Mr. Kim in Albuquerque

Photo Credit: Douglas Brooder

by Rudolfo Carrillo

I saw the fearsome ruler of the north surrounded by cascading waveforms and patriotic transmissions.

The dude was standing in the parking lot at ghetto Smith's, dancing to the latest hit by Brokencyde, winking at the college students; offering them warm beer from out of his backpack.

At least some of those present considered his act to be revolutionary, it being springtime and all. A robotic transport assistant rang up the authorities to report the incident. They were prevented from making a timely arrival due to their collective belief in celestial mechanics.

The son of the great leader left his navy blue woolen overcoat behind as he gamboled toward the gas station across the street.

Eventually, an angry yet angelic hippie named Carlos carried the coat away to use next winter, but first hacked off the red star on the collar because he didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.

The crowd surged and the cars choked Coal Avenue and Yale Boulevard, but I lost track of Mr. Kim just after he lifted himself off the ground with miniature cosmic jets hidden in his shit-kicking boots. The daejang adjusted the price per gallon sign that towered over the neighborhood, then roared and zoomed off toward a storm made from water and dust, just there, near the horizon, probably out by the volcanos.

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The New Mexican Astronauts

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Hey carnales, two-thousand and thirteen is pretty bitchin', so far, eh?

Everyone's talking about how far they have come along into the twenty-first century. It's just plain glorious to think about where we came from to get here. All that shiny newness reminds me of a fable I heard one day at Ghetto Smith's while wandering through the dog food aisle.

It's a story about the New Mexican astronauts; los recuerden? They came from the south with their sister the scientist in an attempt to reconcile el norte with la neta, if such a thing is possible.

I imagine there is all sorts of stuff on the interwebz about all this. Maybe you ought to google it when you are done here. Anywho, this story is about the time those two, nursed on atomic infusions and the dull knife of continuously magic circumstances, were gifted with petroleum-powered caballos mecánicos.

La historia suena así.

The dirt bikes were a good idea because they introduced a format for exploration that was dangerous and therefore had to be studied, modeled, processed, and then undertaken with the utmost gravity.

Additionally, there would be no supervision or support on actual missions, just the endless sage, wrecked cars, spiders, and occasional cows encountered on trails that had been carved out by the agents of men who had been making movies about an imaginary version of Albuquerque, who wanted a way to conveniently strand their hero in the Sandia Mountains, near the end of the fifth reel, like he was el vaquero más solitario del mundo, or something like that.

One of the motorcycles was painted green; the other was red. This configuration had nothing to do with the mythos of the popular culture in those parts regarding two fruitful colors; in this case let us say that the patterns and spectral traces differentiating one vehicle from the other symbolized springtime and blood.

The devices were put to use, a process concerned with the depiction of new experience was inititated and lonesome guitar songs played over the top of things as a plain reflection of the awesome and empty mesa that folded outward from the main observation laboratory. The two New Mexican astronauts prepared a mixture of gasoline and oil, imagining the far shore as just over the looming mountains, a bright thing seen vaguely from the corner of one's eye, waiting to be fully observed and made real.

And so with their sparkly protective headgear properly applied, the two New Mexican astronauts zoomed through several very compact iterations of the eleventh dimension which were craftily disguised as this or that neighbor's back yard, and right out into the middle the desert.

En ese desierto, algunos de los cactus estaban brotando plumaje colorido, and birds made from stones and mud lept up into the air as the spacemen approached. Here was a shift in the sand where a serpent had slithered by; there was a beverage storage unit abandoned long ago by another explorer, whose size was determined to be in excess of three meters, and therefore probably from one of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem was that the whole scene lacked music. The two New Mexican astronauts fiddled with the idea of strapping a portable radio-wave receiver to one of the dirtbikes but decided it wouldn't be the same because meaningful tuneage would just get lost out there in the vasty arroyos, sabes?

On the journey back, one of the spacemen, the one with the name like a wolf (the other was called after the highest of clouds) ran over a small rodent. Basta, each cried out to the other. They hauled ass back to their space chante, parked los motorcicletas in a dark room filled with ghosts and spent the intervening days listening to A Night at the Opera and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; smoking Salem brand cigarettes stolen from the captain's quarters.

At night they would take out their microscopes and consult encyclopedias while the wind churned and rattled as if telegraphed from a much heavier planet. The New Mexican astronauts retreated into their labyrinthine headquarters and shortly after the solstice, the dirt bikes became small birds that flew off towards the sea.

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Aqui, Ahora, a Total Color

by Rudolfo Carrillo


While standing in the queue for the payment kiosk at ghetto Smiths bright and shiny new fuel depot attachment, a fellow with tiny eyes and sharp vocal articulation comes up to me and says "where the hell is the clerk", and "don't tell me they are starting this bullshit again". So, I smile and look up at him because I have been gazing deeply into the sunny reflection coming from my shiny leather shoes. He repeats himself and so I tell him the clerk is  probably showing one of the customers how to pump gas or something like that. The guy tells me he hates New Mexico and that stuff like the missing cashier is why he moved away fifteen years ago, but then finishes off by saying he has come back for a year to teach a course over at the university. I go back to shoe-gazing and the clerk ultimately ambles back into the booth, smelling of gasoline and low wages.


After I pay my seven bucks for about two gallons of gas, I tell the man behind me to have a nice day. He is so busy arguing with the clerk that he probably doesn't hear me.


I didn't think much of it, except I thought the story might make a good introduction for another post about my experience of events while living in Burque. Of course I'd probably come up with some abstruse way of putting that out to you, like pretending, for instance that I am some sort of emissary from another world, downloading data to the robots or colonists or whatever fictive beings I could come up with, in order to spice up the story. 


Anyhow, this sort of device is just what I came up with with regards to the past.


Listen up and draw yourselves to the fire for these words, pilgrims because the way I spill them out into the air and onto the page will one day be described as part of a great confluence of data transmission protocols originating on the planet earth and produced by fragile, flesh-bound beings whose various constructions survived their incorporation as individual biological units. This is part of what will inevitably be left behind. Though there is no permanent record of its passage through your optic nerve and into the universe that you are bound to with water and carbon, its potential to be assimilated, decoded and analyzed by other entities, even billions of years from now, has quantum possibilities.


To further investigate this phenomena, I jumped back to a sub-location in the aforementioned spacial membrane. Called nineteen-seventy five by the beings passing through it, the place is rich with data sources.


At our primary research station, deep at the bottom of the Rio Grande, at the research and colonization center described in a previous iteration of this report, I happened upon the following recorded fragment of an electromagnetic broadcast. For research purposes, it has been uploaded to devices common in the current temporal location, as many of my associates still have not updated their terminals to include basic reverse time-travel apps (damn imperial bureaucracy).

After rigorous analysis of this artifact, I have decided to elucidate my findings using the linguistic structures common to our subjects.


I love New Mexico, this is one of the reasons I stay here. Es la neta.


End Transmission.

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Sounds Like Weekend, Rhymes With Fix

by Rudolfo Carrillo


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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