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in this issue
Issue 26-10/// May 13 - 26, 2026
24 Rock & Roll Machine
Triumph’s reunion tour brings the band back to San Antonio, its second home
07 News
The Opener News in Brief
Bad Takes
Texas politicians’ Islamophobic rhetoric may resonate with voters, but other constituents pay the price
Cityscrapes
San Antonio will remain a poor city until leaders begin looking beyond the low-income status quo
Allies Aren’t Optional
Analysis: Time may be running down for Mayor Jones to rethink her lone-wolf approach
’Go to Hell’ Letter
Auditor’s Certification:
Texas Secretary of State sends scathing message to Bexar County officials and drags feet on helping local officials implement new voting system
15 Calendar
Our picks of things to do powerful
19Arts Planting Ideas
The McNay’s ‘Garden Party’ exhibition explores humans’ intersection with nature
21Screens
Road to Redemption
San Antonio director David Pequeno inspired by formerly incarcerated man’s comeback story
27Food
Bird Is the Word
As the name suggests, San Antonio’s Thai Bird has a deft hand with chicken — but don’t pass up the tamarind-glazed pork ribs
29Music
Critics’ Picks
On the Cover: Canadian hardrock trio Triumph made its stateside breakthrough in San Antonio, and now the band’s reunion tour is taking it back to the town its members have long considered a second home. Cover design: Ana Paula Gutierrez.
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That Rocks/That Sucks
Texas lawmakers spent decades rejecting flood safety bills that could potentially have prevented the Hill Country flooding tragedy that claimed 137 lives last July, an investigation by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica found. The news organizations identified more than five dozen flood safety bills that lawmakers rejected over nearly 60 years, including measures that could have stopped construction in areas most vulnerable to flooding. Texas currently has more buildings in flood-prone areas than any state except Florida.
Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit to block provisions of a Texas law allowing state and local law enforcement officials to arrest individuals they suspect of being in the country illegally. Immigration enforcement has long been an exclusive responsibility of the federal government, and the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project argue provisions of Senate Bill 4, passed in 2023, are unconstitutional. Enforcement is set to begin May 15.
Congressional representatives from Texas are moving to weaken the Clean Air Act and shield fossil fuel companies from accountability, environmental advocates maintain.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is helping to spearhead legislation to protect fossil fuel companies from liability for damages caused by major storms, wildfires and other climate change-related disasters, while U.S. Rep. August Pfluger has sponsored another bill to modify the Clean Air Act by making it easier for states to claim that foreign entities are responsible for pollution.
San Antonio’s Ready to Work career development program has secured more than 5,000 job placements for participants, program officials announced last week. Ready to Work was championed by former Mayor Ron Nirenberg and approved by voters in 2020, but since has been dogged by questions about its cost and perceived effectiveness. More than 15,000 people are enrolled in the program, which currently has a 75% job placement rate for graduates. — Abe Asher
YOU SAID IT!
“This would be the worst year for property tax revenue that we’ve seen … and that’s going on 30 budgets.”
— COUNTYMANAGERDAVIDSMITH inawarningtoBexarCountyCommissionersCourt thesamedayitsmembersvotedtoloan$10million totheSanAntonioMissions’ownershipgroupto helpfundanewbaseballstadium
Pretending to root out Medicaid fraud with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
Ken Paxton is at it again.
And as with most of the Texas attorney general’s greatest hits, this latest reeks of a man desperately flailing for attention.
In case anyone missed it, Paxton — who’s facing a Republican primary runoff as he chases U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s seat — last week made the chest-thumping announcement that he’s “launched investigations into dozens of Medicaid providers across Texas.”
Making things even spicier for the MAGA base, he claimed that his dragnet stems from a data dump wrangled out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services via the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Yes, DOGE.
You remember DOGE, right? The short-lived entity whose chief, Elon Musk, initially pledged to shave $2 trillion of waste from the federal budget. Of course, the billionaire and his clueless cadre of tech bros ended up doing nothing of the sort — despite all the chaos, job cuts and risks to Americans’ private data they managed to cook up.
Let’s cut through the smoke here: Paxton’s announcement isn’t about protecting taxpayers or rooting out Medicaid fraud. It’s about politics.
Specifically, it’s about Paxton’s need to juice up the MAGA base as he claws his way through a brutal runoff with Cornyn. When you’re an underfunded, scandal-scarred candidate with indictments, near-impeachments and alleged extramarital affairs as baggage, you don’t run on character or competence — you run on outrage.
The playbook couldn’t be more obvious. Take a half-baked, right-wing fever dream — in this case,
The Bexar County Commissioners Court last week agreed to loan another $10 million to the ownership group financing the construction of a new downtown stadium for the San Antonio Missions. The county and City of San Antonio have already contributed $126 million in bonds to the project, which they will theoretically recover in the form of increased tax revenue from the area around the new ballpark. Designated Bidders LLC, which owns the Missions, is contributing $34 million.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro last week told reporters that he’s working to secure the release of an Alamo Heights family detained by ICE agents as they waited for the school bus in their neighborhood. Betania Uzcategui Castillo and
the nonsense about “massive Medicaid fraud” in Minnesota that’s been floating around conservative echo chambers — and you slap a Texas label on it. Yee-fucking-haw!
“Ken Paxton is trying to emulate Trump and all the BS people have been spreading about Minnesota, from what I can tell,” UT-San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor said, cutting to the chase. “It’s laughable, especially when you consider that he’s trying to tie all this to DOGE. If DOGE has been anything, it’s been a failure.”
But never mind whether Paxton’s claim holds up under scrutiny. Never mind whether the data actually supports his insinuations. The goal here isn’t truth. It’s about landing time with friendly media, firing up the base and screaming, “Look! I’m owning the libs!” Or whoever Paxton’s hoping to own this week.
It’s not just cynical. It’s lazy.
Once again, Paxton is playing the role of crusader while quietly sidestepping the fact that he’s transformed his office into a political weapon first and an agency of public service second. To point, an investigation last year by Austin TV station KXAN found that his office owed Texans $21 billion in child support.
And here’s the kicker: this assclown’s not even good at his own act. There’s no originality here, no clever angle, no fresh scandal at which to pearl-clutch — just reheated talking points and a lot of bluster.
Hey, Ken, if you’re going to peddle bullshit, at least have the decency to make it interesting.
— Sanford Nowlin
her two stepchildren, both elementary school students, were taken into custody on April 27. Castro said that both Castillo and her husband have U.S. work authorizations and neither has a criminal record.
Texas is struggling to maintain its existing state parks even as it opens new ones, a report from two environmental organizations has found. According to the report, Texas state parks face a $700 million maintenance backlog — which persists even as the state three years ago set aside $1 billion in funding for state park development. That funding has paved the way for the expansion of Enchanted Rock State Park and the creation of a new park in North Texas
— Abe Asher
WIkimedia-Commons-Gage-Skidmore
Texas politicians’ Islamophobic rhetoric may resonate with voters, but other constituents pay the price
BY KEVIN SANCHEZ
BadTakesisacolumnofopinionand analysis.
Six days after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, then-President George W. Bush stood with Muslim clergy at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., and urged Americans not to blame their Muslim neighbors for the 9/11 attack.
“When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. ... America counts millions of Muslims among our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country,” he said. “Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. ... Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value. … That should not and that will not stand in America. ... And it is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They’re outraged, they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.”
Whether the Bush administration’s rounding up of thousands of Muslims after 9/11, or its civilian-decimating invasions of two Muslim-majority countries rose to the ideals described above is worth contesting.
Still, I’m confident every president of my lifetime, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, would’ve felt comfortable giving some version of that speech to begin the process of national healing.
But can you ever imagine Donald Trump saying those words if a similar attack were to occur today?
I’m also old enough to recall when, in
2010, a mosque was set to be built two blocks from Ground Zero. My first reaction was, “What a defiant symbol of our commitment to religious pluralism. Just let the terrorists try and topple that!”
But those plans were never completed, since Fox News and rightwing media went ballistic, arguing the mosque was insensitive to the victims of 9/11. As if hundreds of Muslims weren’t working at the World Trade Center that day.
Lately, that kind of anti-Muslim prejudice continues to snowball.
“In Texas, candidates running for office during the primaries have made Muslims and what they call ‘the Islamification of Texas’ the center of their campaigns,” PBS Newshour and anchor Amna Nawaz, herself a Muslim, reported last Wednesday.
Texans searching Google with the term “Sharia law” spiked higher than ever last summer, when Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill to prohibit neighborhoods from creating so-called “Sharia compounds.”
Web interest in the term reached a new peak in early February when Republican Congressman Chip Roy, who represents parts of San Antonio, and is running for Texas Attorney General, held hearings on the exigent topic of a “Sharia-Free America. ”
Perhaps Congress will waste precious time discussing kosher laws next.
“When I say Sharia to the average American Muslim, they would literally think, ‘OK, I need to be kind to my mother, I need to be a good person’,” Yasir Qadhi, resident theologian at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), told PBS. Certain GOP politicians’ “interpretation of Sharia is not one that the Muslims of this country even understand. It’s a personal set of rituals and ethical conduct.
That’s literally the association that we have of Sharia.”
Yet even the comparatively moderate candidate in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, incumbent John Cornyn, has put out campaign ads proclaiming, “Sharia law has no place in American courts or communities.”
Sadly, there appears to be no political downside to the demagoguery, as Rice University political scientist Mark Jones told KXAN News in February.
“While this issue doesn’t resonate with all Republican primary voters, it resonates positively with some and neutral with virtually all the others,” Jones said, “meaning you’re gaining some votes by raising the issue but you’re not really losing any.”
So, until conservatives proactively turn away from Islamophobia, bashing Muslims will represent easy pickings.
A recent report from the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), found “rhetoric from public officials” continues to treat Muslims “as suspicious and outside the circle of protected religious and civic life.”
Islamophobic posts on social media and hate crimes against Muslims remain at an unprecedented high. And Trump’s National Counterterrorism Strategy, which dropped this month, promised to “remove Jihadist sympathizers from our country” as a pretext for expanding mass surveillance and the criminalization of dissent. Given the electoral incentive to dehumanize, is it any wonder that much of Trump’s base doesn’t recoil in horror at the indiscriminate slaughter of Gazans or Iranians?
Republicans cherish religious liberty, unless that religion is Islam.
Members of the party happily siphon taxpayer dollars to religious schools, unless those schools teach the Quran. Would a planned Catholic or Mormon community find themselves subjected to the same lies and backlash as the proposed EPIC City received? And why, when a Christian commits an act of mass violence, are they treated like a deranged individual acting alone, at worst a militia member, yet when a Muslim does likewise, they’re instantly classified as an Islamic terrorist?
Contrary to the stereotypes propagated even by purported liberals such as comedian Bill Maher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, American Muslims are more tolerant of homosexuality and same-sex
marriage than evangelical Christians, and near-universal majorities of Muslims worldwide oppose terrorism and desire to live in societies with free and fair elections.
Six hundred and twenty-two years after the birth of Isa al-Masih, the Constitution of Medina served as an inspiring precursor to democracy, promoting peaceful coexistence and granting equal rights to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
“When people see the truth and how welcoming people are from the Muslim community, I think all that propaganda goes out the window, to be honest,” 27-year-old Ayesha Imran, a patron of a Yemeni coffee shop, told [Houston Public Media back in March.
But thanks to the pressure of Abbott’s ignorance, the Islamic Games in Grapevine and an Eid al-Adha celebration at a water park in Grand Prairie both got cancelled this year.
“Those kids are trying to just play ball together,” Mustafaa Carroll of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of CAIR said of the former.
And the organizer of the latter, Aminah Knight, has since announced plans for an interfaith get-together dubbed “The Great American Cookout” on the Fourth of July. She hopes the gathering will bring together people of different backgrounds so they can “truly get to know one another as fellow Americans.”
Knight added: “Although this experience has been painful, my faith teaches me that within every difficulty there is ease. And I believe something beautiful can still come from this.”
She may as well have been talking about the post-9/11 era in general, the denouement of which we have yet to write.
Wikimedia Commons Gage Skidmore BAD TAKES
San Antonio will remain a poor city until leaders begin looking beyond the low-income status quo
BY HEYWOOD SANDERS
Cityscrapes is a column of opinion and analysis.
The New York Times turned its attention to San Antonio late last month in the form of a lengthy feature article.
No, it wasn’t about the coming wonders of Project Marvel and its multibillion-dollar price tag, or even about Spurs’ exciting playoff run. It didn’t focus on the wonders of the River Walk or our distinctive culture.
The piece, titled “San Antonio Is Booming. Why Are Many Still in Poverty?” noted that our city ranks as the third-poorest among the nation’s 25 largest metro areas, ranking alongside Houston and Detroit. Just as striking, our current poverty rate of about 17% is barely changed from that of 1980, when 20% of San Antonians lived below the federal poverty line.
It can be difficult to see our community, with construction booming downtown, new residential neighborhoods emerging on the urban fringe and clogged highways as somehow on a par with Detroit, the poster child for urban blight. Yet the reality is that this has long been a low-wage area with an economy substantially based on services for its immediate region and with a significant focus on tourism.
That means a lot of San Antonio residents are “a car breakdown or health emergency away from becoming homeless,” as one resident told the Times.
While the article quoted former mayors Julián Castro and Ron Nirenberg on their efforts, arguing they had “enacted policies that were aimed at tackling systemic poverty, knowing they would not see all of the outcomes during their tenures,” the reality is that they, together with their council colleagues, pursued policies that supported that same low-wage service economy.
Castro did indeed bring Pre-K for SA
to reality and increase access to early childhood education. He also promoted the “Decade of Downtown” with its emphasis on subsidies for city-center development and market-rate housing together with millions in city bond spending for streets and public improvements.
But Castro’s commitment to downtown also included the most recent expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, opened in 2016 at a cost of $325 million. That spending was justified by the promise that its upgrades would “improve the ranking of the convention center facilities’ position in the national convention and tourism industry from 22nd to the top 10,” and that the expansion would “allow the city to host more, and larger, conventions and meetings in the years to come.”
Nirenberg told the Times “he was playing the long game.” Yet during his tenure as mayor he laid the groundwork and financing foundation for Project Marvel, combining a new Spurs arena with a major convention center
expansion, improvements to the Alamodome, redevelopment of the John Wood Federal Courthouse and perhaps a new 1,000-room hotel as well. Well before the project first emerged publicly with news coverage in July 2024, city officials quietly arranged the pieces of the financial puzzle that would not only support the billions in required public investment but could also be carried out with a public vote.
One piece of that puzzle was the “sale” of the Grand Hyatt hotel to a public authority in Wisconsin, approved by the city council in early 2022.
By moving the hotel’s debt off the city’s books, the 2% hotel occupancy tax was freed up to support yet another convention center expansion. That portion of the hotel tax has been dedicated to convention center expansion since the city sought the tax from the state legislature in the mid-1990s. And it will remain committed to center expansion seemingly forever.
The other major piece of the financial puzzle is creation of a “project finance zone,” a means of redirecting
state hotel tax revenues in an area around the convention center and Alamodome to support those projects, and the new arena. That was managed, with little public visibility, by State Sen. José Menéndez in June 2023. Much like the city’s hotel occupancy tax, the commitment of these funds to the Project Marvel initiative was managed without a public vote.
While the poverty rate in San Antonio has remained remarkably high for decades, we have constructed a system by which vast amounts of public dollars feed tourism and low-wage jobs over and over, decade after decade. The promise is always that a bigger convention center and a renewed and improved Alamodome will bring a flood of new conventions and visitors, a continuing series of big events like the NCAA Final Four, and perhaps even a national political convention.
Yet that promise never seems to translate into materially better lives for low-income San Antonians.
Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Wikimedia Commons Michael Barera
Allies Aren’t
Optional
Analysis:
Time may be running down for Mayor Jones to rethink her lonewolf approach
BY SANFORD NOWLIN AND MICHAEL KARLIS
San Antonio didn’t elect Gina Ortiz Jones to play nice. But it also didn’t elect her to run City Hall like, well, how it’s working right now.
A month shy of her first year in office, the mayor has burned through seven staffers — an eyebrow-raising level of turnover. Her second chief of staff, Jenise Carroll, exited last month — just a week after another key departure.
Meanwhile, City Council in late February formally censured Jones after she shouted at a colleague during a heated behind-the-scenes discussion. The 8-1 vote marked the first time in modern history that San Antonio council censured a mayor, and in remarks to the media, members of the body painted Jones as vindictive and bullying.
Amid that fractured backdrop, Jones has emerged as a lone wolf on council.
Earlier this month, amid a contentious debate, she cast the sole vote against issuing the first city contracts for the massive Project Marvel sports-and-entertainment district. She also drew early criticism for unilaterally trying to change the city’s Council Consideration Request (CCR) process.
One of Jones’ most notable victories so far — a proposal to move municipal elections from May to November during odd years — barely squeaked by on a 6-5 vote even though it was widely praised by voting rights groups.
“Perception is everything in politics, and the perception right now is that there is instability in [Jones’] office, that she’s not able to keep top staff people,” UT-San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor said. “And that may end up impeding her ability to lead city council and the City of San Antonio while going
into a tough budget situation and an economy that’s looking worse by the day.”
Expecting receipts
To Taylor’s point, all the City Hall turmoil under Jones’ watch isn’t a good look. Still, it doesn’t mean Jones has cratered her chances of emerging as a successful mayor, political observers said.
Municipal politics has a dirty little secret: most voters don’t follow it closely. Unless trash pickup stops or property taxes spike, the blow-by-blow of council drama tends to live and die among staffers, insiders and the handful of residents who treat council meetings like must-see TV.
Jones may be skating on that reality. For now.
“You don’t always have to get along with the people you work with, and you can burn through staff and still get things accomplished — although getting things accomplished becomes harder in both of those situations,” veteran San Antonio political consultant Laura Barberena said. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, voters care about whether you have the receipts. Did you get things done?”
Still, City Hall observers said time may be running out for Jones to learn from the tumultuous opening months of her tenure and stake out a different path.
Churning through staff
High staff turnover doesn’t just make for awkward goodbye cakes, it drains institutional memory, slows policy progress and makes it more difficult to recruit top talent, political experts said.
UTSA’s Taylor called the churn in Jones’ office “unprecedented,” adding that it would set off alarm bells if it was occurring higher up the political food chain, say, in the governor’s office.
“It makes me wonder how well the policy can be formulated, let alone implemented, when you have such a lack of continuity with the person that is supposed to help coordinate the mayor’s roles and coordinate her policy agenda,” he said.
At least two people familiar with the inner workings of Jones’ office said she will need to change her management style if she wants to stop bleeding staffers. Those people declined to be named
because they don’t want to risk their future political work.
Ortiz regularly cuts off and interrupts staffers as they try to apprise her of situations, according to the first person, who’s worked closely with her in the past.
The other person familiar with Jones’ office said she hastened a staffer’s resignation by publicly dressing the person down for taking a seat at a meeting.
“Who told you you could sit down?” Jones reportedly snapped.
Jones’ military experience and tenure as the Biden administration’s Under Secretary of the Air Force suggest she developed a management style more about getting things done than playing well with others, the first observer said.
“There’s just people that don’t work well with others and work better by themselves,” the person said. “She’s a great technocrat. You give her something to do, and she’ll do it. But when you tell her to work with others and manage personalities, situations and conflicts, that’s just not her skill set.”
One mayor, one vote
Likewise, the longer Jones and the remainder of council remain locked in trench warfare, the less likely she is to rack up accomplishments the way San Antonio’s most successful mayors have — by building consensus behind the scenes.
Our city’s “strong council, weak mayor” system limits the executive’s power, meaning success depends heavily on coalition-building and back-channel diplomacy. Alienate too many colleagues and even modest initiatives end up sputtering before they reach the finish line, observers said.
“Mayors in San Antonio can be as blunt as they wish, but that doesn’t move the dial very much when you’re in a vulnerable position, when you don’t really have the chips to play that get you leverage,” said Char Miller, a historian at California’s Pomona College who’s written multiple books on San Antonio.
“So, some of the best mayors in the city’s modern history have been people who understood that limitation of the position, but had other skills, which were in collaborative engagement.”
Those are learnable skills, the professor added. Especially now that Alamo City mayors are elected to four-year terms.
“The advantage of a four-year term is
that a mayor can learn the job in year one — one-and-a-half or so — and if necessary, pivot and still have time to pursue the agenda that they came into the office with,” Miller said. “And I think part of that is about a flexible personality that goes, ‘OK, that didn’t work. Let me try something else.’”
Jones campaigned on promises that require coordination, persistence and cooperation: housing affordability, economic development and infrastructure improvements. She’ll also need to collaborate as council tackles the city’s $170 million budget deficit.
None of those get done by a mayor operating in isolation or constantly rebuilding her team, political experts said. If the administration can’t translate its agenda into tangible wins, voters will notice — even the ones who don’t read the local news every day.
And an inability to deliver on objectives doesn’t just complicate Jones’ bid for a second term. Observers warn it also could cast a long shadow over her using the office as a political steppingstone — say, for a congressional run. Opponents would be quick to frame her time as mayor as being more about acrimony than accomplishments.
“Very soon, the public is going to want results,” UTSA’s Taylor said. “They want to see tangible results, and that’s where the mayor is going to have to deliver, and that is why having continuity and stability … is extraordinarily important.”
Michael Karlis
’Go to Hell’ Letter
Texas Secretary of State sends scathing message to Bexar County officials and drags feet on helping local officials implement new voting system
BY STEPHANIE KOITHAN
In February, Bexar County approved the contract for a new voter registration system after grappling for months with Texas’ lagging and glitchy system. However, one more roadblock remains before the county can free itself of the old system: the State of Texas itself.
In an April 28 letter to Bexar County officials obtained by the Current, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson states that, even though the county has approved a contract with new vendor VR Systems, her office doesn’t plan to follow the county’s implementation timeline.
That delay threatens to get in the way of Bexar County going online with the new system in time for November’s consequential midterm elections, according to Precinct 4 County Commissioner Tommy Calvert.
To Calvert, Nelson’s letter to Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and other county officials wasn’t a typical missive from a state agency — it seems angry.
“I definitely saw it as a ‘Go to hell,’” Calvert said.
The new system was initially approved by county commissioners in September. Nelson’s delay follows a half-year slowdown at the county level over a contractual impasse before the finalized contract was approved in February.
Nelson — an appointee of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott charged with overseeing state elections — sent her letter in response to a request from Bexar County officials that her office expedite providing the voter data
county elections officials need so they switch to the new third-party voter system. Calvert cosigned the county’s letter.
The implementation proposal approved by the county set an April 30 deadline for delivery of the first batch of data from the state’s TEAM 2.0 system so it could be uploaded, according to a copy of the county’s letter, also obtained by the Current.
Instead of receiving that data, county officials got weeks of radio silence from the Secretary of State’s office, followed by Nelson’s letter calling the county timeline “unrealistic.”
The office of Sakai did not respond to a request for comment by press time. A spokesperson for Elections Administrator Michele Carew declined to comment on the story. However, the Secretary of State’s office provided the following statement:
“The state has had 5 successful elections using the new TEAM system. Our staff has been working day and night to address any issues as they arise. We will be working with Bexar County on
a reasonable schedule.”
Communication breakdown
In Bexar County’s letter to Nelson, Sakai lays out a timeline of delays and “limited communication” from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office as county elections personnel sent repeated requests for cooperation to ensure timely implementation of the new voting system.
Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew first reached out to Leticia Salazar, the Texas Secretary of State’s director of elections administration, on March 26 “to begin the data migration process,” according to Sakai’s letter. After she received no response, Carew sent a followup to Salazar on March 30, the letter states.
On April 1, Salazar responded with the mandatory Vendor Authorization Form for Carew to fill out, which she completed and returned the following day. After two more weeks of radio silence, Carew sent another followup on April 16.
“As of April 22, we received an email from Leticia Salazar confirming that the County’s request for data export has been received and forwarded to the State’s vendor, Civix. However, we still do not have confirmation that the request for timely data migration will be fulfilled,” Sakai’s letter stated.
Is the slowdown deliberate on the part of the Secretary of State’s office? Abbott’s history of picking fights with Texas’ blue-led cities and counties such as San Antonio and Bexar certainly begs the question.
“I think that there’s been a lot of smoke and it’s up to them to put it out,” Calvert said. “This is something that appears to be dragging out, and it’s very suspicious.”
In her April 28 letter, Nelson disputes the timeline Sakai laid out, stating “Bexar County did not inform my team of your contractual deadlines with your new vendor until April 21, 2026 — the day before you sent us your letter.”
Nelson’s letter also describes what she called a “Herculean effort” by her office to onboard Bexar County to the
Instagram senjanenelson
state system ahead of the November 2025 election. That came after a prior vendor, Votec, abruptly went out of business in August.
Nelson said her staff “worked day and night and over weekends” to bring Bexar County online with the statewide TEAM system in time for early voting. She maintained that a turnaround that normally can take months was accomplished in a few weeks — and at a cost to her office exceeding $100,000.
However, Calvert said Bexar County spent $450,000 of its own money addressing the 70,000-voter backlog ahead of the fall election.
Beyond that, once online, the state’s TEAM system experienced massive errors, according to Bexar officials. Days before last fall’s election, county elections staffers, who were working in shifts, found 11,000 San Antonio streets missing from the state system.
“If we hadn’t found 11,000 streets that they were missing, we would have literally tens of thousands of people
ty’s voter data to its new vendor, VR Systems, which already has contracts with 14 other Texas counties. However, Nelson is pushing back.
“Your request is to now go through this whole process again ahead of the November election to migrate data to a new system, under an unrealistic timeline based on your contract with a third-party vendor — a contract that my office is not a party to and has no legal obligations to meet,” Nelson stated in her letter.
Nelson goes on to state that her office sacrificed “core system functionality” and its ability to serve other Texas counties so it could prioritize Bexar County ahead of last fall’s election.
“However, you are now asking us to do the same thing,” she added.
The letter ends by stating: “The timeline that you suggest is unworkable.”
Given that Nelson’s office provided the data on all 18 million Texas voters to the Trump administration in January, Calvert said he doesn’t understand why it can’t provide a far smaller data set to Bexar County. Especially as the county attempts to abandon the glitchy state-provided TEAM system for its new vendor.
The county’s new vendor, VR Systems, is a Florida-based company whose software enables counties to host voter data on premises. That proximity gives counties protection from some of the slowdown issues and glitches experienced with the state’s system, according to VR officials.
Texas’ TEAM system isn’t equipped to handle a county of Bexar’s size, Bexar County Elections Administrator Carew told the Current in previous interviews. That makes the slowdowns more pronounced for the county’s database of 2 million voters.
The lags in data input created a backlog of over 70,000 voters ahead of last fall’s election — and this November’s contest is expected to attract a much larger number of voters.
Back of the line
As the Secretary of State pushes back against Sakai’s proposed timeline, two other Texas counties — Kaufman and Midland — have already gotten ahead of Bexar in the queue for implementation with VR Systems.
disenfranchised,” Calvert said of the error. “So, [Nelson] beating her chest like she was our hero? ... We appreciate the work they did, but we carried the lion’s share of the cost.”
‘Unworkable’ deadline?
In her letter, Nelson acknowledged there was urgency to get Bexar County onto the state’s TEAM system last fall because her office feared potential lawsuits should the system not be up and running in time for the contentious Project Marvel vote.
“We took on this herculean effort knowing that if we did not onboard the state’s third-most-populated county, the November 2025 Election was at risk for a potential legal challenge, including the City of San Antonio’s ballot measure on funding for a new stadium for the San Antonio Spurs,” Nelson’s letter states.
Now, Bexar County needs Nelson’s office to cooperate with another tight turnaround and provide the coun-
“This is a .CSV file. This is not quantum computing,” Calvert said, adding that the Secretary of State’s Office is now waiting on data from an election management software company, Civix.
“The fact that they’ve been trying to get [TEAM] working since August seems totally out of line,” Calvert said. “[Civix] really out to be held accountable for a lack of service to the Secretary of State’s office or the Secretary of State’s Office has got to figure out what’s going on internally with their management.”
Ahead of the March primary, Bexar County’s backlog grew once again — that time to more than 7,000 voters — as elections workers’ input times using the state’s TEAM 2.0 system slowed to a crawl. Once able to input 24 voters per hour, the lag dropped that number to just eight per hour.
County election workers also noted that screens sometimes failed to appear as they worked on TEAM 2.0. Other times, when staffers input data, it would evaporate into thin air, forcing them to submit it all over again. Further, the system attempted to send duplicate ballots to voters, sometimes as many as 13, officials say.
In January, the vendor warned that such a situation might occur based on the level of interest it received from Texas counties at a conference.
“We were approached by a lot of existing TEAM counties that are very unhappy with TEAM,” VR Systems’ Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin told the Current at a January Commissioners Court meeting. He added that the company only takes one county live at a time to minimize risk.
“So, if [other counties] approach us looking to sign a contract, Bexar pushes back,” he said.
Now, that scenario has come to pass, potentially jeopardizing Bexar County’s ability to go online with the vendor in time for the fall election. That would require the county staying on the state’s TEAM 2.0 system through an election with high stakes and high turnout.
More residents may be disenfranchised as a result, Calvert said. And that could lead to legal problems and further undermine faith in our elections.
“It means that the large numbers of people who are trying to register to vote in this election may not be inputted because of the slowness of the state system,” Calvert said. “It’s gotten a little better but it’s still not fully functional.”
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WED | 05.13
SPECIAL EVENT LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS
With primary runoffs just around the corner (May 26), the League of Women Voters will be sharing information on how we can make sure our voices are heard — and ensure our votes are counted. Founded in 1920, the League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonpartisan, grassroots nonprofit dedicated to empowering citizens to fully participate in our democracy. With more than 800 leagues across the country and active chapters in all 50 states, LWV engages in advocacy, education and litigation to protect every American’s freedom to vote. Free, The Twig Book Shop, 306 Pearl Parkway, Suite 106, (210) 826-6411, thetwig.com.
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THU | 05.14
THE RIVER AND THE WALL
Border wall construction is yet again being proposed in one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of Texas: Big Bend National Park. Distinct ecological zones ranging from low desert country to high mountain forest converge in this locale, making the relatively compact area one of the most biologically diverse regions in the U.S. Join the National Parks Conservation Association, the Big Bend Conservation Alliance, Keep Big Bend Wild, Latino Outdoors, San Antonio River Aid and the San Antonio River Foundation for a screening of the documentary The River and the Wall, preceded by a panel discussion by regional experts examining the potential impact of such a structure on wildlife and our environment. Limited seating. Please bring your own chairs. Free,7-10p.m.,ConfluencePark,310WMitchell,(210)224-2694,npca.org— AG
Anjali Gupta
Public Domain National Photo Company Collection
Gravitas Ventures
THU | 05.14 - THU | 05.15
THEATRE
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
The Extended Run Players (ERP) will present Spoon River Anthology, excerpts from Edgar Lee Masters’ series of free-verse poems published in 1915. Spoon River is a fictional Midwestern town; however, each poem represents a thinly veiled autobiography of people from Masters’ real hometown of Lewistown, Illinois. Scandalous in its day, the work contradicts a whitewashed version of rural America, exploring scandals, lost loves, hidden desires and homespun hypocrisy. Proceeds benefit a scholarship fund for promising theater students at the University of the Incarnate Word. $20suggesteddonation,2:30p.m.,TheCheeverTheatre,UniversityoftheIncarnateWord,4301Broadway,(210)8293810,uiw.edu.— AG
SAT | 05.16
SPECIAL EVENT
COOL CREST MINIATURE GOLF GRAND REOPENING
Join Deco District gem Cool Crest Miniature Golf for their official Grand Reopening Celebration. This classic San Antonio establishment originally opened its doors in 1929. While the spot has one foot firmly planted in the past — it’s beloved by generations of locals — the current owners also have their eyes on the future. With renovated grounds, updated food offerings from the minds behind downtown culinary landmarks Shilo’s and Casa Rio and beverages from the attraction’s own Metzger Biergarten, there’s a little bit of something for everyone. For those new to the area, this Deco-era gem is sure to become a family tradition. Pay as you go, 1-9 p.m., Cool Crest Miniature Golf & Metzger Biergarten, 1402 Fredericksburg Road, (210) 732-0222, coolcrestgolf.com. — AG
Courtesy Image _ Un Grito Gallery
Courtesy Photo Majestic Theatre
TUE | 05.19
LITERATURE
BOOK PUBLIC LIVE! WITH YVETTE BENAVIDES AND ITO ROMO
Filth Eaters is a hot-off-the-press debut novel by Laredo-born, San Antonio-based author, poet and painter Ito Romo. The work reimagines vampire lore through a postcolonial lens, following a lineage of mestizo immortals across space and time. Romo furthers his signature “Chicano Gothic” subgenre, tinged with historical fiction and Blade Runner-esque futuristic noir. Jumping between time periods extending from 11th-century India to the distant future, the book harnesses the universal myth of vampirism to critique the history of power structures that feed off greed. Free, 7-8:30 p.m., Malú & Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater, Texas Public Radio, 321 West Commerce St., (210) 614-8977, tpr.org. — AG
FRI | 05.22
THEATRE
MASTERS OF ILLUSION
More than 250 million people have watched the CW Network show Masters of Illusion during its 14-year run as it featured beguiling performances by illusionists from around the world. This 21st century magic show featuring some of the same award-winning performers will allow audiences to get an in-person look at their illusions. Expect not just jaw-dropping feats of deception but a variety comedic of magic performances to lighten up the mood. $43-$122,7:30p.m.,H-E-BPerformanceHallatTobinCenterfor thePerformingArts,100AuditoriumCircle,(210)223-8624,tobincenter.org.— Sanford Nowlin
Courtesy Photo Deep Vellum Press
Courtesy Photo Masters of Illusion
Planting Ideas
The McNay’s ‘Garden Party’ exhibition explores humans’ intersection with nature
BY SAMARA GERSTLE
The sweet spot for gardening and enjoying the outdoors in Texas will soon come to an end, but a new McNay Art Museum exhibition is stretching that time to August.
“Garden Party: Nature on Paper,” which opened May 7, studies the complex stage of gardens and humans’ complicated relationship with them.
The exhibition explores the ways humans interact with nature — from enjoying its beauty to the over-harvest of trees — while also driving home the uncontrollable autonomy of the plants and animals in the space.
“[The garden] is this strange intermediary space between public and private,” said Kathleen Mitchell, the McNay’s head of curatorial affairs. “We work so hard to control them, but plants and animals who live in them have their own agenda.”
The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 9, pulls from the McNay’s permanent collection, from prints to sculptures, and encompasses work from artists including Belgian surrealist René Magritte, San Antonio-tied contemporary artist Vincent Valdez and wildlife painter John Woodhouse Audubon.
The exhibition is Mitchell’s first since becoming head of curatorial affairs in February, and her second since beginning at the McNay in March 2025.
Mitchell wanted the project to be more personal, she said, adding that it was inspired by Carmen Herrera’s geometric prints of green and black — images that reflect how we relate to gardens and what we take from them.
“Just think about all the human drama that could respond in a garden,” Mitchell said. “In the opening text, I call it almost a theatrical stage for human drama.”
Mitchell also wanted people to think about their own interactions with nature.
Indeed, as one walks through the long hallway that holds the exhibition, the images evoke the feeling that one is communing with the natural world.
One of the exhibition’s centerpieces, Magritte’s Two Men with Derbies (1965), portrays a human projecting himself onto nature. The print displays two male silhouettes — one comprised of clouds and another of a bush.
The silhouette’s sky doesn’t match the sky in the background, but the bush silhouette blends perfectly with the vegetation behind the two figures.
In common with much of Magritte’s work, the work doesn’t show faces, and that allows viewers to place themselves into the image. Two Men with Derbies shows how people remake nature in humanity’s image, but where humans and nature begin is ambiguous.
Beth Van Hoesen’s piercing-eyed Brucher’s Owl is part of a four-print arrangement beside the Magritte piece. Two of the pieces reflect the business of nature — bees bustling in a cluster and ants going to war — contrasted by a frenzy of humans in a garden and Valdez’s Chavez Ravine (2009).
“Bugs, like ants, are having their own drama down on the micro level, while humans are frolicking around, having their drama up on the surface,” Mitchell said. “There are these different levels of what’s going on all the time on land, and someone may not see or notice, but it’s happening.”
Valdez’s piece offers a glimpse into someone’s personal garden at the bottom of the print, but the view of the landscape is what makes the piece symbolic, according to Mitchell.
The ravine was once a Mexican-American neighborhood in LA, but in the 1960s, its residents were kicked to make way for an addition
to Dodger Stadium.
“People lost their homes. They lost their land. They lost their gardens,” Mitchell said. “All for the sake of urban progress.”
Each grouping of artworks in “Garden Party” is intended to illustrate one idea — a kind of storytelling, Mitchell said. Beth Van Hoesen’s Mole and Audubon’s Nine-Banded Armadillo, for example, both show the animals humans compete with as they cultivate our gardens.
Walking from left to right through the room, the exhibition begins and ends with the most abstract pieces in the display. The entire exhibition asks viewers to consider what they can take from how artists represented nature in the past — and how artists do it now.
Though our contemporary relationship with nature is fraught with climate change and pollution, it remains a rich subject to consider, and a prompt to ask: What do you take from your garden?
$10-$23, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday through Aug. 9, McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels Ave., (210) 824-5368, mcnayart.org.
Find more arts coverage every day at sacurrent.com
Courtesy Photo McNay Art Museum
Road to Redemption
San Antonio director David
Pequeno inspired by formerly incarcerated man’s comeback story
BY KIKO MARTINEZ
The first time video production company owner David Pequeno saw a movie he made on the big screen, he was hooked on the feeling of sharing his work with an audience. It was 2023, and Pequeno had been hired by a nonprofit to make a documentary film about a group of formerly incarcerated individuals changing their lives after prison.
“The nonprofit was helping individuals coming out of prison get back on their feet by providing them with resources,” Pequeno, 31, told the Current during a recent interview. “When I saw my documentary in the theater, I was like, ‘I just made a movie!’ It felt awesome.”
For his first narrative feature film, Back on Road, Pequeno was inspired by the story of Christopher Sepulveda, one of the formerly incarcerated men he followed in his original documentary. The film, which premieres Saturday, May 16, at City Base Cinemas, tells the story of a man transitioning back into society after a 10-year stint behind bars.
Born in Harlingen and raised in San Antonio, Pequeno graduated from Wagner High School in 2013. Through his video production company, Avid Season Productions, he focuses on weddings, quinceañeras and music videos.
During our interview, Pequeno talked about what inspired him about Sepulveda’s story, whether he thinks his film perpetuates negative Latino stereotypes and why he banned profanity on his set.
What about Christopher’s story inspired you to adapt it into a feature film?
Christopher did 12 years in prison from 2008 to 2020, and during that time, a lot changed in the world. It’s almost like going from the first iPhone to the newest iPhone.
What did he tell you about his life when he got out of prison?
He said he learned not to hold any grudges against anybody and to let things go. He said when he came out of prison, people had already moved on. People had their own families. He had a journal in prison where he wrote about the stuff he wanted to accom-
plish. He’s already done those things.
What did you learn about yourself as a filmmaker?
I feel like making the documentary for the nonprofit really helped me out. But making a feature film is different. I learned that teamwork is key when making a feature film and having the right actors helps a lot — dedicated actors.
Who inspires you as a director? What kind of movies do you like?
I like Robert Rodriguez. He does a lot of his stuff hands-on and with a very small crew. That inspires me, because it shows it can be done. But, of course, you got to know what you’re doing, and you got to put the work in. I also like a lot of sci-fi movies and biopics. I liked the NWA movie [Straight Outta Compton] and 8 Mile. I like Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey.
What do you tell people who think your film perpetuates negative Latino stereotypes?
We’re trying to show that [these stories] are real. When someone like [Christopher] comes back, they go back to the same neighborhood. But in the movie, he tells them that he’s not down with them anymore and that he’s gonna do his own thing whether they like it or not.
Many of the characters in your film are Latino gang members. We see a lot of that in Hollywood too with crime-related projects. Do you think that’s a problem or is that just real life?
I think it’s real life. But I do see why people might think that it’s a problem. It’s a good argument. I feel like there are some movies that show the positive side and successes of Latinos — like the Hot Cheetos movie [Flamin’ Hot]. It would be nice to see more movies like that. I want to make films for all ages. I try to make sure we didn’t use profanity.
Was it difficult to stay authentic and still avoid
profanity, especially with these characters?
A little bit, but I made sure it was known that I didn’t want profanity. There were a couple of scenes I had to stop because some of the actors started freestyling, and they started cussing. But they understood. I have nieces and nephews, and I want them to see my film. I don’t want them to see a movie with a bunch of bad words.
When people see your movie, what do you want them to take away from it?
I hope they see that I’m trying to bring awareness to someone like Christopher and his story. Not all the formerly incarcerated are criminals. Most of them were in the wrong, but they were brought up in the wrong environment. There are a lot of stories out there about formerly incarcerated individuals being success stories. I hope they see that people can change.
Back on Road: Film Premiere
$20-$60, red carpet 5 p.m., film premieres 6 p.m. Saturday, May 16, City Base Cinemas, 2623 SE Military Drive, (210) 531-3000, instaraise.com/backontheroadmoviepremiere/ support.
screens
Courtesy Image David Pequeno
Bird Is the Word
As the name suggests, San Antonio’s Thai Bird has a deft hand with chicken — but don’t pass up the tamarindglazed pork ribs
BY RON BECHTOL
My first visit to Alamo Heights’ Thai Bird was already auspicious.
What other feeling could I take away from the chicken I was served? It was beautiful, burnished to a mid-mahogany and bedded on white rice to further boost its appeal.
Thai Bird represents the most recent appearance of chef David Gilbert on San Antonio’s restaurant scene. Though his travels have taken him all over the world, most notably to Southeast Asia, locals of a nostalgic bent may remember him best as the host of TukTuk on Broadway near Pearl. The building may be gone, but ghosts of its Thai-influenced menu linger on at his new digs — this time on upper Broadway, safe in the bosom of 09.
Thai Bird, as the name suggests, is something of a shrine to the workhorse fowl.
Roasting a chicken, marinated in Thai spices or not, is a surprisingly fraught operation: by the time the dark meat parts are done, the breast has often dried out. You really have to try hard to overcook thighs, but breasts are tetchy.
And TB’s bird handled the balancing act well. With proportionally more skin than the breast, the legs and thighs showed amplified influence of the lemongrass and garlic glaze that was so visually appealing. But, despite my aversion to the Buffalo variety, it was the wings, with all of the nooks and crannies for the fragrant basting sauce to settle in, that won the day.
Yes, I was surprised too.
As if recognizing this, Thai Bird offers pumped-up wings as an order of their own — though the saucing and cooking are substantially different. Billed as Thai Jumbo Wings, they are giant indeed. One orders them by piece, and three are more than enough for a single person.
Tamarind makes a cameo appearance in the wings’ glaze, along with pickled onion. And I suspect the parts have been dusted in rice flour coating per the restaurant’s no-gluten ethos. The online menu advertises two dipping sauces, neither of which was present on my tray. But I can attest, judging by the sauce accompanying the roasted bird, that the fruity charred-chili and citrus version is worth slathering on anything and everything.
Trigger warning: blasphemy — or at least heresy — is about to occur. Thai Bird offers a
rotating list of specials — classic Pad Thai seems to be a constant — and as of this writing, tamarind-glazed pork ribs were an option. Order them. They’re fall-apart sensational and perhaps even better than the chicken. Maybe even better than most ribs you or I have had lately. Could be that crackly crust. Thai basil, a workhorse herb at Thai Bird, added fragrance, while peanuts contributed textural contrast.
Thai basil shows up once again in red curry corn, pitched as a kind of Mexico-meets-Thailand street food-influenced side dish. The toasty corn did suggest a kinship, but if pressed, I have to side with esquites and all of their mayonnaise- and queso-dressed glory. The red curry somehow got lost in the soupiness of the presentation. I didn’t try it, but a Thai fruit salad with tamarind, ginger and, yes, basil might give the tajin-dusted Mexican equivalent a better run for its money.
With little to compare it to but salads that often seem almost dutiful, Thai Bird’s kale slaw shines in its Asian-accented and ginger-inflected dressing. Fried shallots add further, welcome complexity.
But my most generous praise is extended to perhaps the simplest dish of all: ginger pickles. Minimally processed to retain crunch, and
THAI BIRD
featuring unapologetically fresh ginger slices, they offer a perfect complement to both wings and ribs.
The ultimate complement to almost any food is often wine, and Thai Bird’s certified sommelier takes up the challenge of pairing wine with Asian flavors. But his is not just any wine program.
Prominently installed next to the order counter are two, temperature-controlled wine dispensing cabinets — one for red, the other for rosés and whites, all in your choice of two-, fourand six-ounce pours. The cabinets offer eight wines in total, and to access them you purchase a rechargeable card in an amount of your choosing. (I picked $20.)
I particularly enjoyed a suave, Spanish verdejo. However, if I were to spend a lazy afternoon catching up on emails, here’s what I’d do: place an order or two of small donut holes — again, gluten-free since they’re made from rice and almond flours — and check out a Riesling or rosé. Or whatever catches your fancy. For their part, the donuts are warm, unfussy and crunchy-good.
Paired with wine — and compared to any pickyour-poison donut shop — they become almost elegant.
6401Broadway,(310)882-0538,thaibirdrestaurant.com.
Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. daily
Price range: $14.50-$19
The lowdown: Inspired by trips around Southeast Asia, chef David Gilbert has fashioned a menu at Thai Bird focused on chicken. It comes roasted — either half or whole — as tenders or in the form of “jumbo” wings — each with variations on the theme of tamarind, garlic, Thai basil, coriander and lemongrass. Sides include an exemplary kale salad, red curry corn (which could be punchier) and addictive ginger pickles. Should pork ribs be on the specials menu, don’t hesitate, and stake out a seat during the 2-6 p.m. happy hour to enjoy wine paired with the crunchy-good donuts. A second location in Castle Hills is expected to open around July.
Find more food & drink news at sacurrent.com
Ron Bechtol
music
Rock & Roll Machine
Triumph’s reunion tour brings the band back to San Antonio, its second home
BY MIKE MCMAHAN
If you’ve lived in San Antonio long enough, the arrival of Triumph’s long-awaited reunion tour at Frost Bank Center on Thursday, May 21, will feel like a homecoming.
The hard-rocking band behind hits including “Lay It on the Line,” “Magic Power” and “Blinding Light Show” has been a local favorite since the era when Joe Anthony ruled SA’s airwaves and Stone City Attractions packed bodies into local concert halls.
And that’s because Triumph isn’t just popular in the Alamo City — the band literally got its stateside foothold here a half century ago. Its debut performance here in 1977 marked its first U.S. auditorium date.
How did the hit-making act go from a thrown-together spot replacing Sammy Hagar on a bill at Municipal Auditorium to an acrimonious breakup in the ’90s to this year’s ascendant reunion?
We talked to original guitarist-vocalist Rik Emmett and drummer-vocalist Gil Moore on Zoom to find out. In addition, we Zoomed with guitarist-vocalist Phil X, who — along with covering for Richie Sambora in Bon Jovi for roughly a decade — is one of three supporting musicians rounding out Triumph’s touring lineup.
If that wasn’t enough, the Current had a long talk with original bassist Mike Levine back in 2022 when the Triumph documentary Triumph: Rock & Roll Machine dropped. He was more than happy to reminisce how San Antonio contributed to the band’s rise.
“We did get a thing at the Alamo [in the ‘80s],” Levine explained. “They presented us with an award called the Emissary of the Muses. It’s like getting a key to the city. That was a special day for us. San Antonio was our second home, basically.”
“Ozzy pissed on the Alamo, and we got an award there.”
At the time of the interviews, scheduled before the first dates of the tour, Levine’s participation remained uncertain due to health issues. At press time, he hasn’t made any live appearances and it seems unlikely that he will.
Rock spectacle
For the uninitiated, Triumph is firmly grounded in staples of a well-rounded ’70s and ’80s hard rock diet: blues, folk rock and prog.
Moore and Emmett traded off songwriting and vocal duties, with Emmett leaning more toward reassuring, pastoral songs such as “Hold On,” “Magic Power” and “Blinding Light Show” — tunes that crossed a sense of
whimsy with dexterous guitar riffs and soloing. Meanwhile, Moore brought the swagger via “Rock & Roll Machine,” “Allied Forces” and hiscrowd-pleasing cover of Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way.”
The band formed in Toronto in 1975, and released its debut, In The Beginning, in 1976. The album featured “Blinding Light Show/Moonchild,” a nearly nine-minute epic that became arguably its most-beloved tune.
The second LP, Rock & Roll Machine, brought the title track into the repertoire and allowed Emmett to show off his impressive guitar chops. It would be used to anchor an unaccompanied guitar solo as the
band ascended to arena god status in the ‘80s. Though Triumph hit the scene as punk and new wave dominated, it firmly embraced the more-ismore ethos, treating the crowd not just with beefy hard rock, but also as much pyro and lasers as it could cram onstage. A Triumph concert became a spectacle in every sense of the word. The band grew in the hearts of fans, even though it never resonated with rock critics.
By the time the mid-to-late ‘80s rolled around, however, the edges began to fray. Emmett grew unhappy and looked for an exit.
His departure from working with Moore and Levine
Courtesy Photo Triumph
sparked a court battle and acrimony that lasted for nearly 20 years. The remaining members hired Phil X for one more album — 1992’s largely forgotten Edge of Excess — before petering out completely.
Moore opened Metalworks Studios near Toronto, and went on to success in the non-performing part of the industry. Emmett pursued a solo career that wasn’t unsuccessful, though it never reached Triumph’s heights, particularly in the States.
“I wasn’t happy with the way things had been going from about 1986 to 1988, you know, while I was still in it,” Emmett told the Current. “I had a lot of unhappiness there. I had a lot of unresolved kinds of things.”
He added: “Sometimes I think the human condition is such that we end up in situations where the only solution is going to lie within ourselves. For me, it was a question of having to find forgiveness.”
Moore had also reached the end.
“I had no intention of going back out and touring, because when I came off the road, it was intentional to want to be there with my kids while they’re being raised,” he said. “I wanted to look after my mother because my father had passed away, and I’m an only child. I wasn’t going to leave her alone and be in a hotel room halfway around the world.”
But fans never forgot.
Reunion stops and starts
Reunion requests followed the band members for years, and they finally worked things out for two 2008 gigs.
However, the shows at Rocklahoma and Sweden Rock Festival were under-hyped. While the band sounded great, many found it odd and disappointing that the DVD of the Swedish gig shows the members playing in the afternoon, sans pyro or lights, as if they were asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.
Wasn’t a reunited Triumph worthy of headlining gigs? Surely, things couldn’t end on this note.
But the band insisted those performances were definitely, positively it.
The members appeared together once more for a three-song studio set played to an audience of “superfans” for the documentary. But Triumph swore — swore! — any future shows were off the table due to age, physical limitations, costs and more.
So, when a Triumph reunion hit the news wire in 2025 as part of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the excitement was palpable. But, in the end, that gig was a letdown for many fans. Levine couldn’t attend for medical reasons, and Emmett and Moore, augmented by other musicians, at times felt like sidemen in their own band.
Combine that with musings from the band about a hologram tour, hopes for a
reunion tour were dashed. Again. And yet.
Triumph’s social media lit up earlier this year with long-awaited news of a tour. Fans were excited but understandably skeptical. Would it be the original trio? Holograms? A bunch of backing guys?
We now know the answer. Emmett and Moore have been open about age-related challenges — they’re both in their 70s — and the need for support from augmenting musicians. Even so, clips circulating online show the pair in fighting form, handling instrumental duties while handing off some of the sky-high vocal parts as needed.
The backing musicians weave their parts into the songs as essential elements but don’t overshadow the original members. And the usual pyro and spectacle got the invite this time.
Phil X is fully in action, playing guitar and bolstering the upper-register vocals, while Brent Fitz on drums and Todd Kearns on bass round out the sound. This means some songs feature two drummers, while others feature Moore fronting the band — a career first.
“Being onstage and being a fan, I have the best seat in the house,” Phil X told the Current of his place in the touring band. “It’s pretty amazing.”
There won’t be any setlist spoilers here, but suffice to say anyone who saw Triumph during the golden era can make the song calls fairly easily. And for anyone even remotely curious, multiple videos of the entire show circulate online.
“You learn stuff about yourself by kind of looking at your own history and going, yeah, you know, that was probably a mistake,” Emmett told the Current of the re-
union. “And when you revisit the past, you’re getting a chance to rewrite it.”
‘Where it all started was in San Antonio.’
To understand what made Triumph’s pending Frost Bank Center reunion show possible — and so special — we need to go back to the beginning.
As its career heated up in the mid ’70s, the power trio enjoyed success in the Great White North, but the members wanted to get a foothold in the States.
“I think back to the earliest days when we were just, you know, three little greenhorn kids from Canada trying to get an audience,” Moore told the Current. “And that very first time that we came to San Antonio, we filled Municipal Auditorium right to the back seats.”
Back then, album rock stalwart KISS-FM and its star DJ and tastemaker Joe Anthony had Triumph’s tunes in regular rotation, and that raised the band’s profile in the Alamo City long before it was getting airplay nearly anywhere else Stateside.
The jolt of exposure here came from the track “Blinding Light Show,” Levine explained.
“It was like eight minutes long and (KISS) played the shit out of it,” he said. “Nobody played eight-minute songs on radio unless it was ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Which wasn’t even eight minutes!”
But that was just the beginning of San Antonio’s love affair with the band.
The next break came when the band got a surprise offer to replace Sammy Hagar after the Red Rocker was forced to cancel a show at Municipal Auditorium.
“We’ve got a gig in Buffalo a day or two
music
before when we got the offer to replace Sammy,” Levine said. “That was a big cash gig for us, because it was 2,500 or 3,000 people in a club. We go, ‘Are we ready to play the Municipal Auditorium?’ It was either 5,600 or 6,300 seats. They had sold half of ’em when we got the call. We’re going, ‘How will we get our gear there? How are we gonna get there? How will we get work visas?’ We had a group meeting and said, ‘You know what? Let’s just go for it.’”
Emmett told the Current the group felt the difference in the air when it arrived for the gig.
“We were wearing winter coats and stuff and we stepped off the plane and the smell of the air in San Antonio is, to a Canadian, tropical,” he said. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ like it was this very warm, rich kind of air. We got a hotel downtown, and then got to go for a walk on the river. It was this crazy, magical, surreal thing that’s happening in my life that I’ve come here to play this gig.”
Behind the scenes, the KISS crew had to fight to get immigration papers for the band on short notice. DJ Lou Roney even pretended to be the band’s immigration attorney as he met with federal officials to expedite the process.
While Levine wasn’t familiar with the tale, he told the Current he doesn’t doubt it’s true — especially given the chaotic nature of KISS when Levine and the band paid their first visit to the station.
“It looks worse than a bar band trying to plug
things in,” Levine recalled. “There’s cords running all over the floor.”
He continued: “We’re sitting there doing an interview and owned the station for the day, basically. And they bring in some album by some band I’d never heard of. Joe puts it on, and he listens for maybe — and this is live on the radio — 35 seconds and takes the arm of the turntable and scratches across the record, pulls it off and throws it against the wall. He goes, ‘That’s garbage. Next!’ He didn’t like it much. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty serious stuff.’”
Then Municipal beckoned.
“There’s three Canadian guys that were scared shitless,” said Levine. “But when we walked onstage — the roar from the crowd — we just looked at each other like, ‘Holy shit!’ Everybody’s standing up. The balcony looked like it was actually moving with the crowd. We looked at each other and went, ‘Hmm, this might be pretty cool.’ Away went the fear.”
Moore credits the radio exposure and gig for helping break the band in an era before homogenized radio programming and YouTube ubiquity.
“You’ve got to remember back then it was all regional,” he said. “There’s no Internet. There’s no blowing up worldwide or blowing up across the country. You blow up regionally. That’s how it worked.
“Where it all started was in San Antonio.”
From hockey
to a reunion
The years between the San Antonio breakthrough and the eventual breakup treated Triumph well — even though the band didn’t fit neatly into any box. The lyrics were uniformly positive, often focused on the value of community, self-actualization and uplifting takes on love and emotion. You didn’t get the “party hard” ethos of hair metal or the social commentary that marked the emerging thrash scene.
Albums such as Allied Forces, Never Surrender and Thunder Seven earned the band a massive fanbase, as did the accompanying tours. Triumph took part in the massive US Festival in 1983, arguably the band’s high-water mark.
But behind the scenes, things weren’t so copacetic, and Emmett bailed in 1988. Phil X, a longtime fan who’d grown up on the band, seemed like the ideal replacement and came onboard in 1992.
The reformulated trio played roughly 10 shows in support of the resulting album before calling it quits: an inglorious end for such a successful rock act.
Until 2008.
Levine told the Current that after Triumph’s initial reunion shows at Rocklahoma and Sweden Rock Fest, the group lined up 50-plus gigs for a full tour. But a recession gripped the U.S., and financial concerns scuttled the matter.
After that, the members felt they were simply too old to do it right.
But still the matter wouldn’t die. The song “Lay It on
Courtesy Photo Triumph
music
the Line” regularly featured in hockey commercials, and a Canadian broadcast company approached Moore about a Triumph reunion for a 2025 pregame performance.
By then, he was out of practice on his instrument, so he acknowledged the need for another player. That eventually led to the involvement of Phil X along with music-industry vets Fitz and Kearns.
The three-song gig hockey took place sans Levine, who had a medical appointment and separate media appearance already booked.
“We had one rehearsal and jumped onstage,” Moore said of the pre-show parking lot throwdown. “It was just like an electric thing that happened between the five musicians, where all of a sudden, we were like, ‘Hey, this kind of really works.’ And the audience lit up, everybody lit up, then [tour promoter] Live Nation lit up.”
The gig proved a turning point, especially for the still-reluctant Emmett, according to Phil X.
“I think that that kind of lit a little fire under his butt,” he recalled.
Around this same time, Moore got interested in hologram tours after checking out the ABBA production and looked into the possibilities for Triumph.
Behind the scenes, wheels began to turn, albeit slowly. As they did, Moore became increasingly interested in putting a real reunion together.
“Gil is kind of a genius-savant when it comes to anything Triumph,” Phil X said. “It’s insane. Just even talking to him about it.”
Finally, everything clicked.
“Of course, my kids get involved,” Moore said. “’Dad, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it.’ And my wife, to be honest, of course. I’m like, ‘Are you just trying to kick me out of the house? Is this an easy way?’”
Moore began working out and rebuilding his chops. Then came rehearsals.
“It was just that magic,” Moore said. “You’re just
hanging and having a coffee and rehearsing some background vocals and talking about stuff, and all of a sudden there’s this meeting of the minds where you realize, you know what, we’ve got a brotherhood here that’s just kind of coming together naturally, organically.”
Collaboration and inspiration
During the collaborative process, the Canadians did one of the things they do best: be polite. The musicians began insisting that someone else take this or that solo or vocal because they liked what the other person was doing.
The approach resulted in some radical rearrangements of Triumph’s material — something one might expect with the core musicians returning to the songs after decades away and now augmented by new players.
For his part, Moore is excited for his family to experience Triumph’s return.
“On this tour, my son-in-law, Craig, and my daughter-in-law, my eldest daughter and my granddaughter, they’re literally going to drive about two-thirds of the tour, if you can imagine it.”
Emmett resisted the idea that the reunion was about any one thing, though.
He agreed that surviving prostate cancer was a factor, as was being the final surviving member of his nuclear family. After all, the death of his brother inspired him to make up with Moore and Levine prior to the 2008 reunion.
However, Emmett emphasized that the songs remain his North Star.
“There’s things you can say like, ‘Oh, you know, I lost my brothers.’ But when I joined Triumph, I got my brothers back,” he said.
“More than that, I will say that it’s more fun to kind of be going back and revisiting the songs. The songs are the things that kind of keep dragging you back.”
The availability of the strong supporting cast was also a consideration.
“Now, anything that I can’t sing, I’ll just go, ‘Todd, Phil, you guys that can sing really high,’” Emmett said. “So, you know, if people are going to come expecting to see the Rik Emmett that pranced around in spandex pants in 1983, it’s not going to happen. ”
No one likes assumptions, but it’s fair to say a 72-year-old in spandex is probably a hard pass — even for die-hard fans.
For his part, Phil X isn’t revisiting or rewriting anything, particularly his time in Triumph in the ‘90s for Edge of Excess. Emmett was a huge influence on him as a youngster, and he relished the chance to revisit the guitar parts.
“Rik Emmett was always like Jimmy Page on steroids, you know?” Phil X said. “And he grew to have more of his own style as he went down the line. I was getting ready, exploring and learning songs and arrangements. It took me to watching the US Festival in ‘83 on YouTube and it’s mind-blowing the way he played.”
But for all the memories the reunion tour evokes, San Antonio will always be a part of the band’s past and present.
“I’ve come back to San Antonio several times and played on my own,” Emmett said. “I played at [Sunken Garden Theater]. And I had told the guys, the sidemen in my band, that they’re going to want to learn ‘Blinding Light Show.’ We have to learn it, we have to play it.’”
The rest of the band dutifully learned the song, but didn’t quite grasp the significance. But, in the dressing room, as they waited to go on, they heard the chant rise from the crowd and understood: “The Blinding Light Show! The Blinding Light Show!”
Emmett turned to the band with a knowing look. “Like, I’m not an idiot. I knew what was what.”
Trevon Marsh
critics’ picks
Thursday, May 14
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Jake Xerxes Fussell specializes in thoughtful fingerpicked folk in the Piedmont, North Carolina style. But his guitar skills aren’t all he brings to bear, as he also delivers masterful compositional strokes and a deeply affecting vocal style, and he’s astoundingly good in a live setting. Dude casts a spell. In case you need other confirmations of his craft, he’s worked with Nashville underground visionary William Tyler and toured with Wilco, Bill Callahan and The Decembrists. $20, 9 p.m., Lonesome Rose, 2114 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 455-0233, thelonesomerosesa.com. — Bill Baird
Steve Forbert, Steve Crawford, Savannah Lee Mississippi-born Forbert got his start in 1970s New York City, performing at legendary venue
to our dearly departed Flaco Jimenez, featuring his brother Santiago plus artists from all over the globe. $15-$50 (kids free), Rosedale Park, 303 Dartmouth and other locations, guadalupeculturalarts.org/tejano-conjunto-festival. — BB
Friday, May 15
Supersuckers
Like Donny and Marie, Supersuckers are a little bit country and a little bit rock ’n’ roll — and they throw in a whole lot of quirky nicknames for each band member who’s been through. Expect some revved up twang, just not a lot of lyrics about pickup trucks, small towns and God. Supersuckers enjoy talking about sex, drugs and Satan as they bash out their zesty hillbilly riffs. Opener Scott H. Biram is a oneman band who defies genre with songs that mix metal and punk with blues and country — a perfect addition to the outlaw-filled lineup. $26.48-$83.88, 8:30 p.m., Sam’s Burger Joint, 330 E. Grayson St., (210) 223-2830, samsburgerjoint.com.
— Brianna Espinoza
Saturday, May 16
The Silos, Buttercup
The Silos are long-time roots-rock survivors, having built critical acclaim over a career that started in the ’80s. After being named Best New Artist by Rolling Stone in 1987, the group went on to record numerous classic albums for the venerable Bloodshot Records. They’ve been through dozens of band members and are still here to tell the tale. Buttercup, SA’s best indie-rock art pranksters for 20 years or so, will open. $15,9 p.m.,LonesomeRose,2114N.St.Mary’sSt.,(210) 455-0233, thelonesomerosesa.com. — BB
by the legendary Butch Vig. This one is a bit darker than previous efforts, demonstrated by lead single “ The Wreckage.” $59.50-$153.40, 7:30 p.m., Aztec Theatre, 104 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 812-4355, theaztectheatre.com. — DC
Monday, May 18
Grocery Bag, Moon Owl Mages, Bad Habit Austin’s Grocery Bag are a young band carrying on the garage-psych legacy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees. But the group has emerged as its own entity, enthralling larger and larger crowds since its 2022 inception. Boise’s Moon Owl Mages perform equally impressive psychrock, mixing stunning guitar virtuosity and frantic rhythms. Bad Habit seems hell-bent on bringing back ’80s hair metal shrieking and shredding. But, hey, they’re having fun with it, and it’s an infectious good time. $18, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — BB
Saturday, May 23
Jason Isbell
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell released Foxes in the Snow last year, taking a break from his band the 400 Unit. On Foxes, Isbell went all acoustic, accompanied only by his 1940 Martin 0-17 guitar as he sang stories of sobriety and post-divorce hindsight. $60.39-$285.00, 8 p.m., Majestic Theater, 224 E. Houston St., (210) 226-5700, majesticempire. com. — DC
Reverend Horton Heat
CBGB’s before scoring a Billboard hit with 1979’s “Romeo’s Tune.” He’s since released 20 more albums, been nominated for a Grammy and come to be regarded as one of the nation’s top folk-rock entertainers. Easy to see why. His writing is sharp and incisive, and his voice is one of the most distinctive in contemporary songwriting. $38, 8 p.m., Sam’s Burger Joint, 330 E. Grayson St., (210) 223-2830, samsburgerjoint.com. — BB
Thursday, May 14-Sunday, May 17
Tejano Conjunto Festival
This four-day extravaganza celebrates San Antonio’s indigenous musical form. It features performances by a Who’s Who of conjunto and Tejano music, not to mention heartwarming student and folklorico showcases plus puro SA vibes. Sunday night will close out with a special tribute
Millington, Chancla Fight Club, The Skajects, Stillbefriends
Millington, a touring act from upstate New York, bills itself as “brass emo,” and its sound straddles ska and pop punk. The six-piece ensemble, formed in 2018 by lead singer and bassist Cody Okonski, seems to be offering up good vibes for an early summer show stacked with local ska purveyors. $28.56, 7 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — Danny Cervantes
Sunday, May 17
Silversun Pickups
Some consider LA-based alt rockers Silversun Pickups one of the last great rock acts, so bully for San Antonio that we have emerged as a frequent tour stop for the band. This time, the group is touring behind its seventh studio album, Tenterhooks, the third in a row produced
A “Psychobilly Freakout” seems to follow Reverend Horton Heat wherever he goes. After 40 years on the road, the ace rockabilly guitarist and his rhythm section still tour hard, spreading a Lone Star State charm, flashy suits and a slapping backbeat to the masses. $12.03-$53.45, 8 p.m., Stable Hall, 307 Pearl Parkway, (210) 427-7464, stablehall.com. — BE
Sunday, May 24
Apocalyptica, The Hu, The Rasmus Apocalyptica is best described as music for those emo “orch dorks” in high school who always keep their nails painted black. The trio of Finnish cellists has created buzzing metal tunes and melodic ballads for more than 20 years — most notably covering Metallica and bringing iconic metal vocalists in to guest on their originals. The tour’s co-headliner, Mongolian folk metal band The Hu, utilizes traditional instruments and throat singing from its culture to create a head-banging and trance-inducing good time. $59-$200.60, 7 p.m., Aztec Theatre, 104 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 812-4355, theaztectheatre.com. — BE
Reverend Horton Heat
Courtesy Reverend Horton Heat
“My Ames Is True”--where it’s at. by Matt Jones © 2026 Matt Jones
Across
1. 1996 gymnastics star Kerri
6. Opposite of fore, at sea
9. Senate hearing channel
14. “Rice-___, the San Francisco treat”
15. Short story?
16. Airy courtyards
17. Broadcast signal carrier
19. Very resonant
20. Aussie verb ender
21. Habit that’s best broken
22. Occupy a tent
23. Name of multiple British earls (one of which changed his name slightly and wrote the first Gothic novel)
28. Question’s opposite (abbr.)
29. “___ gratia artis” (MGM motto)
30. Sat ___ (GPS system)
31. Part of G&T
32. Threesome
34. Game before a final
35. Soundproofing square
39. Shouts of inspiration
40. Deli loaves
41. Grind
42. Oscar-winning Telugu-language film
43. 2006 World Series winners, on scoreboards
44. “Mad Men” protagonist Draper
45. Electronic identifier embedded in sound files to
protect copyright
51. ___ wat (national dish of Ethiopia)
52. Fashion designer Cassini
53. Shortest English sentence with a subject and verb
55. Between 0 and 90 degrees
57. Series of Nintendo microgames featuring a squiggly-mustached villain
59. Breads for gyros
60. That thing, in Spanish
61. Consumed
62. Meeting on the sly
63. Pig pen
64. Actresses Meg and Jeri Down
1. Rajasthan wrap
2. Refuse
3. Event involving big bucks?
4. Corn opener?
5. Actor Ribisi of “Avatar: Fire and Ash”
6. Ancient counters
7. “Hawaii ___” (CBS police drama)
8. Boot end
9. Conspiratorial groups
10. Put your foot down
11. Person arguing in favor
12. Goal
13. No vote
18. They may be about you
22. Christmas song
24. Fridge invasions
25. Banshee’s sounds
26. Gold fabric
27. Immorality
31. Sentry’s job
32. Choreographer Tharp
EMPLOYMENT
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33. “Call Me Maybe” singer
Carly ___ Jepsen
34. Hot spot?
35. Singer Bareilles
36. “No ___ Traffic” (street sign)
37. “In a day ___” (the really high lyric of “Take On Me”)
38. End-of-year school event attendee
43. Most peeved
44. Three, in Trier
46. Minuscule amounts
47. Pop-up restaurant offering?
48. “The Jetsons” son
49. Cattle rustler’s tool
50. ___ Blixen (Isak Dinesen’s real name)
54. Store department that sells ties
55. Fitting
56. Fig. with a diameter
57. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” director Anderson
58. Method
Answers on page 21.
