Down yonder in the labyrinthine structure and circumstance that defines Things in Light, we are in the business of presenting you with regional information, ideas and events. Of course, it's all filtered through our own peculiar lens. Given that postmodern bent, it is sometimes the case that we appropriate the appropriate.
This is what I'm getting at: I had a craving the other day for an old format. An internet communication interface, if you will kindly indulge me, that eschews deep analysis for brief and pithy hyperlink-supported teasers. That's what journalists used to call short paragraphs below the fold that described what was going on inside the newspaper, trying to gain a reader's interest, sabes? Well, they didn't have hyperlinks back then, but just lonely old page references to guide the reader to their new and abrupt fascinations.
If that ain't clue enough to what is going on this week at the blog now handily located at Things in Light, then I reckon I ought to just go ahead and fill you in on stuff that happened this week in good old Burque. Some of it is news, and some of it is not.
The Persistence of Culture Along Route Sixty-Six
On the night before Thanksgiving, the missus and I decided to go to the closest fast-food hamburger joint in the vicinity, on a lark. We usually eat brown rice and farm-caught salmon seven days a week, and we wanted to see how the other half lives, as they say.
Anywho, we had to wait in line an inordinate amount of time, as the two young gentlemen in a Buick Riviera with deeply tinted windows and a Florida license plates completed a complicated order. I say it was complicated because oddly, when they got to the window, they chatted with the clerk and then traded him a really tiny piece of paper for three bag loads of burgers, with loads of fries tumbling out of the overfilled bags, too. I wonder if that was some kinda new credit card deal or something. Kids these days. The guy at the window did seem real perky and excited by the time our turn came, I might add.
They are Here
News giant KRQE reports on an increase in UFO sightings in the Albuquerque vicinity. In a stroke of stylistic genius, the reporter goes on to note that one witness photographed a "UFO-shaped cloud", that is, a cloud that resembles an unidentified flying object. Very stealthy usage, but I'd still like to draw the reporter's attention to the words saucer and cigar, if I may.
Where to Now, Makers of Democracy?
The Occupy Albuquerque movement, also known as the (un)Occupy Albuquerque movement, held a general assembly meeting this past weekend. It is supposed that members worked on the vision thing. Notes published on the the official website, however, continued to confirm tension and fractious relations between two groups of protesters whose polemic revolves around semantics. One group says colonized peoples have always felt occupied, so to claim such in name would be yet another unbearable tragedy. Contrariwise, advocates of the original appellation say that the post-racial nature of the protest means abandoning closely held beliefs about how race often times becomes intertwined with social status. There is the distinct possibility that the local iteration of OWS will splinter. By the way, I tried to find some humor in that situation, to end this vignette, but only felt a sore sense of cynicism and disappointment as I considered the political consequences for a group that has yet to definitively decide on a name.
Felt Good to Burn
Returning home from the petroleum depot on the edge of my luxurious neighborhood, I spied a column of smoke rising from the middle of the glorious and much coveted Parkland Hills area adjacent to mi chante. Sure enough, the folks with Massachusetts license plates and daily deliveries from this or that local organic farm (plus Schwann's) were getting fiery with the autumn leaves that dozens of unwieldy but beautiful-in-the-summertime mulberry trees had deposited all over the place. Before you could say Jiminy Cricket, there were police cars everywhere. Somebody forgot to read the complex details of the city's Open Burn Program. I'll let you all figure out who that was, exactly.
That's Slob Hill, Pal
My friend the artist drove me over to Ghetto Smith's this afternoon. She was gonna borrow my inkily atrementous Toyota star-cruiser for a quick trip out to the Volcanoes, for religious purposes, she said. On the way, and before the space-warp generator engaged, limiting coherent conversation for a duration of fifteen milliseconds, she told me that folks in town were referring to the student ghetto by a new moniker. She laughed and loftily intoned the words, "Slob Hill," as we slid back into real time. In the supermarket, among the fruits and vegetables, I wondered if that newly defined reputation had anything to do with the demolition earlier this week of the Werner-Gilchrist House.
There is a great local blog about that event and it is here. The only thing I take exception with is the fact of the old house's habitation. I am certain that when I lived next door as an undergrad, in the mid-eighties, the old wreck was still occupied. I remember nights in the late fall of 1984, walking past the crumbling, tree-of-heaven-infested place after the UNM art studios had closed up. I heard an eery and rambling piano being played somewhere inside every time I ambled home.
That's all for now. Be seeing you.
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