BP still buying crude

BP already carries a notorious reputation for destroying wetlands and leaving marine life tarred and tattered for miles along the Gulf Coast.

Today, the company again finds itself in troubled waters.

Future of ‘Dirty Deely’ coal plant debated

courtesy photo

A new report from Environment Texas titled “Dirty Energy’s Assault On Our Health: Mercury” released this week suggests CPS Energy’s coal-fired plants housed at Calaveras Lake are the 11th dirtiest in the state. With an estimated 16,350 pounds of mercury emitted in 2009 in Texas alone, the state ranks number one nationally.

While Calaveras’ coal plants Spruce 1 and 2 and Deely 1 and 2 have cut their mercury pollution essentially in half, (down from 760 pounds in 2000 to 440 pounds in 2009), the debate still rages on between environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the SEED Coalition over Deely, the utility’s oldest and dirtiest coal plant that came online in the late ’70s before mandated federal emission limits. Even as the report suggests that a gram-sized drop of mercury can contaminate an entire 20-acre lake, and pollution from coal-burners also produce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon dioxide, and lead, contributing to thousands of respiratory illnesses and premature deaths each year, environmental groups don’t seem bent out of shape that the utility hasn’t lived up to its 2005 promise of a $565 million retrofit that would install sulfur-scrubbing emission reducers at “Dirty Deely.”

Texas Underground #4: Honky Tonk Blood

When a veritable who’s who of Houston’s local music scene get together to embark on a guitar-wielding slasher pic simply titled Honky Tonk Blood you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking?

This is a horror film five years in the making, a sort of tribute to the city and the music that gave it life, but as slasher pictures go, death must follow…

Texas Underground #3: The Whiptails

With a name like The Whiptails, you’d expect nothing less than a band that can ramble with the best of ‘em and boy can they, but they sure can waltz too.

Singer Jeanne Sinclair, who pulls double duty on a Gretsch lap steel and twangy hollowbody, packs non-stop cry-me-a-river, yet somehow still wicked-slick diddlys into wayward tunes about needed whiskey to make it through. It’s clear bass player Chris Cessac can’t wait to play along; Violent Femmes bass riffs drifting into the air between songs, but he swears he was raised on punk and bluegrass too. Then there’s the barefoot drummer, aka Garrett T. Capps, who wields lighting rod wooden brushes to keep the train beat steaming right along.

It’s Patsy Cline meets Elvis Costello…

Planet K fights free speech in San Marcos

Ralph the Cactus Planter, created by artists Scott Wade of Austin and Furly Travis of San Marcos.

The Supreme Court is showing no love for South Texas in another case of free speech woe, this time refusing to consider the immemorial question: “Is it junk or is it art?”

In February, a three-judge panel at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rejected Planet K owner Michael Kleinman’s plea to overturn a previous decision upholding San Marcos’ junked vehicle ordinance, which ruled that a junked vehicle is not necessary art. On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case.

The vehicle in question, an ’88 Oldsmobile converted into a cactus planter and covered in painted slogans of “Make Love, Not War” during an advertising ploy, sat in front of Kleinman’s San Macros location for roughly three years until the city had it removed in April after a lengthy free-speech standoff.

Texas Underground #2: Mitch Webb and The Swindles

 

Being raised on a heavy dose of Mel Bay musical instruction books and a steady stream of Hee-Haw surely helped pave the way for one of Texas’ most notable cooking country acts, Mitch Webb and The Swindles.

Yes, Webb was raised on country, but he was also raised on the Texas’ infamous psychedelic playground where hippies and cowboys rocked out til the cows came home and then rocked out with the cows, thanks to an influential musical family member. (Ahem, just Google Cassell Webb.)

It’s telling Webb quotes influences like trash rocker Roky Erickson, songwriter Townes Van Zandt, cultural icon Freddy Fender and the laugh-out-loud banjo blues of country music’s answer to comedic ridiculousness, Jim Stafford. (Anyone remember “Spiders and Snakes?”).

Texas Underground #1: Fear Snakeface

If the Johnny Cash Trio played punk, it would be Fear Snakeface, bottled and brewed into heartache and the gospel of tortured-driven blues.

Maybe it’s the simple drums, the hand raised, slamming down with an unstoppable driving beat sparred on by Phillip Luna or Antonio Ronconi decked out in cowboy boots riding a steady stream of fender basslines complimented by the raspy voice of Sid St. Onge that make them the quintessential punk ballad trio.

They’ve got the storytelling down. Then there’s the wacky jingle, but instead of a pieced together Caddy, it’s all about corn. But, for just one moment, forget the hi-jinx punk gimmicks and floor wailing that goes on at live shows because there’s a softer side always waiting to come through.

Space chimps’ kin headed to SA research lab

Animal experimentation. Government involvement. Objector whistleblowing. Sound more twisted than a Bobo the Chimp caper?

It’s the continuing saga of the 200-plus chimpanzees housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Some are descendants of the infamous Coulston Foundation colony, the so-called space chimps used to test the effects of zero gravity and life-support systems aboard the Mercury capsules prior to manned space flights. (That’s “Ham” in his “biopack couch” at right getting ready for the Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket launch in 1961.)

This time ‘round, they face medical research experimentation, mainly for sought-after HIV cures and an ever-elusive Hepatitis C vaccine, when they arrive in our backyard at San Antonio’s Southwest National Primate Research Center as early as next year.

Reverb needs you

Every band hopes people will get off to their music but a few more hope people will get off their anti-eco ways. That’s why Reverb, a non-profit musicians-for-change and fans-for-grassroots-movements, has put out a call for musicians and their fans to get on the green bus.

WWOOF: Farmhands wanted

Normally a glorious excursion to the Mayans Pyramids can be expensive. Or it could cost nothing if WWOOFing is involved.

WWOOF – Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms – is an international network of family farmers seeking part-time help. In exchange for a few hours of farmhand labor like plowing fields, tending goats or chopping wood, would be volunteers get free room and board, and all the locally grown healthy foods found on said farms.

Bikini-clad lettuce girls vs. obesity

When Men’s Health voted San Antonio the seventh-fattest city in the U.S. in May, claiming 28 percent of residents are clinically obese (the national average being 25.19 percent) and that 9 percent of us spend more time in front of the boob tube than, well, healthier cities, PETA decided to break out the hot dogs and do something about it.



Bikini-clad girls, wearing nothing but strategically placed lettuce leaves, handed out free veggie dogs (provided by the city’s own Green Vegetarian Cuisine) on the front steps of city hall Tuesday afternoon to promote the veggie lifestyle.



Leo Rondeau travels south of the badlands

south of the badlands

Meet Leo Rondeau. He’s a Northerner who, with a learned Southern drawl, flirts with disaster.

Mixing lulling three-piece melodies with a simple hi-hat and snare, Rondeau sets the scene with foreboding storytelling, almost as if he’s inherited that born-and-bred old-timey country feeling.

He’s got the Johnny Cash trio down, but give it a minute or two, and suddenly five to ten of the most accomplished Austin musicians emerge, backing him on whatever stringed instrument is lying around. Everything from mandolin to reverb-stained steel guitar is thrown in, sometimes even troubadour-loaded clarinets and trumpets too, transporting the listener to the mellowest showdown around.

diggin’ in the dirt

Nine-year-old Jonathan Whorton sweeps away soil erosion on the Eagle Ford Ranch during the week-long T.A.S. Field School June 13.

On the Eagle Ford Ranch, just Northwest of Medina County, between Hondo and Tarpley, Texas, in brush land country, where an endless supply of mesquite-filled scenic ridges and bluestem grass-fed plains were once roamed by Native Americans and early settlers, researchers have gathered in hopes of finding artifacts needed to tell the story of what once happened here.

This is where the Texas Archeology Society has settled in to complete their annual week-long Field School, June 12-19, where roughly 400 professionals, students, amateurs and newcomers come from all over the state and beyond to study the somewhat untouched land…

The Sadies get poetic on Darker Circles

cuntry poetry

Whether or not a country boy can survive is mutually based on hard work and tales of woe and despair that everyone can relate too.

Enter the somber side of psychedelic alt-country pioneers, The Sadies, with their 13th album in 10 years, Darker Circles, (due out May 18 with Gary Louris of The Jayhawks fame twisting knobs) a much more solemn follow-up to the bastard child of John Doe and The Sadies 2009’s countrypolitan Country Club.

This time around, the guitar-wielding brothers Dallas and Travis Good, and cohorts Sean Dean (bass fiddle) and Mike Belitsky (drums), branch out with an even more countrified blend of laid-back misery set to tense verses of the dark side of dying love…

CPS farms solar

sowing solar

The price of solar is almost falling fast enough to make the sun a competitive source of electricity and it’s rolling high through sapphire skies and soon to be sowing seeds on the ground as CPS Energy, Duke Energy and juwi solar Inc. break ground on a new 14-megawatt solar installation.

under great white northern lights

truth doesn't make a noise

Emmett Malloy’s Under Great White Northern Lights tells the tale of the brother/sister, huband/wife duo of Jack and Meg White who make up the trash rock duo The White Stripes.

While they play unorthodox gigs, him on a guitar (Sears Silvertone to be exact) or banjo or harmonica, her on drums and when i say drums, i mean a snare, two or three floor toms and a tambourine in lew of cymbals, (and she may just beat on them with furry marching drum mallets while standing, anything  can happen) in out-of-the-way locations such as cafes, bowling alleys, daycares, cafes, on buses and beautifully empty piers, even going so far as have a sit and squat pondering moment with tribal elders in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada… (Again, anything can happen.)

who will inherit the wind?

got wind?

It was a lack in available transmission lines that caused billionaire T. Boone Pickens to ditch plans to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas, or was it a drop in natural gas prices, as it seems the new plan calls for Middle Eastern scribblings and war photo scare tactics to sell natural gas. (See video.)

Whatever it was, Pickens had one thing right…

the legend of Billy Joe Shaver

“If you’re going to bring a knife to a gun fight” should have been a country song written by the Honky Tonk Hero of country music, Billy Joe Shaver.

This week, in Waco’s 54th State District Court, Shaver goes on trial for the March 2007 shooting of Billy Bryant Coker outside Papa Joe’s Saloon just north of Lorena, Texas…

SSSC cause mob in the streets at SXSW

is that a whistle in your mouth or are you just happy to see me?

Street Sweeper Social Club, fronted by Tom Morello (former Rage Against the Machine guitarist) and Boots Riley (lyrical spinner for legendary hip-hop group The Coup) took a page straight out of the Bob Dylan songbook, mixing medicine and fighting government on the pent up pavement.

She and Him heat up cold hearts at SXSW

Zooey singing her heart out

Listening to She and Him, the brainchild of actress Zooey Deschanel (aka the older sister to Cameron Crowe’s William Miller in Almost Famous) and local Portland singer/songwriter M. Ward (knob-turner for Jenny Lewis and Norah Jones collaborator) is like falling in love and playing your favorite record over and over again and you don’t even care if it skips…