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Showing posts with label Albuquerque. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Albuquerque. Show all posts

30 August 2016

TIL ❤ [Heart] Transmission, v. 1

Unknown 1:30 PM , , , , , , , , ,


by Samantha Anne Carrillo

Postmodern human culture is inextricably intertwined with social media. Things in Light's ❤ Transmission series will aggregate and spotlight New Mexican people, places, art, music and events that I heart/'like'/retweet/etc. I call Albuquerque home, but anything and everyone within the Land of Enchantment is the TIL ❤ Transmission beat.

I'm always looking for opportunities to learn more about the state we're in. Reader feedback is actively encouraged. Email me at carrillo.samantha.anne@gmail.com or message me on Facebook [facebook.com/samanthaannenm] to hype the aspects of nuevomexicano history and culture that resonate with you.

Publisher's note: The savage murder of 10-year-old Victoria Martens is a fresh wound in Albuquerque's communal psyche. The brutality of Martens' death (and her all-too-brief life) is impossible to fully comprehend. We can, however, understand the structural causes for New Mexico's child well-being rank of 49th ... and we can do better. Our state is currently Number 6 for deaths resulting from child abuse.

 Things in Light's warmest thoughts and deepest sympathies are with Victoria Martens' friends and loved ones. Her family and our society failed Victoria, and child abuse is preventable. Honor her memory by redirecting your natural urge toward vengeance into support of evidence-based solutions to child abuse in New Mexico.

 For example, home visitation programs employ a registered nurse to provide educational and training-based support to parents, thus reducing child abuse and maltreatment. To learn more about our state's child abuse prevention program, visit nmcapp.unm.edu. For a more personal gesture of support, consider donating to a GoFundMe campaign for the college fund of Matthew, Victoria's 8-year-old brother.

On with the ❤!

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xxxooo,
Samantha Anne Carrillo
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28 April 2014

Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Albino Carrillo

Rudolfo Carrillo 6:43 PM , , , ,


Hunting for my Father

On the internet—nowhere
To be found except in the exact
Obit my brother wrote:  one
Error.  My dad served in the Atlantic
Theatre in a sea-going tug
And might have killed
Some German sailors.
I want to find his
Papers and his story but
Hey, they might
Be lost like he was.
Lately I know
There’s a deep
Newspaper record
Of his mishaps and misdeeds,
Half-steps in his dreamy
political State.  Even
At the end.  Now I’ve
Heard stories—

I’m lost in my dream
Of him, not what we
Know when we’re awake.
Wandering East has
Done no good.  I now
Know he had another
Kid way before he
Met my mother.  He
Worked bad deals,
Building pyramids
For old-folks in
Scottsdale and Santa Fe.

I’m amazed I’ve escaped
That world.  I don’t know
How he felt at 50.  I can
Stand at his grave,
Address the criminal
While the white moon hurtles
above me and in the next
grave my mother’s ghost
cries for the world they
left behind so long ago.
If there is any agony
It is for the life he lived.
The one I don’t know so
Well—I’ ve been told this
And that by him, never
Noticed, like us all
He had a secret life,
A secret he could not
Share or maintain.
In the morning
Sunlight I do not
Know what I know
As the truth.  Who
Was that man
In that picture
By the lake?   And
What was he doing
With all the fancy
Cars, the empty bottles,
The rifle he kept
In the master bedroom
Closet.  Closed like
I am forever to wander
Like a ghost for some
Sense of who
He was.  The
Trips to Vegas,
The long rides
To nowhere
He must have endured.

***

Albino Carrillo, a sixth generation native New Mexican, received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University in 1993, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1986. He has published poetry in many literary journals, including The Antioch Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, CALIBAN, The South Dakota Review, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Sou'Wester, and World Order. Carrillo's poems are anthologized in both Library Bound: A Saratoga Anthology (Saratoga Springs Library Press, 1996), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Carrillo's book of poems is In the City of Smoking Mirrors (University of Arizona Press, 2004). Before teaching at the University of Dayton, Carrillo taught in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and at Union College of New York, where he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Carrillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
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10 April 2014

My Town and the Police

Rudolfo Carrillo 9:17 PM , , , , , ,

by Rudolfo Carrillo

 Here is my story about this town and the police. It ain't much. Don't get me confused for a journalist or commentator; I am one of those writers that lives mostly in his own head. My ideas have proven to be outlandish, for example, among humans best described by the geometric form whose perimeter is determined by the formula 4s.

 Anyway, by now you've been practically drowned with words and pictures from experts about all of this; I don't even need to name it in this paragraph. It's been well-recorded and we will all be able to take glimpses of what happened here, what has been happening here, years from today. The people that come after us will be able to viddy it too.

 There is plenty of violence in nature. Think about predation, the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, the effects of pesticides on songbirds. Interestingly, some animals display aggression and perform violence against their own kind. Usually this sort of behavior has to do with acquiring and demonstrating power over others. The animals responsible here are mostly mammals, I am pretty certain, but fill me in if I am wrong.

 As we evolve as a species, the common assumption is that lust for power over other individuals, violence, aggression, territoriality, will fade, will be replaced by more rational and compassionate responses to each other and ourselves.

 The only problem with the evolution hypothesis is that it is taking a god-damned long time to realize and we want peace now. But how can we have peace when we still can't feed and clothe the poor among us? By what magic can we institute respect for individuals and the state when we live in the simulacra of a beautiful oasis, surrounded by the reality of the smoke and noise of perpetual war?

 ***

 The nation's popular culture transmitters continue to strongly imply that violence and aggression are adequate solutions to a vast array of problems confronting the human world. Aggression and competition for power and dominance are seen as a positive qualities in the corporate milieu. The gap between rich and poor continues to heave outward. Some research suggests that up to 80% of Americans are armed.

 Through the twisted logic of wartime paranoia and corporatist values invoked by a series of now thoroughly discredited right wing administrations, the police have become seriously militarized, weapons are easy to come by, the surveillance state has been realized, yet many Americans seem totally fine with our dark inheritance. They can't respond because they are comfortable.

 One of the most disturbing speakers I heard at this week's city council meeting went on and on about some officer's military record, his valor fighting terrorists in faraway oil depots and strategically located warm-water harbors. That is just fine, but how does such experience translate to serving and protecting citizens in a small city? I am glad the man conquered IEDs and tanks, grenades and automatic weapons fire. But we don't have much of that stuff here, unless you count the Police Department.

 ***

 I've been stopped for speeding. I was pulled over near Tingley beach for exceeding the 25 MPH speed limit. I was doing about 30, I reckon, passed by a APD cruiser and knew he might pull me over. I continued though, and slowed down to wait for him. About 30 seconds later, the policeman came up behind me doing about 40 or 50, lights and siren blaring.

 I pulled over. The red-faced officer, probably about 23 years old, rushed over to my car. I rolled down the window and noticed he had his hand on his gun and was fiddling with the strap that kept it in the holster. He looked in the car and said, "What are you running from?" When I tried to reason with him, he began a tirade, claiming that I intended to elude him. He would not let me talk and acted all itchy and irritated. He finally went back to his car, wrote me a ticket and I signed it. Afterwards, he stormed off with his fists clenched and I drove away, terrified. Serio.

 I really believe that events like the ones I've described in this essay happen because we let them happen. All of us are responsible for making the world into what it has become. In evolutionary terms, we find ourselves at a dead end. Obviously we can't go back, we can't un-choose the choices that led us here. So this is where the branch bifurcates.

 ***

 Choosing another way means giving up a collectively false sense of comfort, a perpetual retreat into acquisition, our outward presentation as conquering super-heroes, the belief some humans are better than others. I want to believe my species is capable of that, that I can make the leap too.

 This effort will require something very ultra-non-violent called a cultural revolution; capitalism will have to be modified and imbued with compassion, corporations and advertising put aside entirely. Money spent on the war machine will need to be spent on health care, education, infrastructure, social programs to empower all the folks of America. The unemployed can be put to work, their dignity restored by involvement in building bridges, solar power plants and schools; maybe after a couple hundred years of that, space stations and star ships can be added to the to do list. 

 In that future, all of the policemen and policewomen in my town are trustworthy protectors, reasonable representatives of an advanced and evolved civilization, by the way.

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28 February 2014

Four Paragraphs Referencing Wyoming Boulevard

Rudolfo Carrillo 11:08 PM , , , , , , ,


by Rudolfo Carrillo

 Here are some things about Albuquerque you might like to know.

 There was a thing called the Wyoming Mall. It was indoors y todo and had a fancy movie theater in the middle. The film house was decorated in blue and various shades of grey. This was in direct contrast to other suburban cinema hideaways in the city. The other movie theaters in town were for the most part red and gold colored on the inside. All of them showed the latest in popular celluloid fantasies but the ushers at the Wyoming Mall Cinema had to wear bowties.

A small record shop stood beside the theater and a store called Yanamoto's next to that. At the former a man in thick-lensed glasses went on and on about The Animals and The Yardbirds. He made most of his money selling rolling papers and small stone pipes from Mexico that resembled carved onyx chess pieces. At the latter outlet, rare Asian imports were craftily combined with a vision of post-war SoCal, at once confusing and robust. It was possible to get lost in the kimono aisle; the smell of tiki lamps blazing away during daylight could be intoxicating.

 If you walked past the hobby business and it smelled like model airplane cement, that was okay. The sign in the window said they only sold the junk with the purchase of a complete kit, something along the lines of the Queen Mary. Or a tricked-out '55 Chevy Belair, a P-38 Lightning, or a 1/32 scale, assemble-it-yourself diorama of Washington crossing the Delaware. Each boxed project cost about 20 clams, way steep for casual users. Mostly it was pretty square like that, except for the shortwave radio display. A dude with a flattop and shop glasses (like the ones what are considered hep by kids these days) would yell at anyone who tried to tune in Moscow or Havana.

 The cafeteria was decent but lacked the dusky theatrics of the big dark Italian restaurant on the periphery of this lost world. Over there were 42 varieties of sauce, possibilities of sausage, pasta shaped like smooth orifices into another world. Primitive video games and mechanical fortune tellers beeped and clunked while Neapolitan art songs were piped through crackly speakers. It was moody, mostly lit by candles and colored lights. The tablecloths were the checkered kind. Sitting down at a table for bread and antipasto meant forgetting whether it was dark outside or light.
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04 February 2014

Nineteen Seventy-Seven

Unknown 9:21 PM , , , , ,

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here is a house with an oval of grass out front. The lawn is surrounded by cold lava rocks. The rough stones have been smashed to bits, are colored like dried blood. Banging them against the sidewalk makes small white sparks.

The family next door gets up every morning at four. Lights come on, trucks zoom away and the lot of them spend the last minutes of night wrapping up copies of the daily paper. The old man wears a cotton hat, smokes Viceroy brand cigarettes.

Across the street is an airline pilot with a small foreign car. He has a swimming pool. A woman in a bathing suit and long beach towel wanders back and forth between the front door and his Triumph, singing songs from Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

In the white house with grey trim, Chen practices the viola. His parents own a restaurant filled with heavy wooden chairs. The cook on the corner drives a Cadillac El Dorado. He has painted the automobile bright green, refers to it as the luckiest car in the universe.

There are more plants in the back yard; the sprinklers come on at midnight. A small garden with oleanders and roses has been cleaved out of clay in one corner. The far end, beyond the peach trees, smells of dog piss and pine sol.

Summertime comes around. The swamp cooler shakes and buzzes. As evening advances all of the neighbors walk out to the street without their shoes. Everyone wants to talk about food, how long the days have become or why the surrounding desert sings.
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21 January 2014

Come to Albuquerque

Rudolfo Carrillo 10:18 PM , , , , , , ,

by Rudolfo Carrillo

 The world called Albuquerque is where you want to build your life. There is no shortage of lumber in the mountains north and east of town; someone decided to build a shanty by the arroyo. If you drill into the clay bearing sand,  the small stones pushed perpetually down to the river by rainfall and large diesel powered tractors, you will find plenty of water to drink.

 The hint of petroleum distillates wafting up from your favorite clear crystal vessel and into gas-permeable membranes is there to remind all of us about the inflammatory potential buried everywhere and permeating even the best homes, despite our best efforts to contain it. Somehow all of this has to do with a project designed to take apart very heavy metal objects.

 Spicy food is on the menu. Soon enough we all make the transition from bread to tortillas. Notably, some prominent geographic features are called after a watery produce or the tree that bears such pleasant edible forms. The number two breakfast at the Frontier restaurant is decent.

 If you wander about town in a relaxed and confident manner similar to that affected by the conquistadors or their minions, you may encounter a snake with two tongues, a rabbit with thin veiny ears, a parrot escaped from a six thousand square foot home. Cactus plants hover, moon-like in their presentation.

 Residents here have no problem restoring automobiles to their pre-revolutionary glory and have been known to use autoclaves and special paint made from cobalt in preparation for their clandestine meetings at the train yard, at the ruined chapel, a square building that will always be made from red ceramic bricks.

 Of course, the sun continues to blare and is trumpet-like and bright as that instrument, but alarmingly forlorn in sustained utterances, too. I will continue to insist that it snowed here during the last decade of the twentieth century. You may be surprised and fascinated by the lack of insects available for inspection on the wide swath of next summer's conquering mower; digging will result in more ghosts.
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