Art / Culture

With a name like the Burque Bastards, one has to ask not only what are they all about, but should I trust anyone who is a self-proclaimed bastard?

I might be biased, but the answer is yes, these are the bastards you’re looking for.

In the spring of 2012, Diego Gomez and I began meeting after class to discuss our recent screenplays over a couple beers. This quickly became our favorite day of the week. We loved having an avenue to share our love of writing. After a few meet-ups, our number began growing steadily. Soon we were large enough to do table reads (each person reads a different character’s lines) for each script and provide critical feedback to the writer. This was how the Bastards were born...

My wife and I aren’t regular movie goers.   We catch a few of the big new releases during the summer (especially Science Fiction-Superhero releases (I’m a sucker for that)), but we’ll miss a lot of movies and opt to put them on our Netflix queue or just forget about them.   So, seeing Hangover Part III, being released recently, we bumped the first movie in the trilogy up to the top of the queue. 

Yesterday, we watched it.

We didn’t laugh at all during the whole movie. Yet Roger Ebert (actually a critic I agree with a lot of the time) pronounced, “Now this is what I'm talkin' about. The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line.”  So why did Ebert’s pronouncement not agree with our experience?   Why did we not find the movie funny? ...

Who says there aren't anymore tortilleros? In this video feature, Alimentando el Alma, Andrew Herring demonstrates various traditional Nuevo Méxicano recipes and throws in a memorable cuento for added measure.  Andrew produced this piece as a student enrolled in my New Mexico Villages and Cultural Landscapes course...

The scant descriptions of Doña Dolores Elizabeth “Lola” Chávez de Armijo are so packed with action and activism that they read like a feminist poem cast on a landmark plaque. She was a leading librarian, gender discrimination nonsense-ender, anti-cronyism success story and, as if that wasn’t enough, she has a seven-part name flowing behind her like a cape...

As I walk through la plaza vieja,
Albuquerque, New Mexico,
I remember all the plazas
I’ve seen in Mexico and Spain.
This time I stroll back
through the ephemeral light
of history bent by time,
and cross busy Lomas,
New York Avenue
as it was called back then.

It was a dirt road.  Buried
voices push up through earth,
pavement, and concrete.
The ghosts of homes
linger in the silent walls
of shops and restaurants
where tourists enjoy
a sense of the distant past.
On the back streets
you will still find old timers
who live and work here...

Wind waggles the small oriole,
plume-bulged, through the intersection,
and he crosses off to the side:

ragged wing, swoop black –

he nicks the street near the orange jeep,
leans in half-numb, I think,
with all this strew
and whistle. Sky sails to a blue roof...

Every Monday through Friday for the month of June, from 9am to 4pm, a group of teenagers have devoted themselves to the art of being heard. These teen authors have bought into a 12 year-old program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center called Voces. This teen summer writing intensive was facilitated by the multimedia hip hop theater collaborative Urban Verbs, under the direction of Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras and Colin Diles Hazelbaker. Throughout the month these young writers, with interest that vary from poetry to music to politics to comedy to short stories, were given the freedom and form to develop their innate writing talent. Guest presenters were brought in as experts on different styles of writing and performance, as well as visual art, choreography and communications/media training...