk at the Austin’s most recent SXSW multimedia festival, renowned social media influencer Alexis Nikole Nelson discussed her efforts to demystify common edible plants found right in Americans’ front yards. In 2022, she won the first James Beard Foundation Broadcast Media Award for her social media account, BlackForager, on TikTok and Instagram.
Nelson graduated from Ohio State University in 2015 with degrees in environmental science and theatre — a double major apparent in her humorous, high-energy discussion of topics such as the indigenous roots of foraging in America and the history of U.S. foraging laws.
“I feel like, whenever I talk about foraging, people say, ‘But, loud lady, I don’t live in the middle of the woods like it seems like you do,’” Nelson said during her SXSW talk. “To which I say, ‘You silly goose. There are plants literally everywhere. They’re not more special when they’re growing in the woods. They are just as special when they’re growing out of the cracks in your sidewalk.’”
Nelson may not be a Texas native, but she argues that wherever humans reside, they need not travel far to connect with their environment. The schooled botanist was first introduced to foraging at the age of 5, when her mother pointed out a patch of onion grass in her front yard — a perennial weed that tastes just like its name.
“It’s crazy to me that I used to do this as a child literally everywhere in my neighborhood with nary a care,” Nelson told the Current. “The fact that it’s illegal
MTexas peaches lend themselves to decadent preserves, here combined with goat cheese and butter crostini.
in Texas is just beyond me.”
Yes, in Texas, foraging without permission is considered stealing. Most state and federal lands prohibit gathering plants of any kind, edible or not, and the penalties include fines and loss of park privileges. Lone Star State law allows foraging on private property, but the gatherer must have permission from the landowner before taking anything to eat.
Even though Texas law poses a potential barrier, urban foragers said people shouldn’t be discouraged from seeking out edible plants. Many are considered weeds by homeowners, making it that much easier to get permission to take them home, chemist and Houston resident Mark Vorderbruggen told the Current.
“One thing that people don’t realize is that the best place to forage is often around suburbia,” Vorderbruggen said. “Even though we didn’t domesticate them, there has been a co-evolutionary pressure where humans change the ecosystem, and certain plants really adapted … . It’s honestly a great way to meet your neighbors — if you talk to them and say, ‘I’d like to save you money, can I eat these weeds that are showing up in your flowerbeds?’”
Vorderbruggen — who goes by Merriwether online,
a nickname inspired by Meriwether Lewis of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition — teaches classes on wild edibles at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center and runs a meticulously catalogued field guide to edible plants called Foraging Texas.
Accessible at foragingtexas.com, the site offers comprehensive lists of edible plants found throughout Texas, categorized by type, color, season and use. A series of YouTube videos further aids in plant identification. If you’re unfamiliar, consider it a great starting point for urban foraging.
What’s more, Vorderbruggen leads cooking classes and walkabouts in the Houston area and across South Texas. He said socializing around found food transcends into his personal life as well.
“Humans love to eat, and we love to eat with each other. It’s meant to lift our mood and our spirits, and that does all sorts of wonderful things for us,” he explained. “Hosting a pizza- or cheese-making party is just another way of building those social bonds through food, and the creation of food. If it involves stuff they pick from their yard, even better.”
The popularity of Vorderbruggen’s classes reflects a national upward trend in urban foraging. Since COVID-19 and the subsequent surge in food prices, foraging in the U.S. has increased in popularity, a February 2023 report by the National Library of Medicine notes. Online foraging database Falling Fruit currently displays more than 1.8 million locations around the U.S. where food foraging is permitted, up from 1.4 million in 2018.
The crowdsourced website allows users to drop dots to pinpoint foraging locations and provide species information to other hobbyists. It also suggest the appropriate windows to harvest fruit. Each dot also links to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s homepage for further information about each species.
Even though it helps to start with some online learning or by accessing a book such as Vorderbruggen’s 2022 Outdoor Adventure Guide, Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts, when it comes to foraging food, community is key, experts said.
Truly Texas Mexican chef and filmmaker Medrano recently appeared on an episode of Atlas Obscura’s short film series Gastro Obscura, where he prepared slow-braised quelitre, or Texas Amaranthus retroflexus, surrounded by his family. Yes, the same fibrous weed many of us used to slap friends with during our childhoods can be sautéed, braised, pickled or added to salads.
In the film, Medrano gathers redroot amaranth from a San Antonio roadside in what looks like a plastic H-E-B sack and hauls it home. He prepares the leafy vegetable guisada-style, cooking it with onion, garlic, tomato and serrano pepper. His older sister
jokes about whether she is, in fact, the oldest sibling, and the family laughs and shares memories about eating the spicy, tender greens as children.
For Houston scientist Vorderbruggen, teaching people about foraging allows them to learn about nature together. As of his mid-March interview with the Current, his classes were already booked through the end of 2023.
The ability to gather edible goods from understanding neighbors’ yards is akin to borrowing a tool or cup of sugar, he added.
And for TikTok foraging sensation Nelson, she started foraging as a family activity, guided by a parent who set her on an early path to familiarizing herself with readily accessible food.
The idea that food creates relationships
DO respect the law.
and bonds families isn’t new, but for many, the idea of seeking them out in familiar territory can be one more way they bring people together. Especially since face-to-face interactions these days are so often thwarted by screens, distance and time.
“These plants not only sustain you physically and nutritionally, they also bring joy and understanding to our life,” Medrano said. “It’s a sense of a oneness and of belonging to one earth. And that can be a very joyful thing to recover.”
In Texas, you must have permission from a property owner to collect plants. DO respect the land.
Fill your holes, pack out your garbage and treat nature with the care it deserves. DO be smart.
Positively identify any plant before eating it, since some can make you sick or cause death. Be aware of hazards in your foraging location, ranging from snakes to contamination from oil fields and roadways.
DO be conscious of your surroundings.
If you’re thinking of pulling up edible things near houses built before 1970 or railroad tracks, remember it’s unsafe to eat food from areas subject to lead contamination, flooding from sewers and heavy duty insecticides.
DON’T be a jerk.
Harvest sustainably to ensure others can eat too. Minimize damage by cutting leaves with a sharp knife or shears.
DON’T forget your tools.
Gloves, pruning shears and wax-coated storage sacks are necessities. A field guide such as Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts by Mark Vorderbruggen also helps.
MFilmmaker and chef Adán Medrano says respecting the food that grows in one’s area offers a sense of history.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest offered me a bonanza of opportunities for foraging in the wild.
We knew where spongy-looking morel mushrooms popped up in the spring, where the best places were to harvest the tiny wild blackberries and the even tinier, almost floral-tasting, wild strawberries. We had our favorite hiking paths for picking and eating tart-sweet red huckleberries and knew just where to go in the alpine meadows to find the ground-hugging wild blueberries. In the fall, we sometimes harvested cattail pollen to add to the flour for homemade bread.
And then, after many twists and turns, I wound up in San Antonio. At first glance, the harvesting haunts here seemed sparse at best. But as I better learned the lay of the land, opportunities emerged. Living as I now do on the South Side, the first was right outside my front door: native pecans.
Pecans and San Antonio have a long and often turbulent history. In 1938, local labor leader Emma Tenayuca led a pivotal strike of pecan shellers in search of better wages and conditions. I sympathize. Commercial pecans are hybridized these days to have thinner shells and plumper meat. The thick-shelled natives, I soon learned, are a lot of trouble — even with a rubber band-powered inertia nutcracker. Mustang grapes also grow in profusion along my street, draping from telephone lines and embracing trees, shrubs and fences. Despite the berries’ high acidity, the birds love them. Me, not so much. I didn’t attempt wine, but jelly was a requisite. Maybe it was the recipe, but the flavor didn’t seem worth the effort to deal with the near-caustic juice. But there’s one that sounds good on a blog at growingintexas.com, so maybe I’ll give them another try one day. For now, I much prefer the dewberries I discovered while foraging for grapes.
With their thorny vines, dewberries are much like the blackberries that stained my hands — and scratched my arms — in my growing up as a gatherer. They’re also more than worth the backache they give me bending to harvest along the railroad track and the hike and bike trail near my house.
Usually reaching ripeness in late April, the vines first announce themselves with white blossoms in mid-February — a good thing, as they’re easy to miss later. With a flavor far more intense than the much larger commercial varieties, these berries make sensational jam and even better pie. Try googling the
recipe from James Beard’s American Cookery should you have access to them as well.
If it’s beginning to seem like harvesting in the wild is harmful to your health, let me introduce you to one more plant that fiercely defends itself: the agarita. The bushes grow wild in the Hill Country, but given thorny leaves much like those of holly, they can often be found in purpose-planted urban settings where they make terrific barrier hedges.
The small, tart berries are in the same family as the barberries used in Middle Eastern cooking, and their method of harvest is unique: traditionally, one puts a sheet on the ground and batters the bush with a stick or broom. That requires some winnowing, but the pale copper jelly the fruit produces is ample reward.
Of course, the prickly pear cactus is also commonplace in South Texas. It serves as a kind of bristly fence for the house right across the street and pops up along my morning walk. While the young paddles are important in Mexican cuisine this time of year, their spines are clearly to be avoided. The wispier whiskers of the fruit, or tunas, are less obvious but equally irritating. After an amateur-hour encounter early in my Texas foraging career, unless I get desperate for a prickly pear margarita, I’ll let others perform that harvesting as well.
Fortunately, there are plenty of benign targets of urban gathering that don’t require donning a hazmat suit. Purslane, or verdolagas in Spanish, is thought of as a common weed, growing as it does in sidewalk cracks and abandoned lots. It appears spontaneously
in the joints of my brick-paved patio later in the year. Both the fleshy stems and plump, paddle-like leaves are good raw in salads, or stewed with onion, tomato and serrano chiles.
If they matured at the same time, wild onions would be a great addition to stewed verdolagas. Preferring shady, damp locations — I first spotted them alongside the nearby acequia — these scallion lookalikes are almost past their prime right now. However, if you find some, here’s a tip: grasp the hollow stem as close to the ground as possible and pull slowly. After a good wash, try throwing them on the grill alongside your favorite steak or burger. Doing a salad with that burger? The scarlet blossoms of the Turk’s Cap, tightly wound and turban-like, beg to be harvested as a colorful accent.
Proving humans have recognized the bounty around us for a long time before us modern foragers, wild onions earned a mention in a folio at the San Juan Mission, alongside other plants important to the indigenous community.
Mesquite beans also played a role in that culture, and the leathery pods simply fall to the ground, waiting for you to pick them up. That’s the easy part. My hat’s off to the Coahuiltecans who figured out how to pulverize the sturdy sheaths. A neighbor simply blitzes them into all-purpose flour in a high-powered blender. Mixed with flour, mesquite adds a warm, nutty taste to baked goods, a nostalgic reminder of the cattail pollen of my harvesting history.
BY BRANDON RODRIGUEZ
During the summer after my college graduation, I ate my first wild fruit. It was a blackberry found on a narrow two-lane farm road along the sweltering Southern Oregon border.
The idea to eat the marble-sized violet jewel wasn’t mine. Instead, the idea came from a co-worker who identified the thorny brambles along the roadside as blackberry bushes. He said the fruit was free for the taking.
Naturally, I was hesitant. I was oblivious to the fact that fruits and edible plants could technically grow anywhere, and a recent bout with poison ivy had left me skeptical about touching any plant or weed I wasn’t already accustomed to — let alone eating one.
A few moments coaxing and name-calling convinced me to try one of the berries. We grasped the tiny orbs, failing to avoid their prickly stems. Our hands, dirty from the morning’s work, were dotted with drops of blood and the berries’ violet juice.
On the count of three, we tossed them back. In that moment, I’d become a forager.
Now, years removed from that moment, I scan any
tree or shrub in my path when I’m on a hike or bike ride. While it may seem like the chance of finding edible plants in San Antonio would be slim to none, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Inside Loop 410 alone, there are some 200 varieties of edible fruits or plants, according to Falling Fruit, a free online database and map that highlights foraging opportunities worldwide. Accessible at fallingfruit.org, the site offers info on a “half-million food sources around the world (from plants and fungi to water wells and dumpsters).”
I’m not sure how many urban foragers are willing to include dumpster diving on their itineraries, but hey, the option is there.
The online map is simple to use. One can enter an address to zoom in and even filter for desired types of plants. Users then help update the database to make it useful for others.
Moving the map around one day, I noticed two rosemary bushes within walking distance from my office. After walking through the rain to the spot where the plants were purported to be, I realized they’d been cut — and that they had been on city-owned
property. In Texas, foraging from government-owned property is illegal.
Falling Fruit, while a fantastic resource, has its shortcomings.
Foraging in places with swathes of public land, such as Oregon, simplifies searching for edible plants. Conversely, the massive amount of privately owned land across San Antonio means that one needs to be more strategic in approach.
To the unassuming bystander, I imagine it looks like I’m playing a version of Pokémon GO when I’m using the app. I look at my phone, zoom in and out, examine at the flora in question, check my phone again.
One of those phone-consulting excursions, I realized that I’d identified a pomegranate tree. A quick Google search confirmed the suspicion. While examining the tree, it was clear that its fruit wouldn’t be ready for a few months. Still, the moment brought joy.
Whether he intended to or not, the coworker on my Oregon excursion made me realize that fruit and other edible plants can grow anywhere. They don’t always need to come from a farmers’ market or grocery store. Sometimes they’re growing right outside your front door.
Now, thanks to Falling Fruit, I have become the guy telling others that the tree they’re standing next bears edible fruit. My hope is that, like my friend, I can awaken them to the delicious bounty available in public spaces.
Name: Ian Lanphear
Job: Chef of Naibor, a foraging-forward pop-up
Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Industry Experience: A former chef at innovative San Antonio eatery Restaurant Gwendoyln, Lanphear now shares his love of homegrown foods via fine dining-inspired pop-up Naibor.
Wild food abounds in San Antonio, but not all of us have the skills, patience and time to identify it and prepare it for the table. Lucky for us, Ian Lanphear, proprietor of the pop-up Naibor, has made a name for himself gathering ingredients in the wild and using them to create beautiful food.
Let’s start with where you came from, maybe a Cliffs Notes version of your experience leading up to Naibor and where you are now.
I got my first job in fine dining at [Restaurant] Gwendolyn, and that’s where I was exposed to all the local food scene, local farmers. From there, I kind of decided that I wanted to start doing my own thing in terms of pop-ups, and I decided that I was only going to do local food. So that’s when I got into foraging, and even though I had already dabbled in it as a kid, I just decided to teach myself via online and YouTube and books. I’ve always been into hiking and the outdoors, so it kind of made sense. It was two things that I loved, and I was just able to get out there and bring them together. And then when COVID happened, I lost my job, and I ended up working at a farm, and I learned how to farm through that.
What do you think is the most valuable thing you learned during that time on the farm?
Honestly, just how to grow vegetables in an efficient manner. I’d never really been exposed to that other than visiting farms — touring the property for the day but never really actually doing any of the handson work. So, in that experience, I learned everything from row spacing for different kinds of crops to how to manage rotating animals throughout the pasture. We had chickens, ducks, pigs, turkeys. I’ve also since started gardening at my house, where I’ve kept rabbits and all kinds of stuff. So, I think really just learning how do that on my own is the most notable.
Recently, Denmark’s three-star restaurant Noma closed down, and people were like, “It’s the end of an era. This place paved the way for beautiful, foraged food.” I’m curious about your thoughts on that sort of style of dining having a place like San Antonio.
I know there are several people in Austin who have worked for Noma, and I know there’s also one chef from San Antonio who actually went to Noma and worked in their fermentation lab. I think San Antonio could potentially get to the point of sustaining a restaurant that’s not necessarily in the same exact vein but something similar. There are some things in Austin that are getting close to emulating that, and I’ll say it’s only expanding this way.
What was your first foraging ‘Aha!’ moment? This will actually tie everything nicely together. I remember before I was actually a cook in fine dining, when I was just a dishwasher, one of my mentors had me watch No Reservations, and it was the Noma episode. I remember they ate a salad with wood sorrel and were talking about it, the flavor of it, how it’s just very lemony, and I was just like, “Oh, shit! I’ve been eating that since I was a kid. Why can’t I forage it and
That perspective is so interesting, because through this collection of stories, we’re trying to open doors for people to forage in their own neighborhoods.
This is something that I’ve already known … but I’ve definitely experienced [uncertainty] with trying to teach myself about edible mushrooms. I’ve picked a mushroom, and I’m nearly positive it is what I think it is, but I don’t have the skills to make a positive ID. So, I’m sitting there with this luxury ingredient and debating on whether or not I should eat it. Fortunately, there aren’t really many mushrooms in Texas that’ll kill you. But they’ll make you sick enough to wish that they had. But, you know, I’m actually waiting on getting a delivery of mushroom compost from a local farmer, and then I’m going to convert my front yard into garden space … so it all comes around, I guess.
Innovative San Antonio-born band Glorium will return this weekend after years-long hiatus
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
Glorium emerged from San Antonio’s underground rock scene in 1991, almost immediately grabbing attention with a fractured brand of post-punk that paired surrealistic lyrics and slashing guitars with nimble rhythmic interplay.
After a relocation to Austin, the band appeared on bills with acts as varied as At the Drive-In, Spoon and Man or Astroman and issued a spate of well-received releases on indie labels, including its own Golden Hour imprint.
Along the way, the quintet embraced constant sonic evolution. The early abrasiveness gave way to dynamic material that explored a quieter kind of chaos. Although writers sometimes tried to pigeonhole the band as emo or noise rock, its eclectic and arty musical approach defied such easy categorization.
After multiple tours — including one that included support slots for Fugazi — Glorium went on hiatus in 1997. For the most part, the group kept its original lineup for the duration: Juan Ramos on drums, George Lara on bass, Paul J. Streckfus on vocals and Ernest Salaz and Lino Max on guitars.
Now, following the release of remastered versions of Glorium’s ’90s albums on all formats by Halo Noise Records, that same lineup is scheduled to perform a pair of reunion shows: Friday, April 7 at Austin’s 13th Floor and Saturday, April 8 at San Antonio’s Paper Tiger. The latter will feature High Heavens, The Please Help and DJ Plata as openers.
The Current caught up with Glorium’s Salaz and Ramos via Zoom to talk about what prompted the performances, whether new material is in the works and what contributed to the band’s sonic restlessness.
How much are these gigs about promoting the rereleases, and how much is just wanting to get back together and play?
Ramos: Well, I think the plan was to support the release with these shows. But every time we get together, I don’t know, I feel like I have a good time, and it’s really fun. I’ve been a bunch of bands over the years, and this band has always been special for me. So, yeah, an opportunity to get together with these guys is a great one for me.
Salaz: Yeah, I would agree. It seemed natural that
we would play after rereleasing all the albums and [putting them] on streaming. We had talked about doing a remastering effort a while ago. But I think only recently the pandemic kind of brought out some things. We had some good friends that passed too, as you probably know. And all of that just sort of came to a head, and we were like, “Let’s do it now.” We were never on streaming before. We were on Bandcamp, but I think that’s kind of a limited audience. So, it just kind of came up organically, and we thought, “Let’s go for it.” And of course, playing is the ultimate part of it. So, I’m glad that everyone finally got on board to do it. It’s been fun.
I’ve seen the name Glorium pop up for benefit shows periodically. It seems like you guys weren’t ever in a situation where you weren’t talking, where you weren’t willing to play. Is this a kind of an open-ended situation where we may see other Glorium shows in the future?
Ramos: Well, I’ve always said that I’m up for doing any shows that come up, but I can’t say that everyone in the band feels the same. I guess we’ll find out how these shows go. These two shows that are booked I’m really looking forward to. And I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic, that I’ll get my way and we’ll get to play a few more.
Salaz: Yeah. It’s very much a democracy, and in that regard, there’s always someone that is disappointed or would rather move forward and someone who’s is going to be disappointed with some decision along the way. So, I would love to keep playing. I would love to put out some new songs, actually. That’s really
what I would love to do.
Ramos: Oh, that’s the sticking point, right? It’s like, why bother to get together and do this if we don’t have new songs? And so, if these shows go well, that might mean we have to work on some new songs.
Over the years, Glorium was in a constant state of musical evolution. I’m wondering if you feel like that aspect of the band would still be there if you were to start putting together new music?
Ramos: I think we’ve talked about that recently, in talking about Close Your Eyes, the album that hardly anybody heard back when we made it. At our age now, we’re better able to perform those songs. I feel like we perform those songs better now, as opposed to the really early stuff that was a lot faster and louder and more aggressive sounding. And I kind of feel like if we were to make more new music now, it would be closer to the style of Close Your Eyes
Salaz: We have tried to write new material over the years. Behind the scenes, we would get together, come up with a few ideas. Just getting us in the same room is a challenge. So, once we did that, for one reason or another, it didn’t quite work out. And even now, at this point, we’re meeting when we can to practice. But writing new material, that’s a whole other ball of wax, as you know. And to feel it out and give it the right time takes a lot of effort. Back in the day — in the ’90s — half of us were living together, half of us were living down the street. But sometimes Juan would be in San Antonio or George would be living in San Antonio, and we’d have to figure it out. When we first moved to Austin, we were practicing, and the only time we could get together was at 8 a.m. Do you remember those practices, Juan?
Ramos: Yeah. Yeah.
Salaz: I think George had to work at H-E-B or something, and he was dressed in his khakis and shirt and all that. Or maybe that was you. I can’t recall who.
Ramos: No, I was working at Target, so I had the red shirt and the khakis.
Salaz: Oh, that’s right.
Ramos: But yeah, the dedication, the commitment was so intense. It was really like that was our whole lives almost, doing that. But one of the things that’s happened now is each of us has grown apart, musically. We’ve done different music projects over the years, and we’ve all sort of grown apart. So, that’s the other thing that’s challenging about getting together to work on new songs is we’re all in different places now musically with the experiences that we’ve had.
In a way, you guys were learning as you went rather than being people who played in other bands for 10 years before this started. Was that the genesis for Glorium’s willingness to keep tinkering with the sound and evolving it?
Ramos: I think for me, it was an attitude and maybe a confidence that we had. It was like a chip on our shoulder — that we could keep being creative. That was the thing that was important to us for some reason. “Is that OK? If we did that, then what’s next? If we already did that, then can we do something else that’s just as interesting, just as engaging?” Always trying to be creative is the attitude I think that I had. And I kind of feel like everyone was trying to do that same thing — do something new that we hadn’t done before. Why was that so important to us? I don’t know. ... Ernest, can you explain that? Why was it so important to us that we had to keep, in our minds, moving forward?
Salaz: I’ve been thinking about that a lot too, actually. We’ve been looking backwards, getting all this music ready to be remastered, and now we’re playing these shows. So, we’re just constantly looking back. And that could be healthy, and that could be really unhealthy, depending on how you’re feeling. But for me, I think about Glorium, we started
almost like a garage band. We were a garage band. ... And we didn’t know what we were doing. And that’s been our mindset since day one — that we don’t necessarily know where we’re going. We just know we’ve got to keep going. And so, over the years, everyone kind of grows into the roles a little bit. And I have to say that I think Paul, and especially Linus (Lino Max), both of them really have such a unique take on the world. And they’re very inspiring. They’re very creative. And that was a counterpoint in a way to Juan, George and I, where we’re more musical and could do all these different songs, different covers. And they just had this viewpoint that informed our music a lot. And so, there was always a constant questioning, a constant searching, never feeling settled. It was just like every musical style that we went through was a journey. And I don’t think we really questioned it after a while. That was what we did since day one.
$15-$20, 7 p.m. Saturday, April 8, Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com.
Although live events have returned, the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Check with venues to make sure scheduled events are still happening, and please follow all health and safety guidelines.
Courtesy Photo / Glorium
Wednesday, April 5
A. Wright
Though his sound is based in blues rock, San Antonio-based guitarist A. Wright isn’t afraid to stretch the boundaries, using a picking style that can evoke Spanish flamenco. Wright performs acoustically, though conjures up a larger sound than one might expect. Listeners can get a solid taste of his musical approach and soulful vocals on his recent single “Pancho’s Guitar.” $10$45, 8 p.m., Sam’s Burger Joint, 330 E. Grayson St., (210) 2232830, samsburgerjoint.com. — Mike McMahan
Thursday, April 6
Girl Ultra
Mariana De Miguel was born and raised in Mexico City, and a love of Destiny’s Child and Beyonce sparked her interest in R&B and eventually in Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. Girl Ultra emerged out of the ashes of a high school band to which she belonged. Girl Ultra’s 2019 album Nuevos Aires garnered critical acclaim with its mesmerizing Mexican R&B sound, and it featured “DameLove,” a collaboration with Cuco. The track is a bilingual back-and-forth that De Miguel she described in a National Public Radio interview as a “smoke and makeup song.” $23, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — Danny Cervantes
Skinny Puppy, Lead Into Gold
Formed in 1982 in Vancouver, Skinny Puppy is proof not everything from Canada is pleasant. By fusing jarring noise, eerie atmospherics and dance floor-ready beats, the pioneering industrial group has influenced a legion of acts including Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Bandleaders cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre have remained constant fixtures over Skinny Puppy’s tumultuous history and are looking to give fans all the noise and disturbing stage spectacle they can handle on what’s being billed as their farewell tour. $48.88 and up, 8 p.m., Aztec Theatre, 104 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 812-4355, theaztectheatre.com — DC
Friday, April 7
Spike Hellis, Semantix, LLORA, Night Ritualz, Zen Hander
LA’s Spike Hellis is headlining a stacked and eclectic bill of industrial dance music. The group’s minimal-but-danceable synthwave sounds are rounded out with a variety of vocal samples. Other high points of the night’s lineup include Semantix, featuring Keaton Khonsair of Narrowhead, as well as San Antonio’s darkwave-influenced Zen Hander. $18-$24, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — MM
Saturday, April 8
Dying Fetus, Suicide Silence, Born of Osiris, Aborted, Sanguisugabogg
This stop on the aptly named Chaos & Carnage Tour will provide so much of those titular elements that it has to the decidedly unrock ’n’ roll start time of 4:30 p.m. Speaking of telltale monikers, headliner Dying Fetus’ pretty much lays it on the line about what to expect from the band’s sound: brutal death metal. The bill also includes other heavy hitters in that heaviest-hitting of rock subgenres, including co-headliner Suicide Silence, Born of Osiris, Aborted and the cryptically named Sanguisugabogg, which has been much hyped for its gurgling take on gore-obsessed extreme metal. $30-$35, 4:30 p.m., Vibes Underground,
Mary Maria, Cyan Drive, Street Lamp, Inoha Gritty guitars, peppy drums and the introspective lyricism tie these San Antonio-based bands together with one big bow. However, each is influenced by a unique corner of the indie-rock canon. Math rock-inspired Mary Maria layer their lyrics over frenzied, complex riffs, while Cyan Drive aims at a laidback, dreamy soundscape. INOHA boasts polished, thematically driven tracks that each stand on their own. For its part, Street Lamp lays down a funky rendition of alternative rock. $10, 8:30 p.m., Hash Vegan Eats, 5007 S. Flores St., (210) 332-9244, hashveganeatery.com.
— Dalia GulcaWednesday, April 12
Narrow Head with Future Shock
Houston’s Narrow Head bring a sound that evokes the early, heady days of alt-rock, right around the time that it became acceptable for bands to be on both 120 Minutes and Headbanger’s Ball. It’s heavy and psychedelic, yes. But it’s not quite metallic, even if the guitars occasionally head in that direction. Perfect for people who want to rock out rather than bro out.
$18, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx. com. — MM
Thursday April 13
M83, Rachika Nayar
As if to reverberate from the distant galaxy from which M83
gets its name, the act’s sound is a dreamy symphony of synths and ethereal lyrics. French born multi-instrumentalist Anthony Gonzalez founded M83 nearly a quarter century ago as part of a duo, but it’s since evolved into a one-man show. Much like the massive spiral galaxy 15 million light-years away, each M83 composition seems like a stellar body that makes up something larger than itself. The band is touring behind Fantasy, an album released this year. $50 and up, 8 p.m., Aztec Theatre, 104 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 812-4355, theaztectheatre.com. — DC
MAVI, Shloob
A couple of lines from 23-year-old rapper MAVI’s 2019 single “Sense” sums up his approach: “What kind of songs you make? I make the kind you gotta read, baby.” Charlotte-based MAVI continues to carve his own niche in the hip-hop world with a cascading, sometimes wordy, flow complimented by lo-fi production and jazzy samples. His latest release, Laughing So Hard It Hurts, favors subtlety over bombast. $18, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — DC
Friday, April 14
Lightning Bolt, Cabo Boing
Make sure you’ve notified your next of kin if you’re attending this show, because when Lightning Bolt shows up, shit’s about to get crazy. Although comprised of only a drummer and a bassist, the duo is capable of creating a chaotic din that sounds like an army brandishing power tools. Think Don Caballero paying tribute to Napalm Death and you’re in the right realm. $20-$22, 7 p.m., Vibes Underground, 1223 E. Houston St., (210) 255-3833, facebook.com/vibesunderground. — MM
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