New Mexico Mercury

El Machete: Israel & NM

Israel & NM

Explosive art: something new under the sun

Ever since Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel invented dynamite 150 years ago, people have been trying to make lemonade out of his lemons. The most famous example is Nobel himself, who created the Nobel Prizes, rewarding peacemaking and sundry civilized achievements in literature and science, to atone for the murderous violence he unleashed on the world.

The effort to find useful, even pleasant employment for explosives continues today in New Mexico, home of the biggest explosive of them all, the atomic bomb.

A new book published by the University of New Mexico Press, Detonography: The Explosive Art of Evelyn Rosenberg, parses and celebrates this current effort...

¡COLORES! January 24, 2014

New Mexico photographer Dana Foy shares his experience of capturing what he calls the expanded moment...

Weekly Poem: Taken by Storm

Up near the northern border of North Dakota
the third day of an arctic blizzard, a social worker
loads her hatchback with jackets and coats
and drives the frontage road beside a frozen river.
She comes to a man wrapped in a hospital blanket
seated on cardboard on top of a bed of snow.
He doesn’t want the jacket she offers.
“Then I can take you to shelter,” she says...

Filmmaking New Mexico: The Non-Hollywood Projects

Margaret Randall on New Mexico film history, state incentives and a new independent production. 

Rebranding Enchantment

Some months ago, I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Scott Momaday. He spoke like a man in the middle of a great love affair with the New Mexican landscape. The land was tied to his life; together their narrative extended thousands of years into the past. After the reading, I longed for a walk in the mortally beautiful mountains.

I live in the Scott Momaday New Mexico. The Rudolfo Anaya New Mexico. The Georgia O’Keeffe New Mexico. The Fred Harvey Company New Mexico. I do not live in newly rebranded “New Mexico True” setting that our tourism department has begun selling...

El Machete: The heart of I.C.E.

The heart of I.C.E.

“Nebraska:” The Changed Face of the Land

The movie “Nebraska” is described as a character-driven road movie. It strikes me as that and something more, a meditation on the decline of the part of America alternatively dismissed as “flyover country” or valorized as “the heartland.” In 50 years, the film may be a favorite of college professors, to be screened alongside Orson Welles’ adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons.  Both films explore the transformation of America as fueled by the gasoline-powered engine...

¡COLORES! January 17, 2014

Author of Rounders and Hi Lo Country, Max Evans shares how the West and New Mexico inspired his writing.

Friday Voyage: Ojo Caliente

Margaret Randall explores the realities and facades of ancient, healing hot springs in Northern New Mexico.