Creative Alliance

Viva el Cine Latino!, a celebration of Latin-American filmmaking, brings a pair of Mexican films to the Creative Alliance. Tonight, Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) chronicles young med students Che Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) as they ride through South America and develop a distaste for social injustice and a taste for socialism. Showtime is 8 p.m., and tickets are $8, $6 for alliance members. Tomorrow, short comedies starring comics Cantinflas (Mario Moreno)

Freedom stories The lowdown -- Catch the short play Leaves with a Name and animated documentary Freedom Dance at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson tomorrow and Saturday. Leaves with a Name questions the effect of war as it explores the story of a grandmother's exodus from Hungary during World War II, while Freedom Dance documents four months in the life of a married couple as they boldly leave Communist Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution. If you go -- The show starts at 8 p.m. tomorrow and 3 p.m. Saturday at Creative Alliance at the Patterson, 3134 Eastern Ave. Tickets for the general public are $8-$12.

The Fells Point Creative Alliance will inaugurate its new screening and performance space Thursday with a screening of "Nappy," Takoma Park filmmaker Lydia Douglas' smart and engaging documentary about African-American women's relationship to their hair.Attractively shot in black and white, "Nappy" is an exploration of American history, politics and culture as expressed through black hair, which was straightened to imitate white standards of beauty until the civil rights movement sparked freedom of expression in personal appearance and clothing.

Mission: To present and promote the arts and humanities. As a membership organization of artists, writers, scholars and businesses, the Creative Alliance cultivates community through collaboration. Founded in 1995, the organization originally served as an artists' guild, offering support services for artists and sponsoring exhibitions, lectures and performances. Since then, the group has also established itself as a vital community organization in Southeast Baltimore.Latest accomplishments: During the summer, the Creative Alliance sponsored "Open Minds," a program for children in Southeast Baltimore that included lessons in reading and art skills.

Scotty Stevenson peers into the framed work of art as if he sees something arresting and elusive just beyond the edge of reality."This woman does such interesting work," he exclaims. "Andrea Huppert. I do like her work an awful lot."Stevenson is an artist on a kind of cultural treasure hunt. Today he's previewing "Big Show 98: Journeys," the fourth Fells Point Creative Alliance Members' Exhibition, 100 works installed in 10 Fells Point venues. His own work is in the show, but right now he's in the second-floor gallery at Adrian's Book Cafe, one of the stops on the "Journeys" stops.

There are some fine meetings of minds in the C. Grimaldis Gallery's current summer group show. Works by artists who may never have met one another just seem to go together.Mel Kendrick's "4 Point, Black Oil" and Grace Hartigan's "Spanish Still Life" share a sense of humor about inanimate objects that resemble humans. The Kendrick is an abstract sculpture that looks like it's trying to re-form itself into a human figure, and a two-handled vase in the Hartigan watercolor looks like a woman with her hands on her hips sashaying across the room.

The Fells Point Creative Alliance, a nonprofit organization, will hold the Artist Housing and Studio Fair today to introduce low- and moderate-income people to organizations that can help them buy houses and studio space in Southeast Baltimore."

The Fells Point Creative Alliance, a nonprofit arts and humanities organization, recently received a $10,000 challenge grant from the Baltimore Community Foundation's Developing Arts Fund. The grant, geared to helping young art organizations broaden their audiences, must now be matched through individual and business donations.Founded in 1994 as a membership organization, the Creative Alliance offers services for artists, publishes a quarterly cultural calendar, and promotes exhibitions, readings and lectures.

Tonight, the Fells Point Creative Alliance launches its "Big Show" from 7 to 9 with a gala reception and "ArtWalk." The show, which runs through Nov. 3, features the works of 100 artists at 12 Fells Point locations. Admission is free. Call (410) 276-1651.A story in yesterday's Today section and an item in today's Live section gave the wrong date for the reception. The Sun regrets the errors.As usual, Billie Tolmach had accompanied her husband Eric on a photography expedition. They had just finished burgers at the Poncabird Pub, when they stepped onto a Southeast Baltimore street and jointly experienced the ganglia of ramps and roads stacked above them.

Tonight, when the Fells Point Creative Alliance's second annual group show opens, the path from venue to venue will be charted with brilliant windsocks created by art teacher Patti Anne Battaglia and her Elkridge Landing Middle School students.But don't just follow the neon windsocks to "The Big Show." Follow Battaglia, who undoubtedly will be lighting the way in something ingeniously outrageous. A multimedia artist and confessed "clothesaholic," Battaglia, 42, once made all of her clothes, but now will dabble with a cuff, meddle with a collar to make her wardrobe hers and hers alone.

WASHINGTON - - Over 1,600 in Md. have unclaimed tax refunds The Internal Revenue Service is waiting for Marylanders to claim more than 1,600 refund checks from the 2008 filing season worth more than $1.7 million. The IRS said Thursday that the checks averaging $1,086 were returned to the agency from Maryland because of mailing address errors. Some taxpayers are owed more than one check. Nationally, the IRS said 107,831 checks worth a total of $123.5 million were returned. Taxpayers owed a refund can update their address online with the "Where's My Refund?"

Timothy Dicke works all day doing maintenance and other jobs around Baltimore and then goes out all night with his camera, shooting up to 2,000 photos each week of Maryland scenes lit by a phosphorescent glow. Thirty of the very best are the subject of a one-man show, the artist's first, running through Nov. 7 at Creative Alliance. There are companion shots of the Domino Sugars plant - the cheery front, in which the familiar, red and yellow sign and the lights from the office building are reflected in the nearly motionless waters of the Inner Harbor, and a moody photo of the rear, in which a lilac wall contrasts with the rest of the shadowed edifice.

No lantern yet? Don't fret. This year, procrastinators will have the opportunity to walk in the Creative Alliance's Great Halloween Lantern Parade. Pre-parade activities at the new lantern festival, which begins before Saturday's parade, include last-minute lantern-making, hayrides around the park, live music, vendors and a beer garden. Arrive before 5 p.m. and pay $5 to construct your own lamps of bamboo, wax and tissue paper. Molly Ross, director and principal artist for the nonprofit Nana Projects Inc., an artists' collective, directs the parade, which is in its 10th year, and helps to oversee the festivities.

A half-century after it was made, movies still don't come any worse than Plan 9 From Outer Space, Edward D. Wood Jr.'s grade-Z sci-fi opus about aliens looking to take over the Earth by raising the dead and having them ... well, having them do something that will put us all in our place. (The movie's a little sketchy on the details.) Tomorrow at 2 p.m., the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Southeast Anchor branch, 3601 Eastern Ave., will celebrate Plan 9's golden anniversary with a free screening of the film, as well as an appearance by Maryland's own Conrad Brooks, who played a policeman in the movie.

Noncultists may ask, "The big the-whatski?" But The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers' 1998 cult film that defined a post-countercultural sort of slackerdom, is now bigger than ever, a hep hub for fan celebrations nationwide. And Lebowski fever is coming to Baltimore this weekend, with Dude- Fest! The Big Lebowski Tribute Party. It promises to make up in ingenuity what it lacks in scale. Lebowski fans, pay attention! Initiates, bear with me! Charm City's DudeFest will boast Wii bowling, so you can bowl and see the movie at the same venue.

Fashion is certainly the passion with Baltimore's social set these days. Fashion-themed fundraisers have been popping up all over. Among the latest, the first-ever VIP shindig last weekend prior to Maryland Institute College of Art's annual Student Fashion Show. No sooner had MICA board chair Fredye Gross, and fellow fashionistas Suzi Cordish, Wendy Jachman and Terry Morgenthaler, organized the get-together, than all 100 tickets sold out. Guests got to enjoy a buffet as well as take part in a silent auction that offered new and barely used wearable treasures (size 81/2 Jimmy Choos, anyone?

I remember the last movie I saw at the Patterson Theater in Highlandtown. Actually, I don't remember the movie itself - at that point near the end of its life, it was a second-run theater charging a dollar or two - but I remember keeping an eye on the floor as much as the screen so I could lift my feet if a rat skittered by. Today, the theater is vibrant and bristles with artistic rather than verminous activity. It is the home base of the Creative Alliance - the quirky arts organization that sponsors classes, shows and festivals on everything from screen painting to burlesque performance - which took over the shuttered theater about six years ago. "It was a huge, empty, old box," Megan Hamilton, the program director of the alliance, said of the theater, which had closed in 1995.

Susan Lowe is the sort of person who likes to stay busy - whether it's as a painter, sculptor, teacher, mother or actress who has appeared in most of John Waters' films. So when serious health problems left her confined to a sickbed for most of 2006, she wasn't content to lie back and watch TV all day. To relieve the tedium, she took a pad of paper and box of Crayola crayons and started drawing characters from her imagination, as if she were casting her own movie. There were pimps and hustlers, beatniks and newlyweds, enough to populate a small town.

Forget the glitzy attractions along the Harbor East waterfront. If you want a real sense of East Baltimore, check out The Rumors Are True: Megan Hildebrandt & Christine Sajecki, a new exhibit at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson. With paintings, photographs and other media, artists Hildebrandt and Sajecki offer different takes on the same East Baltimore neighborhoods, based on their tenure as resident artists at the Creative Alliance. The result is an endearing and illuminating show - sometimes whimsical, sometimes sobering - that just may tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Charm City (like, what does that roving Tastee Freez truck really deliver at 3 a.m.?

Halloween need not be dark to be spooky. Creative Alliance's ninth annual Great Halloween Lantern Parade will shed light on some haunting family fun. Each year, people of all ages gather in Patterson Park to march in the parade, which is about three-quarters of a mile, or watch it unfold. The sight is nothing short of a spectacle. Gargantuan floats and revelers in wild costumes transform the green space into a treat for the eyes. But the main attractions are the hundreds upon hundreds of paper and bamboo candlelit lanterns, carried by participants, that will light the way. This year's event starts at 7 p.m. Saturday by the Pulaski Monument off Linwood and Eastern avenues.