Bien Venidos a Todos! Welcome All!

Tonight’s special event hosted by Joe City Garcia will be one to remember!!

Featured guest artists for tonight’s performance include: Martin Holmes (Poeticus Racontaurus), Martínez del Río – Variedades (Ballad of Ricardo Flores-Magón), Cala Elaine (Songster of Exquisite Passion), Juan Pérez (his Awesomeness of Bass), Joanna Fodczuk (abstract installation) and songs and jams with the UDC combo: Dean H. Chamberlain, Jeremy Gilien, Tonya Lee Jaynes, Robert Matsuda & host Joe City Garcia.

Deets:

• Thursday, May 17, 2012
• Back Room, 714 Hollywood Blvd.  http://www.pignwhistlehollywood.com/
• $5 cover.
• Full menu and bar.
• Street parking only enforced until 8PM
• $5 lot @ Cherokee & Selma.

Join the Event: @  http://www.facebook.com/events/147032125418919/

Tell Me More Miz Meliz!

• The Urban Desert Cabaret is a collaborative bi-monthly event consisting of guest songwriters, poets, spoken word artists and musicians. Conceived and hosted by Joe City Garcia.
• The Pig’n Whistle Back Room is an intimate venue, a secret oasis amid the ‘new’ Hollywood Boulevard. Located between Las Palmas and MacCadden Place, you can enter from the side off of MacCadden Place between Selma and Hollywood Blvd. In fact, if you wish to avoid the boulevard altogether, you can circle around the back from Selma and look for street parking (only enforced until 8PM on Thursdays) or park in one of the lots ($5 lot @ Cherokee & Selma.)
• Segments of L.A.’s hit performances of Variedadeswill be part of tonight’s showcase at Urban Desert Cabaret.
• Joanna Fodcuk’s installation of Abstract Art will be highlighted tonight at the event as well.

Come back this weekend to read my ramblings of my experience at tonight’s Urban Desert Cabaret!!

VARIEDADES, the regular “performance salon” hosted by author and performer Rubén Martínez took stage in four installments at the famous Echo Club in Echo Park, in November of 2011.  Variedades focussed on an expansive theme: the Desert, in all its immensity, beauty, and fearsomeness. An eclectic bill of artists rendered the “land of little rain” as desert scribe Mary Austin once called it, with music, spoken word, comedy, performance art and even a “performance lecture” by a leading theologian. This resulted in a dramatic and poignant portrait of a place where Mexican migrants cross a searing land, monks seek spiritual purity, soldiers wage battle and students stage revolution… the many deserts within the desert. The show at the Echo Club featured legendary alternative folk figure Victoria Williams (founder of Sweet Relief), internationally recognized performance artist Elia Arce, comedian/playwright/activist Richard Montoya of Culture Clash, and author and Loyola Marymount University theologian Douglas Burton-Christie.

Variedades, as does the Urban Desert Cabaret, pays special tribute to the powerful art scene that’s taken root in recent years in Joshua Tree—a Mojave desert destination long popular with Angelenos. Angelenos are certainly obsessed with the desert. Sometimes we even say that we live in it. (We don’t—you have to cross over the mountains to get to it.) It is certainly our escape-landscape, a screen upon which to project all kinds of desires and fears, and a real, physical place to inhabit. (In the 1990s and first decade of the new millennium, the Desert West saw the fastest population growth of any region in the country.)

As long as people have been traveling to the desert, artists have been representing it. The desert is a recurring character in both the Old and New Testaments. It is the setting for the American passion play of the Western. These days it is often the mise-en-scène for narco noir and neo-nativist politics—Arizona’s SB 1070, an electrified “border wall.”

VARIEDADES is inspired by the Mexican Vaudeville Shows in 1920’s Los Angeles in which Martínez’s grandparents were regular performers.  VARIEDADES v.4 approaches this vast, contradictory space the same way previous themes had been approached (migration, the drug war, anarchy): with artists of different genres and generations bringing passion and humor, pathos and spectacle to illuminate the theme.  The original four part series, performed last year, was made possible by a generous grant from the Material World Foundation (http://www.georgeharrison.com/mwf/main.html) and Liz Garo and The Echo.

A native of Los Angeles and the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, Rubén Martínez holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University, and is an artist in residence at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. An author and a veteran journalist, he won an Emmy Award for his work in public television. As a musician, he has collaborated with the likes of The Roches, Los Illegals, Ersi Arvizu, and Marisoul Hernandez. (From: http://www.attheecho.com/2011/10/24/saturday-11-12-11-variedades-echo/ )