The race to provide appealing entertainment on New Year's Eve is on, with the Rialto announcing that Chicha Dust will be headlining Tropidelica, "a tropical glow in the dark New Year's Eve" there on Dec. 31, with DJ Dirtyverbs. Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door, which includes a champagne toast and favors.

VIP balcony tickets are also available for $30, but if you want to really get crazy $50 gets you on the stage, plus mega-VIP treatment. Maybe Brian Lopez will kiss you at midnight. I don't know how these things work, but it couldn't hurt to ask.

More info at rialtotheatre.com.

We'll keep you updated on your NYE options as they're announced.

• #10932, 25 June 2013, © Jamey Stillings, courtesy Etherton Gallery

We know it's a big night on Saturday, what with that homecoming game between Arizona and Colorado, but if you're not watching the game somewhere, consider popping by Etherton Gallery for the opening reception for Land Exposures: Jamey Stillings, Richard Laugharn, David Emitt Adams with Chris Colville. I got an early look at the show last night; it's a extraordinary collection of photography (not that we've expect anything less from Etherton). Stallings' images of solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, in particular, are terrific—he has taken landscape photos from a helicopter that will astound you.

The reception is from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Stop on by if you're out and about downtown.

Here's a note about the photographers from Etherton:

• Melissa Amarello, Center for Biological Diversity

Uncomfortable for a bit, sure, but if you're in a committed relationship, you're done procreating and you're also tired of using birth control, well lovelies, consider the snip. Your dog lived, you can too, and evidently, you can celebrate today and learn more thanks to Tucson's Center for Biological Diversity.

The organization has teamed up with urologist Peter Burrows from the Arizona Center for Vasectomy and Urology to provide additional information, and they've put together a meme you can download and share in your social media platforms. Here's Burrows' website www.vasectomytucson.com. And go here for a World Vasectomy Day flyer and meme to download.

From the Center for Biological Diversity:

That's what's going on here, but first, look, these are good folks, led by Body Love Conference found Jes Baker, so that means this is not just a basic swap but an amazing body love celebration and party, too. And all proceeds benefit the next Body Love Conference in the planning stages for 2015.

In the body love tradition, this is a swap for women of all sizes, and it sounds like a great place to hang out with your friends trying on clothes in a body positive atmosphere. Personal stylists are going to be on hand (you know, your friends could be clueless), to help you out with ideas and encouragement. There will also be professional make-up artists, hair stylists and photographers to capture you at your best.

If you bring items to swap, cost is $8, and if you just want to shop, it's a $15 admission. There will also be local crafters and jewelry designers on hand in a special pop-up shop just for the occasion. All leftover clothing not swapped will be donated to the YWCA program Your Sister's Closet, which provides women reentering the workforce with several professional outfits for job interviews and that new job.

More info on the conference and swap, visit www.bodyloveconference.com.

• #11039, 4 September 2013, © Jamey Stillings, courtesy Etherton Gallery

Etherton Gallery is hosting a new show, Land Exposures, that highlights a new way of looking at landscape photography. From Etherton's description of the show:

In Etherton Gallery’s newest exhibition, Land Exposures, three contemporary photographers redefine the traditional genre of landscape photography. David Emitt Adams, Richard Laugharn and Jamey Stillings open up a new frontier in landscape photography, advancing the medium in exciting new directions. An installation of photographer Chris Colville’s photographs from the series Works of Fire will be on display in Etherton’s in-house pop-up gallery. Land Exposures opens Saturday, November 8, 2014 with an artist reception from 7 to 10pm. The show runs through January 3, 2014.

Here's a TED Talk by one of the photographers in the show, Jamey Stillings, who has done extraordinary work with New Mexico's massive solar arrays.

Stillings will on hand for a panel discussion on renewable energy challenges from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 6. Here's how Etherton describes the upcoming event:

Etherton Gallery and photographer Jamey Stillings are pleased to host a panel discussion at 6-7:30pm, on Thursday, November 6, in conjunction with its new exhibition, Land Exposures, featuring Stillings, David Emitt Adams and Richard Laugharn. Stillings has photographed the largest solar energy generating plant in the world, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System which is out in the Mojave Desert. Work from the series has been featured in the NYT magazine, the Wall St. Journal, Smithsonian and a number of other publications. Stillings is an articulate spokesman about the issues that have arisen as a result of the large-scale implementation of alternative energy. The Ivanpah plant has over 300,000 mirrors which reflect light to boilers that sit atop three, 40-story towers. The sunlight strikes the boilers’ pipes to create superheated steam that is piped to turbines where electricity is generated. Ivanpah takes up about five square miles and provides electricity for about 140,000 homes. However, it has come under fire for its adverse impact to local wildlife. As Southern Arizona becomes a hub for alternative energy, the needs of the community, endangered wildlife and the green energy movement will likely come into conflict. The panel discussion promises to begin a dialogue on some of these issues.

The panel features Kevin Koch, owner of Technicians for Sustainability, a solar energy company with a mission to help businesses, public institutions, and homeowners; John Shepard, a Senior Adviser at the Sonoran Institute, who is currently leading the Institute’s efforts to appropriately site utility-scale solar projects in Arizona and more effectively integrate local land-use policies and water management in the Colorado River basin; and Brian Wheelwright, PhD Candidate in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, who is adapting telescope manufacturing technologies to produce cheap dish mirrors for solar concentration, with the goal of producing low-cost solar energy.

Below the cut: Details of the photographers as provided by Etherton:

Turns out, comedian Hari Kondabolu has the whole controversy over the name of Washington D.C.'s professional (well, mostly) football team fixed with a four-minute Upworthy video. That's wasn't how I predicted a solution would emerge, but hey, I'll take it.

Kondabolu performs at the Gallagher Theatre tonight at 6:30 p.m., presented by the Common Ground Alliance. And it's free? Seriously. You should go.

This is also a book signing for Rodriguez, whose book was recently published, and culminates research he started with Gonzales on his investigation on the origins and migrations of the Mexican people in the Four Corners region of the U.S. by following the corn and the people associated with that crop and stories from the elders he interviewed along the way.

Listen to a podcast interview with Rodriguez from Amanda Shauger at KXCI.

We recently interviewed Rodriguez about his book, and intended our interview to be part of a Currents feature in last week's issue, but our decision to focus on marriage equality forced us to change course for the week. Here's part of our interview with the author, journalist and UA associate professor.

Rodriguez was one of only a few active UA academics involved with championing Mexican-American studies at Tucson Unified School District—supporting students at protests and speaking out at many governing board meetings and other public hearings. He was arrested with local high school and college students the day the anti-Mexican-American studies legislation was signed into law when outgoing state Attorney General Tom Horne paid a visit to Tucson. He also experienced a fair share of criticism from MAS critics and far-right attacks, including a threat on this life.

What is the time frame of your work on this book?
It was the mid-1990s. That was when the process began in the literal sense, a research project on maps I was given that showed that the Aztecs reached into the Four Corners of the United States. I had no knowledge of the maps and had never heard of them. I was just given them as proof that Mexican people were native to the Southwest. I wasn’t a scholar then, but even with the little I knew, I knew that this little piece of paper does not constitute proof. So I embarked on a research project.

You found more maps, right?
Yes ... from 1847. That’s what triggered this research. At the time Patrisia and I were colleagues and married when we embarked on this project together. It was exiting and exhilarating. We went everywhere on this topic ... and at some point we saw some of the oldest maps that showed Salt Lake as the point of origin of Mexican Indians. Everyone made the assumption that we were looking for Aztlan. We knew the story but we weren’t sure if that was what was supposed to be depicted. We knew that there has to be memory there and that people would be able to tell us stories. We began to do interviews with elders, many of them are dead now.

I know many people will say, 'Why do you always talking about corn?' Your academic nickname, Dr. Cintli, is Dr. Corn.
When we did the interviews, I realized forget the maps. If you want to know where we come from, follow the corn. At that point it became obvious to me. I think some people were disappoint we didn’t find Aztlan. But we literally did follow the corn and saw how it changed the continent and it was corn that led to what we call civilization. Massive cities.

How did this research related to your own personal story?
I grew up knowing that society saw me as inferior, but I got a different message from my father and my mother — mostly my dad telling me stories, anciet stories, that didn't reinforce the idea that we crossed this ocean to get here. "Don’t worry about that or what they say, we didn't cross the ocean. We are from here

Part of your research was also during the state's attacks on TUSD and MAS, right?
I would say it was coincidental that when I went to do my PhD, it was 2003-2007, and in 2006, Horne began hsi campaign, his war was about indigenous knowledge. Kids were being taught in lakech and pacnhe be — and that was precisely my work. The teachers taught lots of things, but some of what was being taught in the classroom was also from my own materials and column Patrisia and I did.

In your classroom at the UA, you say you teach beyond in lakech and panche be?
I expanded to what I call the seven maiz based values. Really there’s no story like it on this continent — the story of the maize. It is not a counter story. It existed for 7,000 years and it doesn't revolve around Greeks and Roman. The maiz stories is important and it is humble. It's not a claim to land, this isn't about Aztlan, but a claim to our humanity. We are part of a big story — a bigger story. I always looked at SB 1070 as a way to attack brown people, and that was a law to deport the body. HB 2281 was to deport the mind and spirit. My book is a way to help understand that we are from here and we are also fully human.

100% of sales from the OHSO Brewing, Fate Brewing, and Arizona Wilderness Brewing beers on tap tomorrow night are being donated to a very special family. Baby Gavin Hillman was born in July with serious health complications, and has already braved two surgeries. The funds raised from these kegs at the Tucson Girls Pint Out anniversary party will go towards little Gavin's treatments.

Edge 69, the Casa Libre reading series of emerging and younger writers, continues tonight, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m., with Jia Oak Baker, Roberto Bedoya and John Myers, at the 228 N 4th Ave. literary arts center. Suggested donation is $5.

Reading tonight is Jia Oak Baker, author of a forthcoming chapbook, Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City, from Dancing Girl Press and recipient of the 2013 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award; and John Myers, a social worker and writer living in Tucson with his partner Brian Blanchfield, who has work published inPank, Ilk, Spork, Abjective, Frigg, Handsome, Word For/Word, The Bakery Poetry, among many others.

But I'm particularly excited to see Tucson Pima Arts Council's Executive Director Roberto Bedoya. A writer and arts consultant who has worked on projects for the Creative Capital Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts
(Creative Capital's State Research Project), The Ford Foundation (Mapping Native American Cultural Policy), and more, is also the the author of the chapbook, The Ballad of Cholo Dandy from Chax.

One topic Bedoya has written extensively on is placemaking and creative placemaking, and recently swimming through the Facebook internets was a beautifully written essay from Bedoya in Creative Time Reports titled "Spacial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City," that looks at gentrification, placemaking and the Chicano practice of Rasquachification and how placekeeping could expand racial justice.

I don't know what Bedoya is sharing tonight, but I know this essay—you can read it in its entirety here—is a great reminder for Tucson's own struggles with gentrification, and a good reminder om how we need to work to hold it all together with "rasquachismo":

The scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes Rasquache as a Chicano aesthetic with an “attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.” Evoking rasquachismo from an artist’s perspective, Amalia Mesa-Bains calls it “the capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado.” When I think of rasquachismo, I think of repurposing a tire into a flowerpot that you would never find at Home Depot. Such an object signifies the imaginary structured by resourcefulness, and prompted by poverty, which is distinct from the imaginary imposed by the monetization of neighborhoods, a prevailing objective in urban development.

Rasquachification messes with the white spatial imaginary and offers up another symbolic culture—combinatory, used and reused. The Rasquache spatial imaginary is the culture of lowriders who embrace the street in a tempo parade of coolness; it’s the roaming dog that marks its territory; it’s the defiance signified by a bright, bright, bright house; it’s the fountain of the peeing boy in the front yard; it’s the DIY car mechanic, leather upholsterer or wedding-dress maker working out of his or her garage with the door open to the street; it’s the porch where the elders watch; and it’s the respected neighborhood watch program. Rasquachification challenges America’s deep racial divide through acts of ultravisibility undertaken by those rendered invisible by the dominant ideology of whiteness.

Rasquachification is also what the community activist Jenny Lee calls placekeeping—not just preserving the facade of the building but also keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, keeping the tree once planted in the memory of a loved one lost in a war and keeping the tenants who have raised their family in an apartment. It is a call to hold on to the stories told on the streets by the locals, and to keep the sounds ringing out in a neighborhood populated by musicians who perform at the corner bar or social hall.

Local "Desert Soul" trio Copper & Congress performs tonight, Oct. 22, appropriately enough, at Club Congress before getting in the van for a two-week West Coast tour in support of the band's excellent new record, "Fault Line."



Doors open at 8, with support from Tucson's own Carlos Arzate & The Kind Souls and Durango, Co.'s Hello Dollface. Find out more about the show from its Facebook Event Page and educate yourself with Tucson Weekly music writer Eric Swedlund's profile of C&C and their music factory from September.