New Mexico Mercury

¡COLORES! April 25, 2014

Corrales New Mexico's Renaissance man, Juan Wijngaard, doesn't stick to one artistic medium...

El Machete - Gabriel García Márquez, Rest in Peace

Gabriel García Márquez, Rest in Peace

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)...

Semana Santa or Holy Week in Spain

Suddenly the lights go out in the whole town. We’re in pitch black darkness. The crowd is silent. Then with a great creaking sound, the enormous wooden doors of the cathedral slowly open.

We’re in Caravaca de la Cruz, a small town in the little known region of Murcia in southern Spain. It’s midnight and this is our first Semana Santa or Holy Week experience. Frankly, we have no idea what to expect...

¡COLORES! April 18, 2014

Santa Fe's Jeremy Thomas shares his fiery sculpture process in a film by Ric Serena...

El Machete: Wendy’s Ketchup

Wendy's Ketchup... background info.

Weekly Poem: The Girl in Her Head

This time she is in front of the mirror
plucking at the few white eyelashes growing
among the other dark ones, above one eye
only.  She wears a long grey robe, her hair
pulled off her face, she wonders if she never
moved from in front of this mirror would there
be a point when she stopped seeing this self
or another self...

Insight New Mexico - Sherry Robinson

V.B. Price talks with longtime New Mexico journalist and author Sherry Robinson about her latest book on the history of the Lipan Apaches. 

Word War

Let’s face it, I’m at war with words. Every battle is important. Some people crack under the strain, like soldiers at the front. Fine print, Orwellian transpositions, heroic hyperbole of all sorts; these are a few of the tactics words use against us.

I have no respect for words, they’re spineless; they lie to us all the time. Like prostitutes, they don’t care who uses them. They’re duplicitous, and they work against our happiness—but what else do we have? What can we do? We’re besieged by words, assaulted, that’s why a writer’s task is to defend us, to hold words at bay...

A Review: The Day of Shelly’s Death

On October 11, 1981, the second day of what was to have been several months of joint fieldwork in a remote region of the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo’s wife and companion anthropologist, Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo, fell from a precarious trail to her death 60 feet below. These are the facts. Suddenly, the woman he loved was gone, their two small children motherless, their immediate and long-range future dramatically reorganized.

In The Day of Shelly’s Death (Duke University Press, 2014), Renato Rosaldo calls on his most painful memories and all his skills—as poet and social anthropologist, as husband, father and someone who sifts through time and feeling in multi-faced testament—to give us the finely woven layers of a tragic event and the people who inhabited that event...