New Mexico Mercury

Friday Voyage: Cuba Part 2

Vigía, a unique Cuban publisher that produces hand-made books, embodies the creativity and resilience often born out of social upheaval.

El Machete: Presidential Artistic License

Presidential Artistic License

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...

Provincial Matters, 5-6-2014

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

Humphrey’s World: Ethical Dealings

Ethical Dealings

¡COLORES! May 2, 2014

Nora Naranjo-Morse shares how growing up in New Mexico's Santa Clara Pueblo influenced her work...

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...

El Machete: Oil Nightmare

Oil Nightmare

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...