Confession: I love revenge movies. Make them gory, make them violent, make them brutal. I respond to them at a basic emotional level. I think it's because revenge stories function in a parred down, heightened moral universe: a wrong has been committed, and it must be punished. It satisfies a basic desire for justice in the simplest form possible. We live in a world, after all, where justice isn't as straightforward as punishing the right bad guy and we're not often rewarded for being bloodthirsty.

Revenge stories are also effective as metaphors, letting us get back at big, historical enemies and ideas. So you can imagine my excitement for this past Christmas, when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained came out. It seemed like the revenge film par excellence, tackling a controversial historical enemy, letting the oppressed rise up to take out their oppressor in the most flashy and cathartic way possible. Tarantino, after all, directed the Kill Bill movies, my personal favorite revenge stories, a pastiche of every old-school kung fu movie where the protagonist has to get revenge on the enemy clan.

And Django was a great film, and a lot of interesting things have been written about it (I'd cite something here, but, really, just google it). It attempts to be both a revenge romp about killing slave owners and a thoughtful commentary on slavery, and ends up succeeding at each about 75 percent of the time.

But these are just scaffolding. Despite first appearances, I don't think Django Unchained is a revenge epic. It's a love story. It took me a little while to figure out, but Django wasn’t the year's big revenge movie. That honor goes to Zero Dark Thirty.

Beacon Hill’s recently christened neighborhood-scale linear park didn’t start as a dream so much as a constant complaint.

“For years we had a strip of dirt running through the heart of our neighborhood,” recalls Everett Ives, current president of the Beacon Hill Area Neighborhood Association (BHANA). And a strip of dirt is not just a strip of dirt. The association’s Linear Park Committee Chair, Jerry Locky, refers to the former string of undeveloped lots over a drainage culvert as a “dumping ground” for old mattresses and other bulky domestic waste. One proposal to the city, produced shortly before District 1 Councilwoman Mary Alice Cisneros took up the cause, consists mostly of photos of brownfield lots strewn with trash, alongside sidewalks overgrown and broken to the point of being unusable.

The desire to erase a scar across one of San Antonio’s older neighborhoods soon grew into a powerful vision of intimate public spaces meandering through Beacon Hill. Today those magnets for illegal dumping have become a community garden, an innovative playground, and a basketball court, along with plenty of walkways, benches, and native plants. The path from grievance to vision to reality was long and circuitous.

Wednesday, February 20, Trinity University Press, City Design Center, imagineSanAntonio, NOWCastSA and Plaza de Armas convened a conversation about pushing boundaries in SA's skyline and urban environment. Architects, developers and city planners discussed the obstacles, opportunities and latest trends that hinder or enable creative urban design. Trinity University Press Associate Director and PdA columnist Tom Payton moderated. Panelists included Mark Brodeur of the City of San Antonio's City Design Center, Irby Hightower of Alamo Architects, Dan Markson of NRP Group, Anita Devora, executive director of Build San Antonio Green, and Timothy Cone, Chairman of the Historic Design and Review Commission. Made possible by the generous support of Lake Flato Architects, Big Grass Living, Centro Properties and Briones Engineering and Consulting. NOWCastSA webcast and archived the forum.

Join PdA and Glitter Political Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. for conversations with Councilwoman Leticia Ozuna (starts 36:25), County Commissioner Kevin Wolff (starts 54:35), imagineSanAntonio President Bob Wise (starts 2:06), CineFestival Director Jim Mendiola (starts 17:15), and more.