Transformation
We’ve all been to, paid for, dozed off in, had bad meals at and endured countless fundraisers. It’s an obligation of today’s society. Not very often, however, do we come across one that was as much fun as Southwest CARE Center’s 6th Annual Closet Ball.
What I read in a local paper said, “Watch ordinary men transform into gorgeous drag queens at this fundraiser for the Southwest CARE Center, which helps provide treatment for New Mexicans with HIV/AIDS.” What I found was a wonderful event for an excellent cause...
Governor Ignores Looming Disaster at KAFB
A major environmental disaster more than half a century in the making is lurking right below our very feet, and yet the Susana Martinez administration is irresponsibly and unlawfully choosing to look the other way. Officials with Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque have accepted responsibility for a major contamination of groundwater that has already spread beyond its boundaries.
The Governor has systematically dismantled the New Mexico Environment Department and is choosing to officially ignore a crisis situation that should already have warranted critical status in our state’s largest city. The fact that the Governor has halted the state from officially holding the Air Force accountable for the groundwater contamination is a clear act of political malfeasance and is a willful violation of the public trust...
Weekly Poem: Pasqual
His teeth are like a row of stumpy razors, and his black hair has a sheen like the sun on black
coral. He drinks Diet Coke instead of the filtered rainwater preferred by the Progressives, who
incidentally make him very nervous.
"What bills are you going to steal from me today, young man?" he teases me on the House
Floor.
Walking slowly, with the deliberation of a champion mule, his decades of office passing like so
many forgotten arguments. That quizzical look that he always gives me, impossible to read...
Women Without Choices: Two plays in ABQ
Americans tend to think of the pursuit of happiness as one of our inalienable rights, but the phrase means not that society gives us happiness but that it offers choices that allow us to seek it. But what if we don’t have choices?
Two new plays in Albuquerque focus on young women whose choices are foreclosed, whose destiny is tragedy. That these stories occur nearly a century apart merely shows that the prison bars of ethnicity, gender and social milieu are endemic in America...
Weekly Poem: Georgia at ‘The Black Place’
I sit
between black lava and ash
dust-brushed and shaken
amid suggestion of bone
in the curve of the place without sky
rose-lipped clouds beneath...
Hualapai Canyon: A hard paradise
The preposterously vivid green-blue river flows wide and fast. Lush groves and gardens fill the canyon between red ferrous walls rising nearly vertically for thousands of feet. Two horses leisurely bathe and play in the river. Butterflies flit among purple aster, red penstemon, giant white cholla blossoms, orange globe mallow, purple lilac and yellow prickly pear blossoms, and large feathery yellow plants I can’t identify.
Life in paradise is not easy. The scenic beauty of Hualapai Canyon, part of the Grand Canyon, is about as close to paradise as you are likely to find in the United States...
Weekly Poem: City Life
Bent screws.
Yard bricks displaced.
Wooden fence posts splintered.
A late night car hopped the curb,
ramped up my neighbor's driveway
and took out the corner of our fence.
A short fence, anyone could step over it with almost no effort,
but it kept people out,
kept us safe from bums,
random drunks, and passers through
that call this part of the city home
too...
The Art of Clifford Berryman Or, Why Do Things Remain the Same?
George Santayana famously wrote that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Examples of this axiom can be found everywhere in our nation’s history. Sometimes, however, it’s necessary to look to our artists to reveal them to us.
Clifford Berryman was a political cartoonist who worked for the Washington Post during the start of the last century. He worked until his death in 1949. He was the man who in 1902 first associated President Theodore Roosevelt with a small bear cub, one he refused to shoot, thus earning him the nickname “Teddy”—the cartoon, “Drawing the Line in Mississippi” inspired New York store owner Morris Michtom to create a new toy and call it the Teddy Bear...
‘Tribes’: When no one wants to listen
Fusion’s new production of Tribes at Albuquerque’s Cell Theater is all about deafness—not just the inability of some people to hear but the unwillingness of everyone to really listen.
None of the members of the family at the center of this award-winning play by the young British playwright Nina Raine listen to each other, sending a potent message to the audience that our private preoccupations prevent us from ever knowing even those closest to us.
The “tribes” of the title are families, especially one family, but also communities—intellectuals and “hierarchies” of those with varying types of hearing impairment...
Mountain love affair
Who is there in New Mexico who does not love mountains? Our love affair with our mountains may be because aside from the mountains the land is more drab brown than vivid green, more desiccated than lush. There is not a lot to be said for our flatlands, the Chihuahua Desert landscape of rocks and brush, where what we call rivers are really streams and what we call streams are more often seasonal arroyos.
This mountain love affair has spawned a lot of books, of which the newest, and one of the most lavish, is the just-published, New Mexico’s High Peaks: A Photographic Celebration, by Michael Butterfield (UNM Press, $39.95, 188 pages including 134 color photographs)...