New Mexico Mercury

Provincial Matters, 3-3-2014

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

¡COLORES! February 28, 2014

For Albuquerque flamenco artist Jesus Muñoz, the dancer is vital to the music.

Weekly Poem: Villagrá’s Lament

        I.        Qualacú

the guiding
light of our journey across this
mesquital was
the cerro indio moon’s pale
cantankerous shine.
                                We
followed
Oñate north across
the desert
winds rippled
the river into mud, the
bosque disappeared into
                                      the badlands...

El Machete: Tragic Black History

Tragic Black History

516 ARTS Fosters Discussion in ‘Growing the Creative Core’

516 ARTS' fosters dialogue on what a sustainable, thriving downtown looks like.  (Video)

Coin Op

People watching in an El Paso laundromat.  A slice of life in this short story from Baker Morrow.

¡COLORES! February 21, 2014

Author of the popular Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin talks about his experience as a growing artist...

Humphrey’s World: Downs Racino

Downs Racino

Conscious Naming

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...

Provincial Matters, 2-17-2014

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