From left: Joanne Camp, Paul Blott and Laurie Thomas

Fusion Theatre Company’s venturing beyond its home venue—The Cell in Albuquerque—to perform Other Desert Cities for our neighbors to the north this evening at The Lensic. Alibi reviewer Leigh Hile gave the production high praise, saying the acting is some of the finest she’s seen in the 505.

• other desert cities
• fusion theatre company
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You are looking at an Alibi art box

2012 Art Boxer and internationally renowned muralist Danny Skinz actually disassembled his Weekly Alibi newspaper box and bolted three sides of it to a wall, creating ready made detail panels that will also stand alone as one piece -if he ever gets the box back together.

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There. There's the Alibi box panel. Someone give this man a can of beer.

Seriously though, look for Danny's piece as well as eleven other brilliantly modified Alibi boxes at Boro Gallery next month, where there will also be a month long group show (opening Friday September 7th) featuring non-circulation themed work by 2012 Art Boxers.

• operation art box
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• boro gallery
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• alibi 20th anniversary

Photos by Alan Mitchell

Ray Orley, Ed Chavez and Brian Haney are a comedic tour de force in The Winter’s Tale .

The Vortex Theatre is on its last weekend of shows in its last installment of the Will Power series—a run of Shakespearean productions. Leigh Hile reviewed The Winter’s Tale in this week’s Alibi. Check out her write-up to see why this might be one of the best slices of Shakespeare you’ll catch this year. Then head to one of the remaining three performances, including tonight’s at 7:30 p.m.

A bender to end all benders ... or bend all enders

John Bear reviewed Peter Heller's postapocalyptic novel The Dog Stars in this week's issue. It got me thinking about what life would be like if everything went to shit. Actually, it got me thinking about all the things I would enjoy doing if there were some sort of cataclysmic event that wiped out most of the population—be it the coming zombie apocalypse, the also-plausible vampire apocalypse, or any of the doomsday scenarios that religious zealots spew forth every year.

To answer this question, I decided to consult a few of my favorite films and novels that deal in such grim matter.

And the realization that I came to is this: I'd get drunk.

That's right, if the world ended, everyone I knew and cared about was wiped out, and I had to spend my days raiding zombie-infested grocery stores with eerily flickering fluorescent lights, armed with a sawed-off—all in the name of scrounging up some Chef Boyardee and Twinkies—I'd probably come home in the evening to a nice fifth of $500 bourbon.

If you need proof that this is probably what you would do too, let us turn to a couple primary sources.

First off, there's Richard Matheson's brilliant 1954 novel, I Am Legend. You are most likely familiar with this work via the Charlton Heston flick or that Will Smith one that included some of the worst CGI of the 21st century.

If you haven't read Matheson's book, I advise you to do so. The protagonist, Robert Neville, basically goes around killing the shit out of vampires and then ... you guessed it, getting hammered. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.

Moving on, there's that great scene in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead where some folks hole-up in a shopping mall to get away from the zombie hordes. And what do they do? Raid the mall's liquor store and get schnockered on high-end booze.

Exhibit C: When the world is ravaged by crazies infected with some sort of ape rabies in 28 Days Later, Brendan Gleeson's character grabs as much fine Scotch as his shopping cart can handle whilst on a scavenging run. He then proceeds to drink it.

Getting back to Peter Heller's book, all I know about its protagonist's tastes for liquids is that he drinks Coke. I already don't trust him.

• I wouldn't do anything (GardenGnome) [ Fri Jul 27 2012 12:08 PM ]
  

 

There was a strange point in my adolescence where a friend and I had an obsession with the Psycho movie series. Series, you ask? Yep, 23 years after the Hitchcock classic came out, a low-budget sequel was released (and then a few more). What kept it interesting was that Anthony Perkins (aka Norman Bates) had stayed on board.

Anthony Perkins was a weird guy. Either that, or he was just really good at playing one. More than being just a perverted, serial-killing momma’s boy, Psycho II introduced us to Bates’ penchant for whole milk. It was a fucked up movie.

But according to John Bear, it was no less misguided than Manuel Muñoz’ What You See in the Dark, a book about the making of Psycho, which Bear reviewed for this week’s Arts section.

Plant

You'll need to stand in the middle of Tijeras Ave to see this

HOUSE OF HADES
ONE MAN VERSUS
AMERICAN....?

In the early eighties when the tiles started appearing in Philadelphia, the message on these small, public screeds was:

 

Toynbee Tiles, or at least the first generation of them, seem to be the work of a single man who believed he had discovered the secret of immortality in the writings of historian Arnold Toynbee, found confirmation of this possibility in the death sequence at the end of the Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and felt an obsessive need to inform the human race that we could resurrect the dead. I can't remember what Jupiter has to do with it, but I like to think it's got something to do with Sun Ra.

The method for disseminating this concept, as well as other rants (mainly against "the media machine," sometimes anti-semitic, and often paranoid,) is to cut the message into linoleum tile, cover the edges of the tile with asphalt sealer and the top with tar paper -and proceed to drop it onto a busy street in the middle of the night, often in crosswalks. As vehicles drive over the tile, it is pushed into the street and eventually the paper comes off, revealing the message. Toynbee Tiles are found all over North America and in some parts of South America. There's an excellent, must-watch 2011 documentary film about the search for the Toynbee Tiler called "Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of The Toynbee Tiles."

• toynbee tile
• street art
• conspiracy

• Answers Perhaps (MRcleo) [ Tue Jan 1 2013 9:48 AM ]
  
• Answers Perhaps (geoffreyplant) [ Tue Jan 1 2013 2:21 PM ]
  
• Let's hear it for the sun god! (BrokenArrow) [ Tue Jan 1 2013 3:14 PM ]
  

 

Beyond What We Can See

A man fell from a building. Until his death, he washed windows high above sidewalks, so that powerful men could see the world better, the same one he saw hanging on a perch; a porch with buckets and squeegees, lowered down skyscrapers in a dense part of this dull city.

The coworkers drank beers in the back of a pick-up. One of them said to the man's brother: "There cannot be a reason for everything, despite what the elders say. Unless it's cause and effect, a force that drives the world, beyond what we can see."

Then they drove to the wife and gave her $200 for the fire she needed to turn him to ash.

 

Wilson “Jumpstart” Begay

Wilson “Jumpstart” Begay bought a used ’64 Ford pickup when he got back from Nam. Every time he turns off the ignition he has to get a jump start, so he leaves the engine running because so many people laugh at him when he asks for a push. One afternoon while in Gallup he went into a Blake’s, and two men, who had just robbed a 7-11 jumped in and drove to their girlfriend’s apartment. When they all came out, the truck wouldn’t start. Before they could raise the hood, they were surrounded by police. Wilson got out of the squad car and told the officers, “That’s it. Can I have a push before you fellas leave?”

 

Bar-B-Q

We found it near the old Chevy Zeke keeps his guns in. He was small, the orange stripes on his belly had turned rusted red. The white crawling stripes were maggots that kept coming like the cat was giving birth.

We tossed it to Bo and Luke, the two dead boys we keep in the backyard. They scare the looters away and Zeke kinda likes it when they slobber on him.

But they wouldn't touch the cat. Just kept staring at it like they was expecting it to come back to life.

Zeke and me watched the sun die with my head on his chest.

"Don't that beat all?" he said.

The Library of Congress / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Old Truck

He laughed, and then thought it odd to have laughed just then. It was just that now, after everything, it seemed absurd they had been so sad last year when the cat died. He looked across the dry backyard, and laughed again. “That pinche truck, that pinche, red truck.” They had bought it on Valentine’s Day—what, like seventeen years ago?—and they had laughed about buying a red truck on Valentine’s Day. And then he cried, as the yard turned red in the sunset light. This very morning, his wife had been alive, she had seen the sun this very morning. He looked across the yard at the red truck, and he thought about Valentine’s Day.

• Flash fiction (Jessica) [ Fri Jun 15 2012 1:01 PM ]
  

 

For this week’s arts profile, writer Blake Driver interviewed “Lawrence Welk Show” dancer Cissy King. She shared insights about Welk’s famous ability to butcher a phrase, and talked about her transition from the Hollywood spotlight to doing community theater here in her hometown. Check out the above video to see what King was up to roughly half a century ago, then go see her in Albuquerque Little Theater’s Singin’ in the Rain this weekend.

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• My parents took dance lessons from Cissy (Carl Petersen) [ Thu Jun 14 2012 3:18 PM ]
  

[click to enlarge]

“The Life of Liz” by Estella Mitchell, age 11

The Alibi’s Flash Fiction issue hit stands today. As promised, here’s the first in a series of entries that didn’t make it to print, but that we loved, nonetheless. Check out the awesome art accompanying Estella Mitchell’s story. The highly imaginative—not to mention eerie—piece reminded me a bit of that scene where Nic Cage reads the kid’s poem in the great Werner Herzog film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans.

Cage boxes are already transgressive

Weekly Alibi is currently accepting submissions for this year's Operation Art Box, which last year saw more than a dozen Alibi boxes transformed into engaging works of street art. Not all newspaper boxes are created equal, however. Although they must be placed in a sheltered area, I am particularly fond of the "cage box" because they are unusual and cast interesting shadows. They're edgy. Why not turn it into a vintage birdcage, or a traveling circus cage wagon? The cage box could be used to make a statement about America's staggeringly high incarceration rate. A memorial to the 1980 New Mexico State Prison riot wouldn't be hard to imagine.

Deadline for submissions has been extended to July 19th.

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Everyone’s a critic ...

While taking in some sun the other other day on the patio of my favorite Nob Hill watering hole, I heard an uproar of laughs behind me. I turned and saw a dog happily besmirching one of my favorite Alibi art boxes with a mighty stream of urine. After confirming that the canine in question was not employed by any rival news outlets, I concluded he had most likely overindulged and decided to leave the matter at that.

Moral of the story: It's art box season. Click the above link to see how you can personalize your very own Alibi distribution box. Selected artists will also get stipend cash, prizes, inclusion in a big art show and the gratification of having their work displayed publicly year-round. And who knows? You might even have the honor of having your metal masterpiece R. Kellyed upon.

• LOL (marisa) [ Wed Jun 6 2012 12:29 PM ]
  
• That breaks my heart (circulation) [ Thu Jun 7 2012 2:40 PM ]
  
• Territoriality​ (Mikey47) [ Sun Jun 10 2012 3:31 PM ]
  

COURTESY OF Postcommodity

“Repellent Eye Over Phoenix”

Anyone who’s interested in sound- and art-installation in the Southwest is probably familiar with Postcommodity. The collective, comprised of four Native American artists working in a variety of mediums has been creating politcally charged and culturally inquisitive work since 2007. For this week’s arts profile, the Alibi caught up with member Raven Chacon to discuss the direction of Postcommodity in the wake of a large grant and an upcoming installation in Australia.