Whitest Emmys Ever (and Michael Douglas’ Gay Jokes)
Modern Family creator Steven Levitan said, “This might be the saddest Emmys of all time” while accepting his award for best comedy. I argue that this may be the whitest Emmys ever. Whiter than other Emmys? Probably not. But it feels that way. And it feels a little homophobic, too.
Every, single winner on the awards show was white. Levitan’s comment was in reference to the many, sad “in memoriam” segments in the show. I think it was sad, too, because I’m saddened by television’s lack of commitment to strong roles for people of color...
Weekly Poem: FIRST SHA’LA’KO
The men come down
in twos and threes South
to dust-dry Zuni River:
surround and screen
six tall Sha’la’ko of the
snapping beaks and hooting.
Up the hill the small
Zuni girl chops at
stacked juniper with
a sharp, man- sized axe:
smoke comes East swings
around North then West...
A Museum Experience in Farmington
I didn’t know Farmington had an art museum and decided to check it out. In fact, the city of 46,000 in the northwestern corner of our state does not have a museum dedicated exclusively to fine art. But its city museum just finished giving a three-month run to one of the best collections of painting, sculpture, photography, prints and relevant ephemera I have seen in New Mexico—or anywhere else. “An Adventure in the Arts,” a 73-piece collection of 20th Century masterworks on loan from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, opened on July 20th and closed on September 21st...
‘For in the end, hate could kill us all’
Twenty-seven years after the end of World War II, two families who had survived that conflict, one of them German Jews and the other German Nazis, fight a different kind of war on a street in Manhattan: the war of the delis. This is the core of a drama penned by a Sandia Park playwright and scheduled for a reading this weekend in Albuquerque.
The story could have been told as a comedy, however it is anything but; rather, it is an explosive tragedy in which old wounds bleed again onto 55th Street. That there is a beacon of hope, even potential salvation, at the end, does not dim the soul-destroying conflict between two families on the same street trying to sell sandwiches, salvage their self-respect and pay back for their history...
Weekly Poem: I think I understand fishing
when lakes glisten with shallow ripples
and crows cry from distant pines,
echoing late summer
when the cicadas' clamor breaks afternoon calm
as autumn approaches
the fisherman stands along the shoreline waiting
sentinel-like, dressed in khaki pants and shirt
sunglasses and broad-rimmed brown hat
he contemplates the moment, then another in simple succession...
Weekly Poem: In The Heart of Syria (A Hak-ku*)
Humanity is
never the most logical
option, just like love.
When U.S. Grant turned on Lew Wallace
Lew Wallace made the most ambitious effort of any New Mexico governor to reform our state’s errant political ways but famously conceded, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”
Wallace was not just a territorial governor from 1848 to 1851. He was also one of the most celebrated novelists of his time due to the success of his historical epic, Ben-Hur. Before he was a governor or a novelist, however, he was a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he became an arch-foe of his boss, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant...
The Puebloan view of a lesser-known war
A Chinese restaurant’s fortune cookie proclaimed that “You have a charming way with words and should write a book.” Inspired, I taped that little slip of paper to the front of my desktop computer where I was writing.
The result is a historical novel, Winter of the Metal People, which took ten years to research, write, and rewrite.
Winter of the Metal People is about the Coronado expedition and the Tiguex War he fought in 1540-41 against Pueblo tribes — but it’s told for the first time from the Indian point of view...
One Million Bones on ¡Colores! particularly timely
My most striking memories of being on the National Mall for the One Million Bones installation are of the conversations I overheard. Families of four would stop and look. One of the younger family members would ask, “What’s that?” One of the older family members would pause for approximately a moment of silence. Then, I’d listen as the adult gracelessly tries to choreograph an explanation as to why there is a mass grave in front of the United States Capitol without stepping on the word “genocide"...
Weekly Poem: Fire or Water
A flock of crows
reflect the midnight moon.
A coyote howls
the starless horizon.
Quiet settles
the slow footsteps
of a sleepless man
as he strikes a match
lights a filterless cigarette
and pretends a herd
to keep watch over,
imagines a Winchester in his hands...