New Mexico Mercury

El Machete: Good Riddance

Good Riddance

Friday Voyage: The Dushanbe Teahouse

The Persian art and historic tea culture of Tajikistan offer a sought after respite in Boulder, Colorado.

Five Questions with New Mexico Authors – David L. Caffey

This week we ask author David L. Caffey some questions about his detailed, fast moving and fascinating book called Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: Power and Privilege in Territorial New Mexico, from UNM Press, 2014...

Weekly Poem: Midwest Ranchera

Thursdays, the devil danced at the Black Saddle, cloven
hooves tracking dust for later evidence. He drove a black

Mercury with suicide doors and flames flickering the fins.
Sometimes he slid from the door with his tail forking long

and taut to the floor. Hot-tongued, he would say, Do you
want to touch it? And who didn’t want to touch that tail?...

Leaving China: An Artist’s Visual Memoir

Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood is a memoir by designer and illustrator James McMullan, who has long been the principal poster artist for Lincoln Center Theater.  I saw a few of the plays his works advertised when I lived in New York, but remember many of his posters. Like his posters, his illustrated memoir is clearly contemporary as well as vital and emotional.

Leaving China is categorized as a Young Adult book, targeted at teenagers. It would be a fine gift for any adolescent (especially young misfits), but it deserves a wider audience...

A love letter to New Mexico

Dear New Mexico,

No one writes letters anymore.  No one ever writes to states.  They should.  I’m writing to you because I’ve just driven through your land, beneath your open sky, for ten days.  Now that I’m back in Colorado, my belly is too empty.  I miss you.

I miss you, and I’ve never taken the time to tell you how I love you.

The first time I met you, in 1998, I was twenty.  I’d traveled all the way to Las Cruces because I’d fallen in love with a boy who was from there.  He said he wanted to show me the desert...

Provincial Matters, 7-14-2014

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

¡COLORES! July 11, 2014

Nationally recognized slam poet Jessica Helen Lopez made the Southwest Books of the Year list with her first collection of poetry and she is the new Poet Laureate of Albuquerque...

Television and the Ghost of Washington Irving

Fifty-three years ago FCC chairman Newton Minow made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in which he called television a “vast wasteland” accusing the industry of an endless procession of game shows, formula comedies, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, private eyes, and more violence. And endless commercials. Although Minow’s speech was rated one of twenty-five “Speeches That Changed the World,” today it doesn’t seem that the electronic landscape has changed that much. More networks, more profits, same drivel...

Friday Voyage: Ross Ward’s Tinkertown

A quick jaunt from Albuquerque sits a kingdom of fantasy and one man's legacy of creative wizardry.