New Mexico Mercury

Filmmaking in New Mexico

Balancing art and capitalism - infrastructure and necessity.

Weekly Poem: Going Gone

Yesterday I up and went to Chimayo and Truchas
met an Uruguayan in Chimayo with a
honey voice
all rasp and rough
music a love song
gone to seed from
feeling too much and
living too hard and
painting all the same

In Truchas, a Basco raised in Cuba
with red ringed eyes
knew me for an Indian right away
Any Veda he could
lay his hands on, he said,
he had read...

Two Hak-Ku*

This first haiku is for a forthcoming book of haiku, I am publishing. However, current events have recently made this short poem very popular and very potent. Thank you to poet and friend Susana Rinderle and organizer, childhood friend and mother Tangi Lancaster for asking to use this poem as their mantra to grieve and get something that at least resembles justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The haiku that follows Black Poem for America is brand new, and titled Only in America...

Lock him up.

Lock him up. The dead guy did it. Lock him up.

Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components...

Provincial Matters, 7-15-2013

In this inaugural installment, V.B. Price explores a collection of appreciations of Albuquerque and New Mexico.

Friday Voyage: Two Murals Reach Across Time

Margaret Randall takes us on a public art appreciation journey that spans millennia.

Insight New Mexico - Chris Wilson

V.B. Price talks with historian, professor and award-winning author Chris Wilson about rethinking and re-branding cities in an effort to survive and what Albuquerque can glean from Santa Fe's historical re-branding success.

When everything tastes like chicken

My wife and I aren’t regular movie goers.   We catch a few of the big new releases during the summer (especially Science Fiction-Superhero releases (I’m a sucker for that)), but we’ll miss a lot of movies and opt to put them on our Netflix queue or just forget about them.   So, seeing Hangover Part III, being released recently, we bumped the first movie in the trilogy up to the top of the queue. 

Yesterday, we watched it.

We didn’t laugh at all during the whole movie. Yet Roger Ebert (actually a critic I agree with a lot of the time) pronounced, “Now this is what I'm talkin' about. The Hangover is a funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line.”  So why did Ebert’s pronouncement not agree with our experience?   Why did we not find the movie funny? ...

Alimentando el Alma Nuevo Mexicano

Who says there aren't anymore tortilleros? In this video feature, Alimentando el Alma, Andrew Herring demonstrates various traditional Nuevo Méxicano recipes and throws in a memorable cuento for added measure.  Andrew produced this piece as a student enrolled in my New Mexico Villages and Cultural Landscapes course...