#There's a complete character set with Mario being Santa (of course)

[pianokantzart]

Seeing as it's almost Christmas season PLEASE look at this reindeer Luigi plushie Nintendo sold in the early 90s

[official-mr-saxobeat]

N e way it has been 728 days since I last saw/had any communication from my older brother (and longer for my little brother, but I don't know the exact date bc I wasn't fucking PAYING ATTENTION.)

And you know what? I remember the day. 7-14-17. He told me he'd text me the next day and see me the next week. You wanna know how many times he's contacted me? Zero. He's also blocked me. All because his fucking CUNT parents (can you say: DIS-GUS-TENG) decided for some fucking UNKNOWN reason that our mom, sister, and I needed to be cut off completely. Literal family, disowned with absolutely no explanation. He and I were closer than ANYONE and ALWAYS told each other we were more important than anyone else to each other. He has had so, so many opportunities to contact me. Literally just sending a fucking letter could've worked. Just, "Hey, it's Tyler. Simon and I are ok. We miss you a ton. Don't send anything back." But would you guess what? Nope. Nothing. One of his friends said that he misses me, and is apparently going to text me once he's 18. But a mutual friend of ours (who's closer to him than the other one) said more recently that he hates me now! Neat. Great. Good. Wonderful. Our sister lived in a much, MUCH more dangerous house than his, and yet wouldn't you know it! She has contacted me every single time she's had the opportunity, and risked a lot for it too. Even if she couldn't carry on a conversation, she'd let me know that she was at least safe or ok. And wow! Now that she has a phone again, she texts me all the time! Almost like...if you put in the effort to contact someone you care about, you absolutely can! She's planning to drive down and visit me! (If you're reading this Pauline I love you SO HECKING MUCH HOE ASS HOE!!!!)

I even believe that our little brother would have contacted me if he knew how. He was fucking six the last time I saw him. He's turning nine this August. Of COURSE he can't contact me, he doesn't have a phone or know my address to send a letter.

Anyway. I don't know if I'll ever hear from him again. Lots of people have told me to just give up.

....

Don't they get it...? I can't ever give up. He was my everything. Absolutely everything to me. He was there, always, no matter what.

He has no idea how many times I've cried, sobbed myself to sleep over losing him. He has no idea how much sleep I've lost over him, whether it be from nightmares where he finds me and tells me he hates me and hopes I kill myself, or from not being able to sleep because I had an unexplainable feeling that he might, just maybe, come see me, and I didn't want to go to sleep for fear of not hearing a knock or the doorbell. I'd already gone through that with our sister. He has no idea how many times I've come so, so close to just texting him, telling him how much I miss him, telling him I've changed, how much I wish he'd come back. How much I wish I could just hear his voice. See his face. Hear his laugh.

I don't know what I did. I have absolutely no clue. Neither does Pauline. Or our mom. Not an inkling. I found a letter the other day from them when I was going through boxes. A birthday card. There were long messages from both of them (the cunts) inside, telling me how much they loved me, how proud they were of me and the young man I was growing into, how much they loved having me as a part of their family, etc, etc. Who knew that in less than a year and a half from then, they'd be telling me I shouldn't ever ask about going on a family trip to the beach. But not for the same reason it used to be. It used to be, "Don't ever ask if you can come with us on a family trip, you're OBVIOUSLY coming! Why wouldn't you? You are family, after all!"

Then it was, "You're so selfish. Don't EVER ask something like that. Why would you think you could just invite yourself on a trip with us? How DARE you be so disrespectful!? You should be ashamed of yourself."

I hadn't even asked to go. I had been on every single beach trip EVER with them. They were family, after all. Tyler told me they were going to Santa Monica and asked if I was coming. I said no. I hadn't even known anything about it. So I texted CUNT BITCH (CB) and she didn't respond. All I said was, "Hey, Tyler told me you're going on a beach trip on Monday and Tuesday, did you forget to invite me or should I just not come?"

She didn't respond for over four hours. Which was really fucking weird. Because she always responded to me. So I texted again. "It's totally fine if I can't come, I'd just appreciate it if you could tell me instead of leaving me on read please."

Wow! Would you guess what. CUNT FUCK (CF) (her husband) texted me ALMOST IMMEDIATELY from her phone. The message read something like (I don't have the original texts anymore),

"How could you be so selfish. Inviting yourself on a trip that's for FAMILY ONLY. (Insert rant about how I'm a terrible person and caused CB to have a "panic attack") (and yes, I know putting panic attack in quotations seems really bad, but she faked panic attacks the entire time I knew her, aka my whole life. And they got SO much worse in those last couple months.) You hurt CB so much. You know how much she cares about you, and yet you accused her of ignoring you. How could you. I'm disappointed in the amount of disrespect you are showing right now." (Side note, I went over to his house back in June, CB opened the door, didn't recognize me at first, then said, "Nope, get out!" And slammed the door in my face.)

Tyler came over the next day, we hung out, he left. When he hugged me goodbye he said he'd talk to his parents about bringing me on the beach trip, he didn't know why they hadn't asked me.

And that was the last I heard from him. Friday, July fourteenth, 2017. Never again. I don't know if he hates me. But it certainly seems like he does.

I don't know, maybe one day he'll contact me again. Maybe he won't. Maybe I'll live the rest of my life wondering what I did and why he and his parents hate me. Maybe he will contact me, just to tell me what a terrible person I am and how glad he is he was separated from me.

I don't know.

I just want to talk to him again. I want to tell him how sorry I am for being a bossy prick. For beating him up when we were little (but I mean we're fucking brothers, and that's just what we fucking did back then). For not being there on his 14th birthday. For getting angry when he won games. For being angsty all the time when I was older. For lecturing him about Homestuck all the time. For being in the hospital so much when I was younger (see: being angsty all the time). For spending more time with s/o's than him sometimes. For waking him up at 0100 in the morning in 7th grade. For being so flamboyant about my sexuality for a few years (god, that was bad). For saying TRIGGERED every two seconds. For hurting myself even after I promised I wouldn't. For not being good enough at the piano to play the Animal Crossing: City Folk museum theme with him. For not waking up early when he was over. For not making enough (or good enough) homemade gifts for him. For not having enough random gift days. For not listening to him when he said things I was doing were edgy. For making him listen to annoying music.

For not being a good enough brother.

I miss him so much. I miss Simon so much. I miss Pauline so much too, obviously, but it's different because I've been able to talk with her all the time. I know she loves and misses me. I also have a feeling that Simon loves and misses me too. He always liked/loved me more than anyone else. He hated his parents. He told me so. I was the only one that respected him. I feel like no matter the amount of brainwashing his parents did to him, he'd know the truth. I just hope he knows I didn't abandon him. That I love him so much. And that it hurts so, so much, every day. And especially on Christmas and his birthday. And Halloween. We loved Halloween.

It's 0606 now. There's 41 hours and 54 minutes until it's been two whole years.

I wonder if he remembers the day...?

I don't know.

I wonder if he'll read this one day. Probably not. But if he does I hope he knows how much I love him and how much I miss him and how much I miss our driveway talks in the middle of the night and Mario kart races and pool games and water pool games and snowmen and sledding and writing stories together and drawing maps together and listening to pop songs while making fun of them and playing the undertale song game and playing minecraft and watching markiplier and fighting and cheating at board games in each other's favor and sorting candy after Halloween and collecting shit money from a camel in that Indiana Jones lego Wii game and making characters in that star wars lego Wii game and screaming badgers at the top of our lungs and spinning in circles to the hamster dance and walking home from elementary school and learning Japanese and OPERATIONTWENTYFOURHUNDRED and Sliced and making house tour videos and other fucking stupid home videos and building legos and rebuilding legos bc of simon and REREBUILDING LEGOS BC OF SIMON and planning midnight snacks that never happened and going to the waterpark and going to the park and finally being allowed to go places on our own and practicing singing to you and seeing you at all my concerts and playing Kirby's Return to Dreamland to 100% together and making really disgusting food creations when we were really little and playing with your hotwheels and cleaning my (DIS-GUS-TENG) room together and having random gift days and all your birthdays and all my birthdays and your AMAZING peanut butter fudge banana smoothie (which I,,, still have yet to perfect) and you being absolutely blunt and truthful towards me (except about my drawing skills/drawings which you absolutely loved even though they were terrible) and going through the undertale files to try and hack the end credits so we could get through the mysterious door and having tea parties together with that FUCKING TINY tea set (I have a big one now though) and giving you fashion shows with fucking stupid clothes that were really bad and playing Wii ski together and Super Mario Galaxy together while you were Mario and I froze enemies and collected stars and playing HMTOT and playing Animal Crossing and you selling everything you caught and all your furniture (besides mario stuff, obviously) so I could buy the Gracie Grace stuff (god, I was a cunt) and EOU (YOU'RE AS BLIND AS A WORM) and essentially having our own language and reading jack and annie books when we were really little and just. There's 20,000 more things plus some but I could never list them all. Everything we've ever done together I miss.

I don't know your views on a lot of things now. I don't know what you think about gay people. I've heard that you've called me they instead of he ever since we stopped talking. That's understandable, though. I dressed like a girl and wore makeup and stuff. I was confused. I thought that's what you were supposed to do, as a gay dude. Obviously not. I'm way less out there about my sexuality now. It's not something I talk about. It's not my whole fucking personality anymore. Which is really good.

I've changed so much since I last talked to you. I'm not edgy anymore. I fucking finally hit puberty (GODDAMN IT WAS FUCKING LATE) and my voice is really deep and I've been growing quite a bit of facial hair, which is nice. I don't look like a fucking girl anymore because I stopped dressing like one and wearing makeup and stuff. I realized that being mistaken for a girl felt like shit and tumblr was shit for encouraging that, just because I'm gay. I haven't hurt myself since September 4th, 2017. So that's also good. I've seen the bad things in mom that I couldn't see before. (Even though there's literally. Nothing that should have made your fucking cunt mother and father disown Pauline and mom and I.) I've made more friends and lost a lot too. I've done more writing, but nothing too edgy. I got my shit together in school and I'm going to CCCC starting in the fall. I almost have my driver's license. One of my best friend's moms is the manager at Starbucks and I talked to her about hiring me, so I'm getting a job soon, too. I started learning the piano again, for the first time in 12 years. Since the last time your mom taught it to me. I started cooking more, and have made some pretty amazing dishes, if I do say so myself. Mom and I sent you and Simon birthday and Christmas presents every year. They always were sent back. Except for your 16th birthday. I bought you a pineapple pizza club pin and an orange dad hat with an orange on it. Those are the only things that ever haven't been sent back. I sent a note with them too. Did you read it? I hope so.

I brag about you all the time. Mostly about how smart you are. "My brother essentially taught himself pre-calculus in 10th grade, and STILL passed the class," I say. I then go on to explain that you were homeschooled and your math teacher almost never showed up to the online classes.

I've wondered often about what college you're going to go to, or even if you are going. We used to plan to go to one together. I can't even remember what I wanted as a career the last time we talked. I remember that you had no idea, though. I remember you being really good at coding. Maybe you're majoring in computer sciences? I don't know.

I really miss you a ton. Before she kicked me out, mom used to encourage me to send you a letter. I never did. I was scared. Scared of getting a letter back like the one I sent to Simon on his eighth birthday, or the Christmas package we sent in 2017. Both came back to our house with "RETURN TO SENDER!!!!!!!" written in thick black sharpie on the front. Even worse, I imagined a letter back in your handwriting. I would've been so, so ecstatic. Beyond thrilled. Then upon opening it, finding a handwritten letter from you saying that you never wanted to hear from me again and that you hated me.

It was selfish of me. To not send you a letter. I'm sorry. I texted you twice. You blocked me the second time. It was too scary to me. I should've been brave. For you. Just so you knew I was thinking of you. I'm so sorry. I love you so much. I miss you so much.

After I moved back to our hometown, I thought about going to your house. I texted one of your friends. He said that he could text you for me. He said that you said you miss me. And that you'd text me as soon as you turned 18. Tyler, you don't even know my number. I don't know if the guy was lying or not, but I don't think so. He doesn't seem like the type. He said that you wouldn't have him communicate for us. I don't know why.

I don't know why your parents hate me. I don't know what I did. For the longest time, my therapist and mom and Pauline told me that I didn't do anything, it had to have been something between mom and your mom. I didn't believe that at all. If it was just mom, why did they cut Pauline and I off...? But eventually I started to believe them. That was clearly a mistake, seeing how your mom treated me when I saw her. I wonder if she told you about that. She literally slammed the door in my face. In her own son's face. Who she always told would always have a home with her. Who she always told would always have a place in her heart, no matter what happened between mom and her. So clearly I did do something. I have no idea what. Could it really be that I asked about if I had been forgotten for a trip...? Was 15 years of raising a child completely disregarded because I was curious and confused? Again, I have no clue. I doubt I ever will. But if that is the case. If that's why specifically /I/ was cut off (because I know there was something else between mom and your mom that she literally never explained. Literally all mom and Pauline and I know is that apparently mom was "abusive" for years towards your mom, despite nobody ever seeing it, her never mentioning it before I went to Oak Grove, and her saying that she "knew it happened, but didn't know what it was"), then I doubt that your parents ever really loved me. If a simple question erases a lifetime of care and love and bonds and family, then all of those things were never really there.

It's 0737. Yeah, I still use military time. Also, I wanted to do a speech (in my speech class) on why a time system based on 10's would be better for the world. Remember? You wanted that. I couldn't remember the details, though. Anyway. It's 0738. There's 40 hours and 22 minutes until it's been two years since I've seen you.

I often wonder if you think about me. I think about you all the time. Have I faded from your memory? What am I to you now? Am I your brother, your closest confidant, your best friend, and your <>? Am I nothing? Just a faint thought, a distant memory? Or am I your worst enemy? Have your parents convicted you that I'm a horrible person? I desperately hope not. I hope you remember everything. And I hope that you realize that it's been a long time, and we both have matured a ton. Going from an edgy 10th grader who thinks dressing like a girl, screaming "GAY," and looking up undertale AU's are the coolest things ever to a college freshman who finally realized that sexuality shouldn't be a personality trait, being an edgy cunt isn't cool, and responsibilities are actually important is a big difference. I'm sure you've had some huge changes too. You're almost 18. As of today, there's 2 months and 2 days until your birthday. I've been waiting for it for so, so long. An eternity, it feels like. I'm so scared. I don't know if you hate me or not. I'm going to text you. I'm not sure on what, but something. I'll tell you happy birthday. Just so you know how to contact me in case you want to talk. I have no idea if you'll just block me right off the bat. I'm hoping so, so much that Nathanael wasn't saying you hate me.

It's 0756. There's 40 hours and 4 minutes until it's been two years since I've seen you. Error 404 means...something not found, right? I don't know. It doesn't matter.

I miss you. I love you.

Please come back soon.

- E. Nikolas B.

[brothermarc7theatre]

"A Christmas Story, the Musical" show #691

Somewhere hovering over San Francisco is a sterling production featuring Ralphie, a Red Ryder BB Gun, and an Old Man who swears to no end. This, of course, is the musical adaptation of A Christmas Story. Book writer Joseph Robinette and score writers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have adapted Jean Shepherd’s famously festive tale of an average Indiana family just trying to make their way through Christmas: the Old Man wants a working furnace; the mother is just trying to keep her sanity; Randy wants to put his arms down; and Ralphie, the central character, wants to be gifted a weapon infamously known to shoot a kid’s eye out. Director Susi Damilano has helmed this production in a way that honors the iconic necessities in terms of delivery of jokes and attention to film-famous bits while still gifting the audience with touches of new comedic loveliness. What results is an enjoyable musical performance featuring a talented cast who effectively know how to honor the old while injecting some new.

(Christopher Reber (Jean Shepherd); Photo credit: Jessica Palopoli)

Keeping true to the structure of the film, the musical has a narrator, Jean Shepherd, providing commentaries and jumping into several cameo roles in scene and song. Christopher Reber is the man who dons the sweater of Shepherd, and does so with an approachable demeanor that makes him a welcome narrator throughout the performance. Mr. Reber has a calm, well-timed knack for delivering the one-liners with appropriate inflection and comedic nuance. He brings a youthful disposition and timbre to the role that connects him all the more to his younger self. The evening I attended the performance, Mario Gianni Herrera went on as Ralphie, delivering a fine performance, balancing youthful earnestness and nuanced relationships with the various characters he encounters. With a voice ahead of its time, Mr. Herrera does give audiences a shimmering vibrato that is a steadfast enjoyment in “Red Ryder Carbine Action BB Gun” and “Ralphie to the Rescue.” Mr. Herrera teams up with a hilarious Kavan Bhatia, playing Randy, for a beautifully harmonized and genuinely charming “Before the Old Man Comes Home.” Mr. Bhatia finds every bit of comedy embedded in Mr. Robinette’s script while executing Miss Damilano’s direction with committed precision.

(Ryan Drummond (Old Man) and Abby Haug (Mother); Photo credit: Jessica Palopoli)

Playing the parents of the alliterative brothers are Ryan Drummond as the Old Man and Abby Haug as Mother. Both Mr. Drummond and Miss Haug deliver moments of shining excellence while being consistently likeable and connected as husband and wife, father and mother. Mr. Drummond is exceptional in his Act One romp “The Genius on Cleveland Street,” and delivers all the song-and-dance pizzazz in leading a show-stopping “A Major Award.” Miss Haug has so few moments to truly come out of her role’s box, but when she does it is something to behold and enjoy. Her turn at “What a Mother Does” makes this, otherwise forgettable lament a standout tune, airing on the side of grateful pondering rather than whiny pity-party. With a genial voice paired with just enough motherly warmth and quirkiness, Miss Haug delivers a flawless matron.

  (Katrina Lauren McGraw (Miss Shields) and the Kids; Photo credit: Jessica Palopoli)

Katrina Lauren McGraw simply steals the show as Miss Shields. Her Act One “Theme” monologue shows the caliber of comedic finesse, timing, and presence she has brought to the role. Miss McGraw has a belt like no other working in her favor; but wait, there’s more! She taps the snot out of the Act Two dance highlight, “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out.” Continuing in the choreographic discussion, Kimberly Richards’ staging is great, completely appropriate to the varying genres Pasek and Paul’s Tony-nominated score has to offer. Unfortunately, the adult ensemble was not up to snuff in their execution of Miss Richard’s technically awesome choreography, sans “A Major Award,” which was performed without foil. The kids’ ensemble is in fantastic voice in “Somewhere Hovering over Indiana,” and performs “When You’re a Wimp” in energetically impressive fashion.

(The Kids; Photo credit: Jessica Palopoli)

As is the norm for SF Playhouse, the scenic design for this production is outstanding, with Jacquelyn Scott credited. The set really is the “other character” in this piece, moving with fluidity and accommodating the many locales and dream-like sequences Miss Damilano and Miss Richards tackle with accomplished style. Helping the staging and visuals along is a pitch-perfect lighting design by Thomas J. Munn, who accomplishes realism coupled with fantasy at the turn of a dime. Though Christmas is over, this production is not. You have just a few more weeks to catch this charming production before the Santa and his Elves truly relocate for the season. Go see this show!

The Details:

A Christmas Story, the Musical runs through January 11th

San Francisco Playhouse in San Francisco

www.sfplayhouse.org

[communistcountryclub]

From Donald Duck to Donald Trump, an unprecedented look at Latin American art holds up a mirror to the U.S.

So much about the tangled relationship between the United States and Latin America can be told through a surprising cultural character: Donald Duck.

The many lives of the hotheaded fowl serve as a curious case study on the enduring cultural links between the U.S. and Latin America. These links will surface repeatedly over the course of Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles/Latin America, the series of art exhibitions across Southern California that officially debuts next week.

Donald Duck, star of the new PST: LA/LA exhibition “How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney,” was created by Walt Disney and his animators in the company’s Silver Lake studio in the early 1930s. By 1937, he was headlining his own animated short: “Don Donald,” in which he plays a hapless caballero in a stereotypical Mexican town, complete with cactus and recalcitrant burro.

Donald’s dip into Latin American culture didn’t end there. In 1941, Disney took a tour of Latin America as part of a U.S. government effort to build solidarity in the Western Hemisphere during World War II. That journey inspired a pair of films that now serve as notable artifacts of the era of Good Neighbor policy: “Saludos Amigos” and “The Three Caballeros,” the latter of which features the hallucinatory convergence of Donald Duck cavorting with folksy Latin American locals and Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers.

“It’s like a hall of mirrors,” says Jesse Lerner, who with L.A.-based artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres curated “How to Read El Pato Pascual” : which is set to open Sept. 9 at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in West Hollywood and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A.

“Disney borrows from Latin America, they turn it into something Hollywood, they send it back to Latin America, and the Latin Americans do something else with it and send it back.”

Disney characters have inspired bootleg T-shirts, critical theory and indigenous dances. For decades, Donald Duck served as a logo for the Mexican juice company Refrescos Pascual. (It now has its own duck, Pato Pascual, who sports a baseball cap.) And Donald was at the heart of the seminal leftist essay, “How to Read Donald Duck,” published in 1971 by Chilean-Argentinean thinker Ariel Dorfman and Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, who present Disney comics as ideological tools of capitalist propaganda.

One scholar has even theorized that Donald Duck may have been inspired by indigenous Latin American culture to begin with. Disney did not have an official comment on the matter, but as the story goes, an artist who worked for Diego Rivera gave a lecture on Mexican art to a group of employees at Disney Studios in the early 1930s. Among the visuals, there may have been an image of a pre-Columbian duck vessel from Colima. Made hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, it resembles a wide-eyed duck wearing what appears to be a small beanie.

“Disney appropriates and the people appropriate Disney,” says Ortiz-Torres. “It’s a constant dispute.”

It’s a similar back-and-forth that reflects the broader cultural exchange between the U.S. and Latin America, a relationship that over the decades has swung from fraternal to fraught and back again.

PST: LA/LA, which focuses on the work of Latin American and U.S. Latino artists, will examine this relationship in many ways. And it will be no small affair.

Funded by the Getty Foundation to the tune of $16 million, the series consists of dozens of exhibitions and events at more than 70 Southern California institutions, plus complementary programs at more than 65 commercial galleries. A launch party in Grand Park, a Latin music concert at the Hollywood Bowl (including Café Tacvba, Mon Laferte and La Santa Cecilia) and a contemporary music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall are also part of the lineup.

The shows touch on pre-Columbian artisanry, the U.S.-Mexico border, Chicano queer identity and the Asian diasporas of Latin America. Not to mention the “Pato Pascual” exhibition, which examines the potent repurposing of the world’s most iconic cartoon characters.

This all unfolds in a climate of intense anti-immigrant sentiment — from Donald Trump’s reference to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” during his 2015 campaign kick-off speech to the recurring nativist refrain of “build the wall.” Just this week, the Trump administration put an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation.

“This was not anything that we anticipated six years ago when we started talking about this edition of Pacific Standard Time,” says Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “But now that it’s here, it highlights the truth about borders — that they are political creations that don’t fit neatly on cultural populations.”

As the shows prepare to shine a light on the cultures of Latin America, they also will serve to hold up a mirror to the United States. First, because the Latino presence is so critical in the U.S., the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. And because to be Latin American, in some ways, is to continuously contend with the outsize presence of the United States.

Among the tropes artists will be dismantling are what Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Rita Gonzalez describes as the “entrenched notions of American exceptionalism.”

“This is 2017 and we are just catching up with Latin American art,” Gonzalez says. “And it is part of the history of the Americas, just like the United States is part of the history of the Americas. You’ll see that manifesting itself in these shows.”

Gonzalez co-curated LACMA’s “A Universal History of Infamy,” which opened late last month as an early entry in the PST: LA/LA series. It features the work of 16 contemporary U.S. Latino and Latin American artists whose work touches on a range of global concerns.

One project on view at the LACMA show, by Carolina Caycedo, a Colombian artist now based in Los Angeles, examines the nature of dam-building projects in Latin America — one of which, the Quimbo Dam on the Magdalena River, is located in the region her family is from.

In a video installation, she pairs views of rivers in natural and dammed states. On a table, a long, accordion-style book — which unfolds in the shape of a river — meanders through the gallery.

“We are building so many dams in South America, but decommissioning dams in the United States — so what does that mean?” she asks, sitting amid fishnet sculptures in her downtown Los Angeles studio. “It makes you think about energy slavery in the future. Will we bear the environmental consequences for energy production that will be consumed here in the United States?”

With the project, Caycedo aims to show how a dam in rural Colombia might link up with a light switch several nations away.

This notion of inter-connectedness, of the U.S. not being able to separate itself either physically or psychologically from the rest of the Americas, comes up in other exhibitions too.

“Video Art in Latin America,” which goes on view at LAXART in Hollywood Sept. 17, is part of an exhaustive effort by the Getty Research Institute to compile Latin American video art back to its origins.

In a work titled “They Call Them Border Blasters,” from 2004, Mexican conceptual artist Mario García Torres explores the U.S. radio stations that position themselves on the Mexican side of the border in order to skirt U.S. regulation. The border’s hard dividing line may limit human movement, but geographic proximity means that radio waves can travel back and forth unimpeded.

Even as it continuously looks to Europe, the United States is firmly part of the Americas.

“We are more similar to Latin America than we are to Europe,” says the show’s co-curator Glenn Phillips. “These are countries that have vast histories of migration, of slavery — there are so many parts of post-colonial history that are shared across the Americas and that the U.S. often thinks of itself as being apart from.”

And as the U.S. enters a period of profound self-questioning — of its culture, its institutions and its politics, the exhibitions of PST: LA/LA will provide an intriguing view of how Latin American societies have contended with these very same issues.

“Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico”is scheduled to open at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in the middle of October. It features experimental works of installation and performance by Mexican artists reacting to a period in which that country’s institutions had been weakened.

“In the 1990s, the artists we are looking at were responding to a climate that was dire in many ways,” says exhibition curator Irene Tsatsos. “There was a crisis in Mexico’s political system, an economic crisis, violence was everywhere, the drug trade was rampant and there was inadequate infrastructure in many respects. All of these things called upon citizens to perform, to come together in previously unforeseen ways. Artists were part of that.”

During that time, the collective Pinto mi Raya (which consists of Mónica Mayer and Victor Lerma), invited museum-goers to respond to a question about what steps they would take to achieve democracy and justice. “Justicia y Democracia” was first shown in Mexico in 1995. It will be reinstalled at the Armory Center, where visitors will be invited to post their replies — a timely work.

Also timely are many of the exhibitions featuring the work of U.S. Latino artists, a population that has long contended with issues of equity and representation.

The exhibition “La Raza” will reflect this. The show draws from a vast archive of photographs from the Lincoln Heights-based Chicano activist newspaper and will go on view at the Autry Museum of the American West on Sept. 16. The images chronicle issues of policing, civil rights and labor struggle.

“‘La Raza’ speaks through time of issues that have yet to be resolved: of work, of indigenous rights, of migration and immigration, of demanding access to a system that has typically denied access,” says Luis Garza, a former “Raza” photographer who serves as co-curator of the exhibition. “But 50 years past is present and is future. The very nature of what is contained in those photographs reflect what is going on in the country today.”

Most significantly, the very nature of the Getty’s PST: LA/LA project — with its sprawling exhibition program and its countless curatorial points of view — mean that the art of the continent will not be subject to a single defining conclusion.

“It’s so decentralized and so chaotic and everybody does their thing,” Ortiz-Torres says. “If the Museum of Modern Art did this, it would be, ‘These are the guys to follow. This is the canon.’ The thing I like about the Getty is that you will have these competing visions and they will force us to make sense of what’s going on.”

For Latin American art in the U.S., a rare moment of texture and nuance — one that may reveal something important about ourselves.