Art / Culture

To many in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, the United State’s enactment of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was nothing more than a fancy smoke and mirrors tactic that allowed the U.S. to steal huge pieces of land from its rightful owners.

One of those land owners was my great-grandfather, Jose Inez Quintana.  He was born in Mexico.  His daughter and my great-grandmother, Geñoveva Quintana, was born in the United States.  Only, they were born in the same physical place: San Ildefonso, NM...

A friend wrote the other day to tell me her novella had been published. Where can I get a copy? Here’s the link, she responded. And when I went to it I discovered her book was only available on Kindle. No hardcopy at all! This was my first experience with what I fear may become commonplace, a gradual replacement of physical books with their digital imposters, something like cloning gone wild.

Call me old-fashioned. I like to read real books, material objects with pages I can turn, a cover that draws me in, inked pages that in some cases even smell of the old bookmaking craft...

In The Wind Rises, anime master Hayao Miyazaki adds his own memories and obsessions to the real life of Jiro Horikoshi and the writings of Tatsuo Hori. The result is a complex film of great beauty, one that has angered the right wing in Japan for its attitude toward 1930s militarism, and disappointed others worldwide for its failure to show the consequences of the hero’s quest.

Jiro Horikoshi designed the innovative Zero, a long-range and highly maneuverable fighter used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Once the United States had caught up in fighter design, the Zero became a manned missile...

A full-throated debate over women’s equality might seem to be a pointless rhetorical replay of the arguments of our parents or even our grandparents. But that turns out to be hardly true.

As illustration recall the passage from Just Fly the Plane, Stupid, the new memoir by our own congressman, Republican Steve Pearce, in which he said he and his wife agreed to follow a biblical injection that a woman would follow her husband and be subordinate to him.

A similar theme is debated in Rapture, Blister, Burn, a thoughtful new play at the Aux Dog Theater in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, which will have its last performances 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday after a three-week run...

In Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning: Her Lifetime in Photography by Elizabeth Partridge (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2013), I find the following paragraph: “Like many of the other San Francisco bohemians, Maynard [Dixon] and Dorothea found the label ‘artist’ highly suspect. In a kind of reverse snobbery, those who called themselves artists were thought to be more interested in being an artist than in making serious art ( . . . ) ‘I was a tradesman,’ Dorothea said. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’” (p. 13)

This passage brought to mind the very different weights, different meanings even, that certain words hold for us, depending upon our cultural contexts and the time in which we live...

Beginning in early spring and continuing into late autumn, I often see a man walking on Raven Road in my neighborhood with a backpack, a shabby jacket and a smile. He is elderly, lean, with long hair and a beard as gray as my own. He wears dirty boots, a torn shirt and shabby pants. He is always by himself, although when I greet him, he responds with a friendly word and wave.

This man, with all his repulsiveness and attractiveness, is much like the protagonist of Jerusalem, an unusual play, in equal parts entertainment and philosophical statement, that opened last week at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque...