New Mexico Mercury

Fortune Teller

El Machete

Whitest Emmys Ever (and Michael Douglas’ Gay Jokes)

Modern Family creator Steven Levitan said, “This might be the saddest Emmys of all time” while accepting his award for best comedy. I argue that this may be the whitest Emmys ever. Whiter than other Emmys? Probably not. But it feels that way. And it feels a little homophobic, too.

Every, single winner on the awards show was white. Levitan’s comment was in reference to the many, sad “in memoriam” segments in the show. I think it was sad, too, because I’m saddened by television’s lack of commitment to strong roles for people of color...

Weekly Poem: FIRST SHA’LA’KO

The  men come down
in twos and threes South
to  dust-dry Zuni River:
surround and screen
six tall  Sha’la’ko of the
snapping beaks and hooting.

Up the hill the small
Zuni girl chops  at
stacked juniper  with
a sharp, man- sized axe: 
smoke comes East swings
around North then West...

A Museum Experience in Farmington

I didn’t know Farmington had an art museum and decided to check it out. In fact, the city of 46,000 in the northwestern corner of our state does not have a museum dedicated exclusively to fine art. But its city museum just finished giving a three-month run to one of the best collections of painting, sculpture, photography, prints and relevant ephemera I have seen in New Mexico—or anywhere else. “An Adventure in the Arts,” a 73-piece collection of 20th Century masterworks on loan from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, opened on July 20th and closed on September 21st...

Provincial Matters, 9-23-2013

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

‘For in the end, hate could kill us all’

Twenty-seven years after the end of World War II, two families who had survived that conflict, one of them German Jews and the other German Nazis, fight a different kind of war on a street in Manhattan: the war of the delis. This is the core of a drama penned by a Sandia Park playwright and scheduled for a reading this weekend in Albuquerque.

The story could have been told as a comedy, however it is anything but; rather, it is an explosive tragedy in which old wounds bleed again onto 55th Street. That there is a beacon of hope, even potential salvation, at the end, does not dim the soul-destroying conflict between two families on the same street trying to sell sandwiches, salvage their self-respect and pay back for their history...

Friday Voyage: Canyon de Chelly

Generations of Diné resistance in a land of mystical beauty.

Insight New Mexico - Virginia Scharff

V.B. Price talks with historian, scholar and author Virginia Scharff about her book "Seeing Nature Through Gender."

Rick Bayless

El Machete

Weekly Poem: I think I understand fishing

when lakes glisten with shallow ripples
and crows cry from distant pines,
echoing late summer
when the cicadas' clamor breaks afternoon calm
as autumn approaches
the fisherman stands along the shoreline waiting
sentinel-like, dressed in khaki pants and shirt
sunglasses and broad-rimmed brown hat
he contemplates the moment, then another in simple succession...