Marsden Hartley once wrote of the challenges of inhabiting New Mexico in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz. "This country is very beautiful and also difficult... It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light, therefore it is a country of form, with a new presentation of light as problem." New Mexico remains a beautiful, difficult land.
Things in Light featured Supernormal Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher's "bokeh words" technique at the end of March, showcasing the talented local artist's "Light Works." To refresh your memory, click here.
Wentzel-Fisher directed Portland's Parenthetical Girls' new video, "Careful Who You Dance With," utilizing his "bokeh words" technique, chiaroscuro, and creative camerawork. It's gettin' a lot of buzz, y'all. According to Wentzel-Fisher, the video was shot in the basement of the Bank of America building, at Washington and Central. Fellow Parenthetical Girls fans, we now have a hyper-local tribute zone for our PG-love. Tag suggestion: (♀)
Wentzel-Fisher's video is lovely. Check out it below.
The following communique was disseminated via DCat's subterranean show list. My only comment: BOSS.
"DJ Caterwaul teams up with Voodoo Scooters, on Thursday, May 19, to bring you some of the sickest, grimiest visions of human existence ever committed to celluloid. Well actually, there are sicker ones, but these two cult gems just radiate & revel in human degradation, with a wicked sense of humor at the same time.
Street Trash (J. Michael Muro, 1987) has a lot in common with early Peter Jackson movies in terms of pure grossout glee, but this one’s got a really nasty urban disposition. It was shot in gonzo fashion on location in NYC, during a small window of time when filmmakers could get away with a lot more shock value than now. And boy, do they ever. It’s definitely not for the politically correct or weak of stomach. Some of the scenes still make me cringe, and not for the gore effects alone, which are probably the most enjoyable part of the flick.
What’s the movie about? Oh, umm…the violent social ecosystem of homeless derelicts fighting to survive in pre-Giuliani NYC; dissing, robbing, raping, mutilating & killing each other. Occasionally the bums also drink poisoned rotgut liquor that makes them explode & melt all over the place in neon gore. It’s a sick hoot, and one of a kind- but don’t say you weren’t warned.
The Dark Backward (Adam Rifkin, 1991) is a lot tamer on the gore, but makes up for it in Lynchian weirdity and pure filth. If Street Trash is Bumsploitation, then this is literally Trashploitation, as garbage is practically a main character in the film. Textured layers of grime & scum cover every surface in almost every scene. Sordid & despicable human behavior fills out the rest. The plot follows two garbagemen, one of whom is a miserable failed comedian (that Neil Hamburger has to have been inspired by), the other a cackling, opportunistic degenerate who treats his buddy like shit. Out of nowhere, the comedian develops a bizarre physical mutation that his “friend” sees as a potential goldmine. More gratuitous misery ensues. This existential fable disguised as a cult film stars a nearly unrecognizable Judd Nelson, a maniacal Bill Paxton,Lara Flynn Boyle and freakin’ Wayne Newton as the sleazy promoter! You’ll definitely want a shower after this.
Thursday, May 19 @ Voodoo Scooter/The Shack (2318 Central SE) 8-11:30pm, donations welcome, popcorn on Tha Shack, BYOWhateva. Many thanks to Basement Films for the loan of the projector."
i am driving a car that is colored like ashes or the far reaches of intergalactic space - and is called the salamander after a book that i like to read - when i will be god-damned if an oil-smeared and dusty like the machinery of oklahoma in the thirties group of humans stops right in the fucking road and i have to turn the wheel sharply to the left, else they be rendered as lifeless components of the inanimate galaxy all around them.
they are waiting for a straggler who is still on the other side of the road and he is busy taking a piss on the big green electrical transformer that sets next to the rubbish dumpster behind the neighborhood pharmacy. they are all yelling and cajoling him to be done with his relief, fearful of the heat which such watery pause often brings. at least one of them is also thinking that they can't spend the rest of their life in jail and so they don't see my car turn the corner on a vector that might well forcefully intercept their desperate but satisfying congregation.
thanks to my lightning fast reflexes, that never happens and I am past them and gliding into a parking space before the group's laggard finishes his work and passes out with his pants around his knees, his associates fairly howling with laughter and recrimination. they head on down the street, leaving him to rot in the bright sunshine while i pull myself out of the drivers seat using a kind of leverage that is reserved for magicians and the chronically ill.
the doors to walgreens slide open automatically when you approach them, but before i am in range of that miraculous technological demonstration, an old dude who is wearing a greasy hat with the name of a natural gas supplier in Lubbock Texas paired up with a flimsy Rat Fink t-shirt ambles up to me casual-like and asks about the weather. i tell him it ain't ordinarily this dry, but when the conversation veers toward money, I draw out a fiver from my left front pocket and hand it over with the gentle admonitions.
since it only takes 'em a few minutes to account for and bag up my supply of medicine and the mysterious high-tech life-saving devices that generally come along, I rush home so that I can spend the rest of the early morning investigating other worlds. i don't see the street people again, but instead dream that a navigable river flows through the midst of the Sandia Mountains, that there is a colorful restaurant on the edge of town, down a muddy road, where anyone who asks for a meal will be fed until they nearly burst.
Folks, before punk rock leaked out of the surrounding universe like a glob of very hot metal - the kind produced when welding or alternatively, by cranking the shit out of your mains and destroying expensive musical equipment on stage - and coelesced gloriously and profoundly in albuquerque new mexico (where it continues to dwell perpetually like steel is designed to do), local rocanrol music lovers were known to gather in the desert with transistor radios and the am philco receivers of their parents' abominably huge automobiles and tune into faraway places like Ciudad Juarez or Denver Colorado to get their nightly quotient of those heady nuggets of tunage which drove their souls past ennui and into the blissfully rhythmical unknown.
Actually, it wasn't like that at all. I just wanted to experiment a little. Generate a mythos and all that. Because you know the story. There's been rocanrol played in this town for what I reckon must be about sixty years. I'll prove that to you all someday, but since I can't get the god damned T.A.R.D.I.S. to go back past nineteen hundred and sixty four until i install a new sub-temporal modulator, I'll tell you all about the rocanrol scene that was cooking up a storm in Burque during the later portion of that same decade.
There is already a lot that has been written about those halcyon days, mostly by one of the scene's progenitors. His name is Dick Stewart and he and his mates had a band called the Knights. Heavily influenced by the instrumental surf rock that was seeping onto the playlists at KQEO, the Knights evolved into a proto-psychedelic band as la musica de Califas came to rule youthful imaginations in the west and southwest.
Later on in the game, they changed their name to King Richard and the Knights. Here's what they sounded like in the year called nineteen hundred and sixty six:
Stewart further contributed to the local scene by publishing a seminal music zine that still has life and is planting seeds today. Most significantly, Stewart started a recording studio called Lance Records. He used the electronic technology of the age to document and showcase home grown psychedelic rocanrol, releasing records by space pioneers like The Kreeg and Lincoln Street Exit.
If you wanna know more about all of that, check out The Lance online. It's the perfect means of remotely viewing and hearing the authentic voice of Burque's rocanrol past, since you aren't privileged with the same awesome devices available to a Time Lord, and all that other sci-fi mumbo jumbo that I am known for espousing.
In the meantime and while you are clicking away, here are two of my favorite recordings from the archives of Lance Records: The Kreeg performing Impressin' and Lincoln Street Exit's recording called The Bummer.
American Modernist painter Marsden Hartley once wrote of the challenges of inhabiting New Mexico in a letter to Georgia O'Keeffe's husband, photographer and promoter Alfred Stieglitz. Hartley wrote: "This country is very beautiful and also difficult... It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light, therefore it is a country of form, with a new presentation of light as problem." While time has passed since Hartley penned these words, New Mexico remains a beautiful, difficult land.
TIL Publisher Samantha Anne Carrillo
TIL Editor Rudolfo Carrillo
Things in Light Editor in Chief Rudolfo Carrillo currently serves as music & news editor for Weekly Alibi. Carrillo earned his bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including daily newspapers, literary magazines and alt-weeklies. His personal weblog, Infinity Report, was recognized as one of the best blogs in New Mexico in 2007. At the latest Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference, Carrillo chaired the experimental writing workshop.
Things in Light featured Supernormal Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher's "bokeh words" technique at the end of March, showcasing the talented local artist's "Light Works." To refresh your memory, click here.
