New Mexico Mercury

Bush’s legacy

El Machete

Obama phone

One of the best ideas since sliced bread was the Sequester. This wonderful piece of non-legislation is destroying a whole lot of people who can’t be seen.  We should be thankful for that. These invisibles are mostly drooling kids who just won’t get Headstart and senile elderly people who will just see their benefits slashed or Meals on Wheels taken away. Big deal. So what? I for one am deeply glad I can’t see these subhuman types and I can’t hear their stupid and silent screams...

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 4: A city of edges

Is it time for a complete revamping of the goals Albuquerque has set for itself as a city?  Are we ready for a genuine city-wide discussion of what the current economic and environmental conditions mean for our future?

The great goals setting exercises of the l970s and l980s took place in an atmosphere of intense public interest and involvement in city issues.  By comparison, 21st century Albuquerque seems asleep at the wheel...

The last poet standing

In Amiri Baraka’s review of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I was struck by not only the vitriol, but how he was making a similar argument that I had made a few years ago during my review of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960.  Lacking the vitriol, I took the editors to task for trying to be inclusive but missing what was happening outside the Academy...

Weekly Poem: When Will the Next Chance Be?

-written in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf”

There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart...

Un Trip Down to the South Valley - A film by Ben McCallum

Ben McCallum's digital cuento, Un Trip Down to the South Valley, takes us on a visual viaje celebrating Albuquerque's south valley pride and heritage.

What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 3: Police trust

If there’s anything city residents need to hear about during this mayoral season it’s how the candidates plan to give Albuquerque a police force it can trust and admire, and is no longer afraid of?

How would a mayor accomplish that turnaround? I know many of us would like to learn in detail how that could be done.

Living in a city where one worries about the police going rogue, killing people, beating them up, drawing guns at routine traffic stops, and the like makes doing business and going about one’s daily life even harder than it already is...

Changing perspectives on U.S.-Mexico relations

It’s unfortunate that the two presidents chose to hold their May 2-3 summit in Mexico City. Both nations and Presidents Barack Obama and Enrique Peña Nieto would have been better served by a meeting at the border – where the grim reality of neighborly relations would not be masked by the pomp and circumstance of the grand presidential residence of Los Pinos.

A meeting at the customs building in Ciudad Juárez – the site of the first Mexico-U.S. presidential meeting in 1909 between Porfirio Díaz and William Taft – would have likely resulted in a more memorable and productive summit of the current heads of state, Enrique Peña Nieto and Barack Obama. As it is, this meeting will likely be soon forgotten – lost in protocol, predictable rhetoric about interdependence, and the photogenic smiles of the two presidents...

ABQ theater scene is hopping

Albuquerque had more than 20 plays opening in April, appealing to almost every conceivable taste, from children's stories and musical comedies to cutting-edge contemporary drama.

Among the latter was “Humble Boy,” a strange and generally confounding British family drama staged by the Fusion—at the Cell, the KimMo and the Lensic in Santa Fe through May 11.
Expertly directed and skillfully acted by a highly professional ensemble cast, the play describes the homecoming of a Cambridge University professor after the death of his father.

Aaron’s Death

A young man's death harkens a re-examination of manhood in a society awash in moral conundrums.