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31 August 2012

BrBa Haiku: Say My Name, S5E7

Unknown
Words spoken in the
desert and then the bosque,
A name and a plea.

26 August 2012

ABQ MTV: Salad, Pancakes! and Salt Verse

Unknown
Salt Sculpture by Motoi Yamamoto
Things in Light is pleased to present the eighth installment of ABQ MTV, featuring videos by Autumn Chacon and Mello Sanchez, Pancakes!, and Father of the Flood.

Performance artist/musician Autumn Chacon and DJ/musician/pastry chef Mello Sanchez toss a salad like, well, it's never been tossed before.




Pancakes! video for "Lipbiter" is psychedelic, energetic, and darn cute.



Father of the Flood's video for "Disclosure/Salt Verse" is a dark and twisty journey one probably best not undertaken by the faint of heart.



25 August 2012

Fiction For Generation X, Albuquerque Variation Number Seven

Rudolfo Carrillo


By Rudolfo Carrillo

Working at the office supply store on Saturday was one goddamn harsh toke after another, thought Thurston the painter as he crawled around the floor of the unisex water closet at the back of the shop. But hell one more day wouldn't kill him and since it was an off day, he could probably stop by Luther's pad after work and dance with some of the deadhead gals that had been hanging around the old red head's trailer since he inherited his father's horseshoe and moved back to Burque from Califas.

But Thurston would have to save that for later. Presently, he was bent down over the toilet, scrubbing up the week's worth of piss. The urine was mostly dried up and dark by the weekend. It stank like hell and had been deposited there by larger than life postmodern graphic artists and the assistants of lofty bureaucrats whose output was neither tamed nor directed, Thurston reckoned solemnly, as he poured some more bleach into the crack between the porcelain target and the tile, scrubbing the foul work of humanity into clean chemical oblivion.

Just then, Bart the manager tried to push the door to the privy open but could not because Thurston's walrus-like body was in the way; his vietnam era combat boots effectively blocked the hinges as they tried to swing around in space, intent on revealing a shabby room that had been painted in bright colors to distract from its intrinsic shitty-ness while still somehow and mysteriously inducing customers to exit with the word buy smeared brightly upon their rosy or pale lips.

Bart was in the closet, was married to an older woman he did not love. So sadness and the faint odor of vodka followed him wherever he went. He was always trying to hook it up with the other guys that worked at the store, tossing around invitations to have a drink or go swimming after work, to whomever would listen. Thurston thought Bart was a goddamn creep because he'd always come off in public as being against gay folks, telling jokes about them, snickering ominously at his own punch lines, and then referring to the sublime nature of jazz music as a way of moving the conversation on when no one else laughed.

Since he needed the money from the office supply store job to get his craptastic life back together, Thurston never said anything to Bart and ignored the man's anxious advances, his cluttered bigotry. When they did talk, Thurston always tried to guide the conversation towards art or literature, so he could plaintively praise the violin of Ingres and allude to Hemingway or Mailer before slipping away toward the copier supplies isle.

After a summer of that sorta thing, Bart suddenly retreated from the other employees, was sullen and drunk most afternoons and the boss, Jerry - a tall fellow with big teeth who came from a town in New Mexico where everyone still wore a cowboy hat and drove the kinda truck that could really be used for hauling livestock around or saving the United States from foreign invasion if so called upon - let him stay, but said he had to work mostly in the basement from that point on, making picture frames and keeping the loading dock organized and so forth and so on.

That was fine with Thurston mostly because it meant more skylarking. He was a slacker, alright,  and took that identity so seriously that he had a poster of the Richard Linklater movie with the name of his cultural affiliation plastered on the wall above the ratty mattress upon which he slept. Thurston dreamt of being a great artist, one who had access to stuff like clean sheets and cheery, antiseptic studios that went on and on forever.

Anywho, Jerry hardly came out of his office, excepting emergencies like when this or that famous corporate entity came rolling through, on the lookout for a special mix of renaissance-style lead bearing toner. Similarly, gloriously odd consumer-related events raised him up too, like the woman with a zebra skin purse who wanted a fashionable computer desk more than anything in the world.

At the end of the day, Jerry would walk down the stairs, lock everyone in and count the money the shop took. If the counting turned out alright, he'd shove a toothpick in his mouth, wink and then say goodnight to his charges in a drawl you ordinarily might hear in southern Oklahoma or on the Missouri border.

Besides those fine folks, Thurston could always talk to Audrey. She had been to the south pole and had a leather parka with a National Science Foundation patch on the shoulder as proof. She told how she ended up in Burque because of her husband's architecture studies at UNM and how she could not wait to get back to where it was icy and the ocean churned.

Thurston believed she vaguely resembled one of the characters from a teevee show he used to watch. Twin Peaks, or something like that, he said to Audrey as she handed him a sawbuck and asked that he make change for a purchase of two graphite drawing pencils, stock number one three seven five nine two. He smiled wanly; she flirted vaguely, with her porcelain hands, when the change was transferred back to the woman with dark hair and antarctic experience.

A couple of hours later, at the end of the day, on the Saturday afternoon in September I am writing to you about, a solar emanation of some magnitude came right through the front door of that otherwise maudlin place, sending a bright and beckoning beam of light across the showroom floor and right up the stairs to Jerry's office.

Thurston walked out from behind the counter, to the perimeter of that spectacle, sat quietly in the fashion of a mendicant, and begin reciting the names of all the hues of oil paint that he had ever used to represent ideas on canvas. Bart climbed languorously from out his cave holding a carpenters square and asked in a plaintive voice for a dry martini and a good man, while Jerry sat immobilized in his custom executive recliner, listening to the birds chirruping in the alley.

Noticing the bright stillness around her, the voices drifting like insects, and the smell of bleach coming from the back room, Audrey checked to see that her converse high-tops were well tied, left her parka on the counter for Thurston to find, walked out the door and crossed San Mateo Boulevard headed south with the sun in her right eye, bearing two graphite drawing pencils in her left hand; becoming a beautiful and curving instrument as she went on her way, clothed in fleshy ivory and adapted to function in the deep cold.

21 August 2012

Things in Light Podcast #25: Monkey Business Mix

Unknown
Things in Light is pleased to present our twenty-fifth podcast, Monkey Business Mix, featuring Nuevo Mexicano recordings old and new, covers and originals — by Treadmill, Veery, Whiteshell Girl and Turquoise Boy, The Glass Menageries, Fort Hobo, Chinese Love Beads, The Drags, and Luxo Champ. See the full track listing below.




1. Treadmill - Shock the Monkey (Peter Gabriel)
2. Veery - Too Late for Love (Def Leppard)
3. Whiteshell Girl and Turquoise Boy - VI
4. The Glass Menageries - River of Secrets
5. Chinese Love Beads - Ballad of a Brown Beret
6. Fort Hobo - Sandman
7. The Drags - Iron Curtain Rock
8. Luxo Champ - Monkeytime!

19 August 2012

Analysis of Fictive Locations Encountered Near Albuquerque

Rudolfo Carrillo

By Rudolfo Carrillo

One.

Down yonder through the cottonwood thickets, there where the earth touches the river absorbently and with the patience of geological processes intact, the agent of an advance guard from an alternate universe nearly identical to Albuquerque and consequently, the watery sphere dangling in space that surrounds it, came upon or perhaps was chemically induced to discover a silver railroad watch upon the muddy shore alive with toads, it being summertime.

When properly activated, the clock transmitted images, and sounds from that other place were produced by turning gears and spindles too, in a convenient and easy to access format capable of imbuing historical activities that never happened with a vibrant, digitally enhanced realism that spoke properly, definitively and eloquently, to the possibility of distinctly divergent temporal process outcomes on other wetly blue globes floating past other warmly yellow suns.

On one such bright day, as he prepared to download and view the fantastic cultural units known to some members of his tribe as cartoons, the agent noticed an anomalous transmission emanating wanly from the timepiece; between colorfully meaningless iterations of Jonny Quest and mysteriously sped-up versions Space Ghost, sharp and lonesome flickers advanced, static tumbled restlessly about the apparatus.

The surface of that discovered file was coated in poisonous snakes and the limbs of trees that had fallen during summer storms. Although the agent was able to brush these dangerous contrivances aside with an electronic eraser, he remained wary about what followed, what proceeded forth and into the air from the damnable device.

There was a film. As a traditional practitioner of a human craft that was looked upon with great foreboding and holy ignorance by the other animals, the agent felt he had no other choice than to summarize the narrative. If necessary, he might add his own interpretation of what could only be considered, after much contemplation, the great masterwork of a race of beings whose similarity in form and function to his own was disturbingly beautiful.

Two.

A man with shabby woolen pants trod through snowy streets, stumbled drunkenly in front of his home and then entered. He jabbered in English over something that vaguely resembled a telephone, but was made from plastic and filled with copper wires. There were newspapers and what appeared to be butterfly wings scattered here and there without conscious regard to their position or function.

Later, he is sitting in a decrepit office speaking in plaintive tones to a well-groomed stick figure who might have been a movie star if only the desert had not captured him and brought him to the ruins of what had once been a quaint strip mall on the southern edge of town. Have you ever been in a band, the thin collection of wood inquires gravely while folding a dollar bill into a football and launching it across the room.

Next door it is always dark but a tropical ambiance has been introduced to improve morale. The manager wears a hula skirt and sings songs from her adolescence to the other workers. Everybody smokes and there is a beaded polynesian curtain separating the reception area from the sales floor.

This sequence is followed by scenes of women frolicking and gamboling across great swaths of asphalt. Birds light on some of the cars and all of the telephone poles in Nob Hill.

The man with moth-eaten trousers rushes out of the lodge with a camera, but it is too late because the day is retreating, the bar is open and everything important is happening upstairs, anyway.

12 August 2012

Things in Light Podcast #24: Home on the Range Mix

Unknown

Things in Light is pleased to present our twenty-fourth podcast, Home on the Range Mix, featuring Nuevo Mexicano recordings by Cobra//group, Knife City, Leeches of Lore, Pitch & Bark, Kayfabe Quartet, iNK oN pAPER, Bermvda Shorts, and Sabertooth Cavity. See the full track listing below.



1. Cobra//group - It's Still Rock and Roll to Me
2. Knife City - Death
3. Leeches of Lore - La Follia Di Spazio
4. Pitch & Bark - Twisted Hammer
5. Kayfabe Quartet - Le Mat
6. iNK oN pAPER - Mumblety Peg (Live in the Red Stick)
7. Bermvda Shorts - Dzoavits
8. Sabertooth Cavity - Manteca

09 August 2012

And Now, A Word From Our Sponsors

Rudolfo Carrillo



By Rudolfo Carrillo

Here is some more of the stuff I know, about what happened in Albuquerque and the surrounding atmosphere.

Some of it I learned by asking folks, or by reading about events that occurred before I was born, things I heard about when I was a kid. My father was always a good source for that sort of information. So was Howard Bryan.

But I gotta tell you that some of the vast reserves of memory locked in the fatty tissues filling my thick skull came from television transmissions. I grew up on the edge of 
the rez. Because of my old man’s relationship with Tio Sam, my family had access to cable and satellite programming that was practically unheard of in the late nineteen sixties. In particular, I liked to watch the programs emanating from the city of angels, from KTTV-TV; reruns of The Outer Limits and 77 Sunset Strip, Connie Chung's noontime newscasts, and so forth and so on. I also spent many a laconic afternoon tuning into Albuquerque stations.

As an nine year old, I was hooked on
Dialing for Dollars, a show that was broadcast live from the KOAT TV studios, five days a week.

The aforementioned activity went something like this: the station screened cheesy movies (including the
ouevre of Marjoe Gortner) and during commercial breaks cut to the studio. There, the host, standing in the middle of a folksy but brightly painted and cardboard set, drew a phone number (clipped out of the Burque White Pages) from a spinning drum. He dialed the number. If a human on the other side answered and knew what movie was currently emanating from said studio's technical broadcast facilities, then blam! The lucky viewer won at least seventy-seven dollars.

That kinda exposition of the random nature of electronic existence, plus the seeming contradiction of this randomness (each time there was no winner, the prize was raised in value, with each iteration ending in seven: 77 dollars, 87 dollars, 97 dollars, and so on and so forth) drew me back for weeks. I also gained an appreciation for mediocre filmic productions, a proclivity that continues to influence my intellectual and literary output.


Besides Dialing for Dollars I was also partial to the
Val Del La O Show on KOB. Broadcast live on Saturday afternoons, the De La O Show was a Spanish language variety program. Val was urbane and hip, his sidekick clownish and messy. For years, as he highlighted the latest in homegrown performing arts, I watched and listened carefully, honing my Spanglish and allowing his broadcasts to symbolize my journey away from childhood; the show came on after the morning cartoons and seemed to be an prescient indicator of the culture I would inherit someday.

My favorite early electronic media experience though, was rooted in the kick I got out of watching and listening to the news shows on KGGM TV 13. It’s called KRQE now, but back in the sixties and seventies, it was locally owned and displayed a sort of hyperlocality in focus that was keenly evidenced in the on-air talent. The son and daughter of the owner, who served as anchors, presided over a circus that included the lovably shambling and disheveled weatherman, Hartsell Crib (whose toupee often awkwardly shifted position as he sweated and grunted through his rambling descriptions of this and that high pressure system, or of the interminable heat of the Albuquerque summer) and more influentially, the inimitable ravings of Gordon Sanders.

Sanders was a local wag whose favorite targets were the city government and the mayor. A larger than life and often combative man, he was hypercritical of the powers that be, would get visibly upset during his on-air commentaries, allowing his passion for the working man and his distrust for the ruling class to become battle cries for justice and redemption. His peculiar brand of populism and angry activism has all but been lost to those who followed him, those of the shiny smiles and perfect hairdos who have ubiquitously infected American television journalism. At the height of his popularity, Sanders ran for mayor of Albuquerque twice, but lost.

Sanders' bellicose tone eventually cost him his job at KGGM, so he moved on to the station that was home to the Val De La O show, where he served as news director. He continued to spin his tales of cyclical poverty and government greed until his retirement. In my research on Sanders, I came across only one video document of his informed, precious, and wholly unorthodox brand of broadcast journalism. While Sanders spoke about the high cost of meat and how citizens were being duped into buying unhealthy and unwholesome versions of the butcher's produce, an unknown citizen snuck into the studio and let Gordon have it in the face with a banana creme pie.

I suppose there is some tragedy in that fact, in the path of reductionism that is symbolized and mythologized in a clownish act that rendered intelligence as comedy and rewarded shallowness as somehow newsworthy.

So, tonight, if you get around to it, and the bright, one-eyed god is willing, take a close look at the humans who came after Gordon Sanders, noting if nothing else their intrinsic and cosmetically enhanced effervescence, even as the beautifully ugly ghost of Gordon Sanders lingers somewhere in the teevee studio, on the airwaves beaming their way toward other, grateful worlds.

I won't be able to join you all though, my television hasn't worked properly for years and years; the screen is more often than not overcome with the static of history. But, hooked up to a DVD player, it's great for watching bad movies, yo.

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